The U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched a Housing Advisory Council this week, tapping JPMorganChase to chair a group of major companies tasked with turning recently enacted federal housing reforms into concrete changes on zoning, financing and workforce development.
The council’s inaugural members are JPMorganChase, building-products maker James Hardie, Citi and manufactured-housing REIT UMH Properties, according to a Chamber announcement. The group is intended to bring private-sector expertise from companies that build, finance and supply housing to bear on local, state and federal policy efforts, and plans to publish policy recommendations, engage directly with policymakers, and track progress in priority markets.
“When housing supply doesn’t keep up with demand, it becomes a real constraint on workers, businesses, and growth,” Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s chief policy officer, said in the announcement. The Chamber estimates the country faces a shortage of roughly 4.7 million homes.
The council’s work is organized around three priority areas: reducing barriers to building, chiefly outdated zoning, land-use and permitting rules; unlocking capital through policy and market changes that improve financing certainty and liquidity; and strengthening the construction workforce through expanded training pipelines, apprenticeships and employer-education partnerships.
“As the nation’s largest multifamily lender and residential bank mortgage lender, we recognize that financing is only one part of the equation,” said Michelle Herrick, JPMorgan’s head of commercial real estate, in the announcement.
The council’s formation follows enactment of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a federal law that ties certain housing grants to local jurisdictions’ actual home-construction activity, part of a broader push by Washington to condition federal housing dollars on measurable supply outcomes rather than spending alone. The Chamber said it will lean on its network of more than 1,500 state and local chambers to identify specific local barriers to building and help scale solutions that work.
The initiative also arrives days after JPMorganChase separately pledged $750 billion through 2035 toward U.S. housing supply and homeownership programs, underscoring the bank’s growing public role in housing policy well beyond its traditional lending business. Other states and cities have taken their own steps to address building barriers directly, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s threat to strip funding from cities that block housing construction.
What it means: A business-led advisory council carries no regulatory authority of its own, so its influence will depend on whether the companies involved β starting with JPMorganChase, which both chairs the council and has separately committed hundreds of billions of dollars to housing finance β can translate zoning and permitting recommendations into actual changes at the local level, where most building barriers originate. The council’s explicit focus on tying its work to the ROAD to Housing Act’s construction-linked funding structure suggests its near-term influence will likely run through which jurisdictions choose to act on its recommendations to qualify for federal dollars, rather than through any direct authority of its own.
