Biden will actually INCREASE Housing Equality: Day 25 of 100 Days of Loving Joe Biden

by GoodNewsRoundup

Community

(This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday, Jul. 30, 2020 Thursday, Jul. 30, 2020 at 4:04:09am PDT

Because home ownership is how many families save and build wealth, racial disparities in home ownership contribute to the enormous racial wealth gap.

Joe Biden believed that it is far past time to put an end to systemic housing discrimination and other contributors to this disparity.

He started work on this with Obama and he has impressive plans to continue increasing housing equality.

Biden will:

Help families buy their first homes and build wealth by creating a new refundable tax credit of up to $15,000.

Scale up support for investing in homeownership in revitalization areas.

Spur the construction of 1.5 million homes and public housing units to address the affordable housing crisis, increase energy efficiency, and reduce the racial wealth gap.

Protect homeowners and renters from abusive lenders and landlords through a new Homeowner and Renter Bill of Rights. Modeled on the California Homeowner Bill of Rights, Biden will enact legislation to end many shortcomings in the mortgage and rental markets.

Bolster programs that improve housing affordability for renters. Biden will provide Section 8 housing vouchers to every eligible family so that no one has to pay more than 30% of their income for rental housing

Those policies will help anyone who needs help affording a house, which is great.

Biden also has plans for policies to specifically address racial gaps in home ownership and thus wealth.

Eliminate local and state housing regulations that perpetuate discrimination. Biden will enact legislation requiring any state receiving federal dollars through the Community Development Block Grants or Surface Transportation Block Grants to develop a strategy for inclusionary zoning, as proposed in the HOME Act of 2019 by Majority Whip Jim Clyburn and Senator Cory Booker.

Hold financial institutions accountable for discriminatory practices in the housing market. The Obama-Biden Administration held major national financial institutions accountable for discriminatory lending practices, securing hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements to help borrowers who had been harmed by their practices. But now the Trump Administration is seeking to gut this disparate impact standard by significantly increasing the burden of proof for those claiming discrimination. In the Biden Administration, this change will be reversed to ensure financial institutions are held accountable for serving all customers and not practicing policies that have the effect of deepening the impacts of systemic housing discrimination.

Roll back Trump Administration policies gutting fair lending and fair housing protections for homeowners. Biden will implement the Obama-Biden Administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule requiring communities receiving certain federal funding to proactively examine housing patterns and identify and address policies that have a discriminatory effect. The Trump Administration suspended this rule in 2018. Biden will ensure effective and rigorous enforcement of the Fair Housing Act and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. And, he will reinstate the federal risk-sharing program which has helped secure financing for thousands of affordable rental housing units in partnership with housing finance agencies.

Of course the racist monster in the WH is trying to brand Biden’s plan as destroying the suburbs.

But it is actually the opposite. Biden's housing plan actually will add more infrastructure to suburbs.

What Biden is going to try to destroy is the systemic inequality and lack of opportunity for people of color in home ownership. Biden will create more pathways for people to make their lives, and the lives of their children, better.