Late last week, the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee unanimously advanced the Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream (ROAD) to Housing Act of 2025.
ROAD is a soup-to-nuts approach to repairing the country’s housing affordability crisis, taking aim at financial literacy, homebuilding, access, rural and veteran housing, and accountability.
The chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, and ROAD’s lead sponsor is U.S. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), but the bill has broad support in both parties, including from U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
So the question is not so much whether there is political will on Capitol Hill to address housing affordability, but more, could an act of Congress make a real and lasting impact?
When he announced the bill last week, Scott called housing affordability a problem “so persistent, so pervasive, that every place in the nation consistently deals with the struggle of increasing supply and lowering prices at the same time.”
That includes South Carolina, which this year has fallen off several top 10 lists of the most affordable states to buy a house, and which, despite robust homebuilding continues to lag behind the demands of an increasing population.
Data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) found that median mortgage payments in 21 of South Carolina’s 46 counties were at least $100 per month higher in the first quarter of 2025 than they were a year earlier. In two counties – Beaufort and Charleston – homeowners in Q1 paid $280 and $260 more per month on their mortgages, respectively.
The median mortgages in those two counties were the highest in South Carolina in Q1. Beaufort’s median mortgage was $3,280; Charleston’s was $3,580.
Median mortgages topped $2,000 per month in seven counties, and $1,000 per month in 20 counties.
Although rents nationally have declined steadily over the past two years, according to NAR, Zillow’s measure of average rent in South Carolina in June was $1,875 per month. That, of course, factors in a range of $3,000 average rent in Charleston to less than $900 per month in Dillon.
Meanwhile, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that in December 2024, average weekly wages in half of South Carolina counties were below $,1075. The highest – $1,389 per week in Charleston County – was $118 per week lower than the U.S. average, even as wages grew between 4.2% and 7.4% in the state’s six largest counties in Q4.
As most of the country battles with a similar dynamic of rising housing price growth, short supply, and wages that are not keeping up with housing costs, senators are trying to put legislative might behind addressing the myriad problems.
“We have a comprehensive housing bill where every member around this dais has made a significant investment in making America’s housing crisis better, and that is such a blessing,” Scott said in Washington, D.C., last week.
ROAD has 40 provisions that seek to ease federal regulations on communities looking to revamp zoning policies, make federal assistance easier for communities hit by natural disasters, reward communities for developing housing supply, and provide funds for repairs for houses, among other efforts.
“Fortunately, my colleagues and I, on both sides of the aisle, share this vision,” Scott said. “Today marks a very important first step toward jumpstarting our housing development and making a real difference in the lives of Americans across the country.”
But will it work?
Affordable housing proponents in South Carolina welcome the intentions – and the policy-focused nature – of the ROAD Act. Adam Protheroe, litigation attorney for SC Appleseed Legal Justice Center, said “it’s great to see real policy proposals as opposed to some of the cultural war stuff we seem to get caught up in.”
And, Protheroe said, ROAD is “the product of good faith, bipartisan negotiation and an effort to solve real problems. I think that's clear in the level of detail that all these proposals go into.”
Likewise, Lila Anna Sauls, president of Homeless No More in Columbia, said ROAD is full of good ideas – but they are quite familiar to her.
“When I look over the Road Act, I chuckle a little bit because it's what our organization has embraced for decades,” Sauls said. “I always talk about this toolbox. In theory, we should be giving [people] the toolbox for that long-term independence and sustainability.”
So while she thinks ROAD does a good job outlining a real blueprint for success, Sauls hopes that federal lawmakers understand that they need to put money behind the ideas and keep money coming to programs aimed to help affordability over the long haul.
“It’s helping put the right tools in the toolbox and then saying, ‘Okay, we'll never see you again,’” she said. “That cost money. And looking at the budgets presented so far, there are no increases in any of these funding lines. So you've got to make peace with the idea that to bring many of these individuals or families to that true independence, you're going to have to fund the programs.”
That includes funding for wrap-around services like mental healthcare and substance/addiction issues, she said.
And she relates this to the history of the Bull Street Mental Hospital, a notorious complex of institutions taken out of commission – “rightly so, they were horrific,” Sauls said – during the Reagan administration.
The offshoot of the decision to close Bull Street was a swell in Columbia’s homeless population and an almost total lack of funding for mental health services and accompanying issues like substance abuse.
So if ROAD is going to work, Sauls wants lawmakers to know that they can’t replace a system, even a broken one, without properly funding something that can achieve its ambitious goals.
“It all comes back to the money and the funding,” she said.
