Gavin Newsom praises federal housing bill, says it mirrors California efforts

Lia Russell, The Sacramento Bee on Jul 13, 2026

By clicking submit, I authorize Arcamax and its affiliates to: (1) use, sell, and share my information for marketing purposes, including cross-context behavioral advertising, as described in our Privacy Policy , (2) add to information that I provide with other information like interests inferred from web page views, or data lawfully obtained from data brokers, such as past purchase or location data, or publicly available data, (3) contact me or enable others to contact me by email or other means with offers for different types of goods and services, and (4) retain my information while I am engaging with marketing messages that I receive and for a reasonable amount of time thereafter. I understand I can opt out at any time through an email that I receive, or by clicking here

After being a target of out-of-state lawmakers’ criticism, California is leading the nation as housing affordability and homelessness have become a national problem, forcing Congress to act, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday.

The housing crisis was concentrated to coastal blue cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Boston, until remote work allowed people to move to other states that had not dealt with such crises, leading to skyrocketing rents and mortgages in states like Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Texas.

Over the weekend, a major federal housing reform bill passed into law, which streamlines environmental regulations, prevents large-scale investors from buying up more than 350 homes, lifts the public welfare cap on banks’ investment in low-income communities, and makes it cheaper and easier to build manufactured housing to increase supply.

The bill, known as the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, went into effect without President Donald Trump’s signature, who protested by cancelling a signing ceremony after Congress failed to advance his election reform SAVE Act bill.

“That housing bill that was done federally looks a lot like what we’ve been doing here in the state of California,” Newsom said during a press conference in Oakland. “Their reforms to (the National Environmental Policy Act), our reforms to CEQA.”

“A couple good things have actually happened in Washington D.C. and this was one,” Newsom said, calling it a “pretty good damn” bill. “I thought there was a lot of good thinking and a lot of smart work that was done on it. Federal government and states have limited roles and responsibility when it comes to these things.”

Newsom has often faulted local regulations and attendant political pushback against new housing for California’s housing and homelessness crises.

“Localism is determinative on all this,” he said Monday. “Housing and homelessness, it’s a bottom-up construct. So it’s really about getting rid of those regulatory thickets. It’s really about creating flexibility and doing what you can to support localism.”

He said the focus on loosening local zoning regulations will “feed very nicely into what the counties and cities will be doing all across this nation, and across the state of California.”

____