ATLANTA – (Atlanta Trend) The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act cleared the Senate 85 to 5 and the House 358 to 32. Sit with those numbers for a second. This is a Congress that can turn naming a post office into a floor fight, and it just agreed, nearly unanimously, on the largest housing bill in thirty years.
There is exactly one way a bill gets margins like that. It has to avoid making anyone do anything, and it has to avoid costing anything. The ROAD Act clears both bars with room to spare. It authorizes no new construction money. It does not preempt a single line of local zoning. Most of what’s in it is a suggestion, a study, or a rule that some federal agency will get around to writing in 2027.
There is no zoning reform in this bill. None. No preemption, no federal floor, no minimum standard, nothing that nudges us an inch toward a code that reads the same way in two towns that share a road.
I know what that fragmentation costs with more precision than I’d like, because the hardest thing we have ever built at cove, by a wide margin, is software that reads zoning codes. Not the AI. Not the energy modeling. Zoning. It’s the hardest because there is no such thing as “the code.” There are thousands of them, each with its own definitions, its own overlays, its own exceptions, and one clause buried on page 240 that quietly undoes page 12.