Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott worked together to push a bipartisan housing bill through the Senate. The bill, which reduces regulations and places limits on private equity ownership of single-family homes, now goes to a skeptical House, where it must garner the votes of Republicans and Democrats alike to pass.

Warren joined WBUR’s All Things Considered to tout the multi-part bill as the best chance to bring more housing to the market, and to help slow the skyrocketing cost of buying a home.

The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Interview highlights

On what the bill does:

“ We need about 5 million more homes of different kinds in America. You know, single family homes, apartments, condos. We need more housing. So what this bill is all about is more than 40 different provisions that are about how to get more housing supply and then a second part. And that is how to keep corporations from buying it all up.”

On why Senate Republicans were willing to support the legislation:

“They like the fact that it does things like cuts regulation, which makes it cheaper to build. They like the fact that we are putting incentives so that there will be more places that build more housing — will get more help for building that housing.

“We’re making it easier, for example, to build more manufactured housing by reducing some of the regulations around that.”

On the complexity of the bill:

“I really want to underscore — this is not, this doesn’t follow the theory of there’s one magic bullet and the federal government will come in and say, ‘Here’s the way to build more housing.’

“Instead, it’s like I said, more than 40 different pieces, because we understand the way you’re going to get more housing in Boston is not the same way that we’re going to  get more in Pittsfield, and not the same as how we’re going to get more out in Provincetown. There are different reasons that we don’t have as much housing as we need in different areas.

“So what this is all about is to try to remove barriers and at the same time to say for communities that are trying to build more housing: Federal government will be a good partner. And if you’ll start building more housing and lowering the cost of your housing, we’ll help you out with things like money to build a new elementary school or to build out new roads or sexy stuff like wastewater plants that you’re going to need because you have bigger demand.”

On how she got President Trump’s support for the bill:

“So remember, he actually called me because I had just given a speech chewing on him about the fact that he still hasn’t lowered credit card interest rates. So he called to say, ‘let’s get that done.’

And then I said, ‘Mr. President, well I have you on the line. You know, we could get this housing bill through and we could ban private equity from buying housing across America,’ and the President said he was interested. And so we have put this bill together. It has the private equity provision that he and I talked about, and now he has said he will support the bill exactly as written.”

On objections to limits on private equity in housing:

“The problem we’ve got right now is that private equity has discovered that Americans’ homes can be quite profitable for Wall Street investors, and they have moved into one area after another …

“Once they buy up enough houses in the area, then they start raising the rents so that renters pay more and more, never have a chance to build up the savings so that someday they might become buyers themselves. In other words, we really face the possibility here that private equity is trying to move into the home market and turn us entirely over time into a nation of renters.”

On convincing Republican House members to vote for the bill:

“ Look, we need more housing. We have a bill that has passed the United States Senate overwhelmingly on a bipartisan basis. The President of the United States has said he will sign the bill as written.

“Anyone who wants to block this bill from going forward is going to have to explain to the American people why it is that they don’t want to build more housing, lower the costs for Americans all across this country.”

On whether limits on private equity will slow new housing construction:

“They buy up existing housing; they’re not expanding the housing supply for much of their purchasing. And I think that’s why it’s important as we have done in our bill to say they just can’t buy any more single family homes. They are barred from that.

“I think that’s the right thing to do. And on the question of additional construction, look: There’s money to be made in housing. Our problems are that we have too many constraints on building for anyone. Builders can build these houses. Millionaires can get together and build them in big swaths. Builders can build them for individual home buyers or for smaller landlords.”

This segment aired on March 18, 2026.