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Trump declines to sign bipartisan housing bill

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A decent start: On Wednesday, President Donald Trump canceled his plans to sign a shockingly decent housing bill that had passed both House and Senate. It’s not clear whether this is a stunt designed to get voter ID laws passed or whether he intends to sign the bill eventually.

“Under the Constitution, a president has 10 days, excluding Sundays, to sign or return a bill once it has been presented to him. If he has not done either by the end of that period, it becomes law without his signature,” reports The New York Times. “But there’s a catch. If Congress is adjourned when that 10-day period ends, the unsigned bill is killed in what is known as a ‘pocket veto.’ There are legal questions about whether this would happen during a congressional recess—when the chambers are out of session temporarily, as the House and the Senate are scheduled to be for 10 days beginning on July 3—or only when Congress is adjourned at the end of a session, which will not happen until the end of the year.”

As for the actual substance of the bill, the YIMBYs are celebrating. Case in point:

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a decent start, streamlining National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews, permitting, and zoning will surely speed up the building of new housing. But I fear so much implementation happens at the local level, so localities still have the opportunity to thwart these efforts (like how California thwarts new building projects with the California Environmental Quality Act, which is at long last being rolled back a bit). And some components of the bill are not great for fans of free markets, like the ban on large investors buying more homes.

Of course, it’s a joint production by Sens. Tim Scott (R–S.C.) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), so the bill explicitly includes Warren’s investor-purchase ban (which Scott agreed to). It’s a genuine political compromise, with Warren getting her corporate landlord crackdown in exchange for Scott getting his supply-side reforms. We can never just have a fully good housing bill, can we?

Scenes from New York: Lots of drama from the NYC Rent Guidelines Board, which just approved a two-year freeze for roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments. This is “the first two-year rent freeze in the board’s history and fulfills a key campaign pledge from Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who named six of the board’s nine members,” reports Gothamist. “The decision applies to rent-stabilized apartments in buildings with six or more units built before 1974, as well as apartments in buildings that receive certain tax breaks or government subsidies. The freeze applies to new one- and two-year leases beginning between Oct. 1, 2026, and Sept. 30, 2027.” This is obviously a bad decision. I actively hope Mamdani won’t fulfill any of his campaign pledges, but he is unfortunately turning out to be rather true to his word so far.

QUICK HITS

  • “In the 1990s, the Friends decade, just 3% of American men and 2% of women said they had no close friends at all,” reports Bloomberg. “In 2021, that number had risen to 15% of men and 10% of women, per the Survey Center on American Life. Feelings of isolation have quintupled in 30 years.” Now “a new niche of companies, community builders and coaches are stepping into the void. Call it the connection economy.” (I am bearish on whether any sort of startup can solve this problem.)
  • More on Darializa Avila Chevalier’s insane beliefs (no jail or deportations for murderers!), from my friend Mary Katharine Ham:
  • “An Iranian court has sentenced an outspoken female singer to 74 lashes for performing at a concert without wearing a hijab, according to a person close to her family and state media news reports,” reports The New York Times. “The punishment indicated a possible tightening of religious rules for women under an Iranian political order reshaped by war.”
  • Inflation ticks higher and higher while consumer spending accelerates:





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