They say that the best time to fix a leaky roof is when the sun is shining. So now that we are out of the financial storm, this is the time to fix our broken housing finance system. If we don’t, we will be no better prepared for the damage that will rain down when the next tempest comes.

Fortunately, we have an opportunity to begin the effort in earnest when the Senate Banking Committee takes up the bipartisan Johnson-Crapo bill to reform our broken housing finance system. The goal is clear: to at last end the perverse “heads you win, tails the taxpayer loses” model that sent Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship, and replace it with a housing finance structure that is sustainable and effective.

The last year has seen an unusually collaborative and comprehensive, bipartisan effort between Republican and Democratic senators and the Obama administration. First, Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) helped forge a breakthrough bipartisan agreement. Building on that work, Banking Committee Chairman Tim Johnson of South Dakota and ranking Republican Mike Crapo of Idaho put together an even stronger bill, with federal officials playing a helpful role behind the scenes. The result are reforms that put private-sector capital and competition first, while still having a commitment to an ultimate government backstop, and new measures to ensure that Americans will still be able to afford a 30-year fixed mortgage.

Is the bill perfect? Of course not. But my hope is that both sides of the aisle will overcome the inclination to make the perfect the enemy of the good and recognize that inaction is the surest loss for both conservatives and progressives alike.

The status quo means preserving “too big to fail” in housing, where the Fannie and Freddie duopoly would continue to guarantee more than 80 percent of all mortgages in the United States, with virtually no capital buffer to shield the taxpayer. Virtually none. If we face another housing-related recession going forward – or even another regional housing price decline – there could be no choice but another taxpayer bailout.

This duopoly not only gets special tax relief no one else gets, but they control the platform – the infrastructure for broad securitizations of mortgages. If the beauty of the Internet is that it is an open platform that allows new entrants, the status quo for housing reform is the total opposite. Here, the two entities that needed a nearly $200 billion bailout in September 2008 currently control the equivalent platform – and get special tax advantages – so that no one else can fairly compete.

Some very conservative voices have come out against Johnson-Crapo on the grounds that even with the focus on putting private sector capital first, there should be no government role at all in housing finance. Yet that purist position is likely to get much traction among even their Republican constituents on two grounds. First, without any government backstop, most experts believe that it would deeply weaken and even end the affordable 30-year mortgage. Second, as there will never be a bipartisan agreement to end all government involvement in the housing finance market, the purist position ironically is a recipe for ensuring the government’s continued domination of this realm. That does not seem like a winning argument in Tea Party town hall meetings.

Likewise, some progressives may resist working to find common ground out of a misplaced belief that the status quo – especially with a new Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) director committed to affordable housing – will somehow be better than reform. But that is based more on vague fear of the future than a hard-headed assessment of the present. Today, the uncertainty in the housing finance market has led to tight credit conditions that are shutting the door on millions of families. How can one argue that the system is working when the average American needs a 734 FICO credit score to obtain a mortgage? And there’s a growing diversity problem, too: According to the most recent data, just 2 percent of the 1.3 million mortgage loans in 2012went to African American borrowers and just 5 percent went to Latino borrowers. One cannot expect than even a FHFA director as committed to affordability as Mel Watt can fix all of this and that legislation is therefore not needed.

Under current law, even if the FHFA stretches to raise available resources for affordable housing and first-time homeowners, the best the agency can do is $500 million a year. Yet, with the new affordable housing access fee in Johnson-Crapo, that number would grow tenfold to $5 billion a year. With so few other legislative prospects for affordable housing, progressive leaders should think long and hard about how much good they are doing for responsible, modest-income families and underserved communities if they leave $50 billion over the next 10 years on the table.

This is not to say that senators on either side should just take the bill as is. Valid concerns have been raised about the dangers of vertical integration, how to include capital markets in a way that is stable, what alternatives there are to down-payment requirements and how to strike the right balance between an adequate capital cushion to protect taxpayers without making the entire system unnecessarily expensive – to name but a few. But those are the type of issues that can be resolved if everyone puts their cards on the table and is willing to negotiate seriously. Because after all, if the roof ever comes off the housing system again, it will be difficult for any of us to explain why, when the sun was shining, we chose to say “never mind” as opposed to “never again.”

Gene B. Sperling was director of the National Economic Council for President Obama from January 2011 to March 2014 and played a lead role on housing finance reform.