Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro raised eyebrows among Democrats last week by going somewhere few other 2028 Democratic presidential hopefuls have been willing to go: directly criticizing the record of the Biden-Harris administration.

In an appearance on X’s news show with Jessica Tarlov and Scott Galloway, Shapiro distinguished his “Get Stuff Done” approach to governing from what he characterized as the Biden administration’s failure to deliver on ambitious broadband infrastructure commitments, despite passing a bill with a massive price tag.

“One of the biggest things holding back our rural communities is a lack of high-speed, affordable internet,” Shapiro said. “I was incredibly proud of President Biden when they got that infrastructure bill passed to provide the billions of dollars that were needed to plug everybody in, connect everybody in Pennsylvania. And do you know how many people, this many years later, have been connected to high-speed affordable internet thanks to President Biden’s law in Pennsylvania? Zero. Because the dollars were never driven out.”

Governor Shapiro has a strong track record of GSD governing in PA and has some genuinely impressive bipartisan accomplishments in this exact area of public policy, like radically streamlining state permitting for certain activities and business licenses, and signing a substantial energy permitting reform bill in last year’s budget, which was championed by Republican Senator Greg Rothman.

The broadband failure, though, is a timely example for Shapiro and state lawmakers to keep front-of-mind as Harrisburg gears up to tackle another massive infrastructure problem this year: housing.

Shapiro warned that Pennsylvania will be short 185,000 homes by 2035 if Harrisburg doesn’t act.

What’s in the governor’s housing proposal?

Housing was a major theme of Shapiro’s budget address this week, with the Guv going into significant detail on the problem and the solutions he could support, most of which would involve state legislation. In a sign of how pro-housing politics have really arrived in Harrisburg, Shapiro even mentioned the Municipalities Planning Code — PA’s local zoning legislation — in his speech, which probably wasn’t on anyone’s budget bingo card.

Shapiro warned that Pennsylvania will be short 185,000 homes by 2035 if Harrisburg doesn’t act — a gap that state officials say can only be closed by building roughly 450,000 housing units over the next decade, a 70 percent increase over the current rate of homebuilding.

For context, PA ranked 44th among the 50 states in the rate of housing built from 2017–2023, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. During that period, the Commonwealth’s population grew by 5 percent, while the housing stock grew by only 3.4 percent. Meanwhile, average rents in the 23 PA counties tracked by Zillow increased from $1,013 in 2017 to $1,476 in 2023 — a 46 percent increase Pew attributes to the growing housing shortage.

Nationally, housing advocates increasingly see this as the state governments’ problem to solve. Between July 2024 and June 2025, more than 25 states passed legislation aimed at increasing housing supply, according to Mercatus, but PA wasn’t one of them.

This could be the year that finally changes. To that end, some of the more interesting solutions Shapiro endorsed in the speech and official budget address documents this week include:

• $1 billion bond supporting a Critical Infrastructure Fund for housing and other building projects
• Cataloging all zoning laws across PA’s 2,560 municipalities
• Modernizing the Municipalities Planning Code to include accessory dwelling standards, transit-oriented development, mixed-use housing in commercial areas
• Creating a Deputy Secretary for Housing position at the Department of Community and Economic Development to coordinate housing policy and share model land-use ordinances
• Capping rental application fees statewide
• Limiting lot rent increases in mobile home communities
• Allow transfer-on-death deeds for primary residences (tangled titles)
• Fair-chance housing reforms and eviction record sealing

We’ll have more details to chew over when the Governor’s full Housing Action Plan comes out — rumored in about two weeks — but Shapiro’s budget address remarks signaled he may endorse some land use reforms in that document.

Like energy, one of the most effective ways we can lower costs is by simply building more housing. That starts at the local level, where zoning laws and ordinances vary across our 2,560 municipalities.Yet right now, we don’t even have a catalog of all those rules.We need to make one, so that we can help local governments understand what works best to build more affordable housing.

That also means working with local communities to modernize the Municipalities Planning Code to build where it makes sense — and cut red tape where it’s unnecessary. It means creating standards for accessory dwelling units, facilitating transit-oriented development, and streamlining mixed-use development on main streets and commercial corridors.

A remarkably bipartisan issue

The momentum for state-level housing supply policies specifically has been revving up in early 2026, with new bills and co-sponsor memos coming out of both parties’ caucuses, in both houses of the legislature.

The debate over this issue has progressed to the point where housing policy leaders in both parties emphasize the need to reform local zoning laws and permitting practices, and generally reduce regulatory barriers to new housing supply — a topic our state government already knows a lot about in great detail, but hasn’t taken any steps to prevent in practice.

One core conceptual issue that still divides some of the legislative housing supply champions is whether to pursue a more voluntary, incentives- and education-based strategy for winning more pro-building ordinances in more places; or whether to establish statewide minimum standards for the housing types that municipal governments must permit by law in their local zoning ordinances.

Everyone involved has been trying to read the tea leaves on this point these past few weeks based on the administration’s public comments. A couple weeks ago, Spotlight PA reported that “a senior Shapiro staffer working on the housing plan told a local group in Lancaster the plan would focus on ‘incentives rather than mandates.’” Pew’s Alex Horowitz had a blunt appraisal of that idea in the Spotlight piece: “States that tried that early on didn’t see the supply response,” he said.

But Shapiro also used the term “standards,” which has become Harrisburg insiders’ and advocates’ preferred euphemism for talking about state-level preemption of municipal zoning laws. And the fact that he’s talking about this at all in a high-profile address is a positive sign.

A plan that rewards self-certification of good behavior, instead of outcomes like permitting activity or measured growth in the housing stock, is doomed to fail right from the start and is in some ways worse than doing nothing.

In reality, most of the action around this issue is in the legislature, and there are already multiple bipartisan groups of legislators linking arms on a variety of bills, some of which have been bundled together as distinct packages.

State representatives Jared Solomon, a Democrat, and Abby Major, a Republican, have released a package of bills focused on incentivizing municipalities to update their zoning ordinances to be more pro-housing — for instance, by giving the pro-housing communities preference when applying for state grants. Some bills go further, creating pre-approved standard plans for duplexes, townhouses, and accessory dwelling units that municipalities could adopt. Republican Senators Greg Rothman, Joe Picozzi, and others have published a co-sponsor memo indicating they’ll introduce these same bills in the Senate.

A second bipartisan group is taking the more direct “GSD” approach. Democratic Representatives John Inglis, Tarik Khan, and others, joined by Republican Representatives Dave Zimmerman and Major, have released bills that would legalize accessory dwellings, duplexes, triplexes, and eventually mixed-use multifamily housing near transit by-right in qualifying communities. In the Senate, a bipartisan coalition including Republican Senators Greg Rothman and Dan Laughlin and Democratic Senators Nikil Saval and Tim Kearney has issued a co-sponsor memo for an accessory dwellings bill taking this same statewide standards approach — building on the coalition that backed last session’s sweeping SB1126 zoning reform effort, with more bills to follow.

Broadband’s lessons for housing

This is an area where the failure to build broadband infrastructure is instructive, and provides a cautionary tale for those hoping against hope that a more incentives-based approach to state zoning reform could succeed.

PA already ran this same experiment with broadband. The Broadband Ready Communities program asked municipalities to voluntarily opt-in to reducing local permitting barriers hampering broadband deployment. Like the housing-ready communities proposal from Solomon and Major, BRC was optional, incentives-based, with applications closing at the end of 2024.

Even with $1.16 billion in federal BEAD funding on the table, and even with the incentive of being highlighted as “broadband ready” for grant applications, most municipalities didn’t bother. According to the state, only 141 of Pennsylvania’s 2,560 municipalities have filled out the minimal paperwork required to receive the designation — a 5.5 percent participation rate.

With much of the policy emphasis falling on rural broadband, it’s maybe not surprising to see that most of the participating municipalities are in rural counties, but there is also no geographic limitation on this program. The geographic pattern is telling. Not a single municipality in the five county Philadelphia region or Allegheny County is participating. Bradford County alone accounts for more than a third of all participants, largely because a single county planning director signed up every township. Urban and suburban municipalities are just as eligible — but the populous places where demand is highest couldn’t be bothered.

The relevant legislative action on this happened at the end of the Wolf administration, but Shapiro was in charge when his administration created the Broadband Ready Communities designation in 2024, and the dismal participation rate should be a cautionary tale for those who want to copy and paste this same approach for housing.

If this is the best the state can do for certifying pro-broadband policies, we’re going to be in big trouble when it comes to housing. The Department of Community and Economic Development simply doesn’t have the administrative capacity to check everyone’s homework in general, and they definitely don’t have the capacity to check if the supposedly pro-housing new local ordinances aren’t loaded down with other poison pills that make home-building infeasible. The state shouldn’t give out meaningless gold stars to just anybody who claims to be pro-housing. Either the permits get pulled, or they don’t.

The Governor just criticized the Biden administration for failing to “drive out the dollars” for broadband, but his own housing plan — at least as described so far — risks relying on an approach with the exact same failure mode as Broadband Ready Communities. A plan that rewards self-certification of good behavior, instead of outcomes like permitting activity or measured growth in the housing stock, is doomed to fail right from the start and is in some ways worse than doing nothing. It wastes valuable time on the legislative calendar we could instead be spending implementing proven solutions from other states that build a lot of housing. The alternative approach embodied by the Inglis/Khan and Rothman/Saval bills is much more in the spirit of the GSD ethos Governor Shapiro used to distinguish himself from Biden’s broadband bumbles

Failing to pass reforms that actually put shovels in the ground means homes not built, growing economic insecurity for tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians, and pointlessly dimmer horizons in spite of our Commonwealth’s vast economic potential.

Correction: This post was updated to reflect that doubling PA’s affordable housing fund was not among the solutions Shapiro endorsed in the speech ot official budget address documents this week.

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