Sen. Elizabeth Warren has her own housing plan, but that didn’t stop her from enthusiastically embracing an ambitious plan from Data for Progress. “Skyrocketing housing costs are squeezing families to the breaking point, and too many families are suffering from the legacy of racist housing policies,” Warren tweeted. “I'm proud to fight alongside @DataProgress for big ideas that will help us fix this crisis.”
Big ideas indeed. One of the proposals to make housing more affordable in some of the country’s most expensive areas is a “tax on vacant investment properties and luxury secondary homes.” The same section of the plan would crack down on the use of real estate purchases to launder money by banning anonymous LLCs from buying homes. Those moves would free up housing that’s currently sitting empty because it’s convenient for billionaires to just buy it and leave it.
Those two proposals can be found in the “make homes for people, not capital,” the fourth section of the Data for Progress plan, titled Homes for All. The remaining three sections of the plan call for equitable zoning policies to allow for the construction of low-rise multi-unit housing to fill in the “missing middle” between single-family homes and high-rise apartment buildings; the construction of millions of new permanently affordable homes to be mixed between market-rate but rent-stabilized units and units for extremely low income households; and for cash assistance to renters and careful structuring of subsidies to prevent profiteering by greedy landlords.
Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker have also put out housing plans of their own, and Data for Progress has analyzed all three candidates’ plans. The initial analysis of Warren’s plan praised it for “offer[ing] serious, thoughtful efforts to address the core problems facing the American housing supply” and for “throw[ing] real money, real measures, and real accountability at the problems,” and, an update noted that Warren had incorporated some of the Data for Progress suggestions in a reintroduction of her plan, concluding that “the updates in the new bill show a willingness to respond to pressure from the left and openness to making big, new ideas work at the federal level.” Warren’s embrace of Homes for All re-emphasizes that.
Neither Harris nor Booker had immediately responded to the Data for Progress Homes for All plan.