Fast Company, September 28, 2018: Elizabeth Warren has a plan to help end the housing crisisÂ
America’s housing crisis reaches across income levels and geography, but the further one goes down the socioeconomic ladder, the more dire it becomes: Currently, the U.S. is short 7.2 million homes for the 11 million residents living on very low incomes. The affordable rental market is so constrained that 71% of low-income families spend over half their income on rent. The solution to this crisis–like many of America’s crises–is more and better funding toward affordable housing construction and preservation, but to date, leaders have lacked the political will to demand it.
On September 26, Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced the American Housing and Economic Mobility Act of 2018 to call for a $450 billion investment, spread out over the next decade, toward building and preserving affordable housing, and boosting rates of homeownership among low-income people. Warren’s proposal would funnel $45 billion every year into the Housing Trust Fund, a new federal program, rolled out in 2016, that provides block grants to states to build, rehabilitate, or preserve affordable housing for people living on incomes less than 30% of the area median income, or below the federal poverty line.
Part of the funding through the Housing and Economic Mobility Act, for instance, would be made available to local governments in the form of competitive grants, for which cities could apply. In order to qualify for the funding, however, communities have to prove that they will reconfigure their zoning laws–one of the most pervasive ways of keeping people of color and low-income residents locked out of more prosperous neighborhoods. On the equity front, Warren is calling for a down payment assistance program to help primarily low-income people of color purchase property, reversing decades of racism and redlining that have kept this population locked out of the benefits of homeownership. Among black Americans, homeownership rates hover around 41%, around 25 percentage points behind that of white Americans.
Warren’s bill has secured the backing of the NLIHC, Matthew Desmond, the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book Evicted and founder of Just Shelter, The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the National LGBTQ Task Force Action Fund, and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, among others.
