As a country, we have spent decades subsidizing housing demand and done little to reward supply. The mortgage deduction. Down payment grants. Tax-free profit when you sell. Demand went up. Supply hasn't kept up. The country is short about 3.7 million homes. The wave of new apartments that cooled rents is running out. Starts are falling. The buildings that held the line are leasing up with nothing behind them. When they fill, rents climb again. So why don't builders build more? Part of the answer hides in the tax code. Develop a new apartment building and you write the cost off over 27.5 years. A thin slice each year for almost three decades. A dollar deducted today beats a dollar deducted in 2050. Money has a time value. Inflation eats the late write-offs. So the long timeline raises the after-tax cost of building and drops the return. Marginal deals fall below the line where a lender will fund them. High rates make it worse. This month four members of the House Ways and Means Committee introduced a bill to change that. Two Democrats. Two Republicans. It rewards building apartments. No new agency. No appropriation. Not even a subsidy. The "Rental Housing Investment Act" moves the write-off forward. Build a new apartment and you can deduct up to $150,000 per unit the year it opens. For income-restricted units the figure rises to $250,000. The deduction caps at what the building cost. It covers new construction, not existing buildings, and you have to be the first owner. Put these numbers on a real development project. We just finished a 76-unit project in the Cedars, south of downtown Dallas. Cost about $19.8 million. Under today's rules, a cost segregation study got us a $4.3 million write-off in year one. Under this bill, the next one like it throws off about $11.4 million. That is a first-year deduction worth more than all the cash equity in the deal. That swing is the point. A bigger deduction up front lifts the after-tax return. A deal that might today be a few points short of penciling now clears the bar. The housing gets built. Do that across the country and more buildings pencil. More buildings mean more apartments. More apartments hold rents down. Now the objection. The first reaction is that this is a deficit bomb. It is not, and here is why. The first-year deduction cuts the building's basis by the same amount. Less basis means smaller deductions in every year that follows. Sell the building or pull it out of the rental market inside ten years and the law claws the benefit back. For the affordable tier that window runs fifteen years. The break rewards housing that stays housing. So the true ten-year cost is a fraction of the headline number. Treasury fronts the deduction to get the building up, then takes most of it back over the life of the asset. And the idea is not new. In 2025 Congress restored full first-year expensing for business assets. For the first time it let companies write off some building structures in year one, the ones used in domestic manufacturing. The principle is settled law. This bill points it at a narrow, capped slice of housing. That is why both parties can sign it. 🔴 The supply-side gets a tax cut that builds something you can stand in front of. No new agency. No grant contest. 🔵 The housing-first side gets more supply, including units working families can afford, without waiting on a capped tax-credit pipeline. We spent decades learning how to make people want a home. We forgot how to make it pay to build one. This remembers.