Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Tina Smith have just released a BRILLIANT housing plan called the Homes Act of 2024. I just received this below in my mailbox. Please. Please please please go sign their petition to get Congress to support it. If you want the Kamala Harris housing plan to work, we need to get this done.
As Justice Democrats Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Tina Smith explain in their latest New York Times essay, “The result is a housing market where corporate landlords make record profits while half of America’s 44 million renters struggle to pay rent. For a generation of young people, the idea of home has become loaded with anxiety; too many know they can’t find an affordable, stable place to rent, let alone buy.”
To finally combat this, AOC and Tina just unveiled a historic new bill for social housing called the Homes Act, which would establish a new, federally backed development authority to finance and build homes in big cities and small towns across America using union labor.
It would then turn the management of those residences over to entities that agree to manage them for permanent affordability, such as public and tribal housing authorities, cooperatives, tenant unions, community land trusts, nonprofits, and local governments. Under this plan:
- Rent would be capped at 25% of a household’s adjusted gross income;
- Homes would be built and set aside for lower-income families in mixed-income buildings and communities;
- Every home would be built to modern and efficient standards to ensure health and safety while cutting utility costs for residents.
This is the bold solution we need to address one of the biggest problems facing working people across our country, but it’s going to require strong public pressure to push Congress to support it.
Why is this smart? The key is that they recognize that our current housing construction system is broken. The home construction companies just aren’t capable or interested in building fast enough, affordably enough, or ethically enough to solve the country’s problems. It’s not even always their fault. Our modern global economy makes the financing of these projects so unstable that they’re forced to essentially shut down construction every few years until interest rates cool or the economy picks up. There’s such a small sweet spot for home construction in America that we need a new solution.
That’s where a federally backed development authority comes into play. The ability to sustainably finance these projects would reduce or eliminate construction delays and the initial ownership by the government of these projects would start to emulate examples that have worked in the past. Take the city of Vienna, Austria for example. And many cities in our country are starting to. In this article at the Guardian below, you can learn how one of the most expensive cities in Europe was able to create a situation with the lowest housing costs on the continent. Basically, after WW2 the government built a lot of new housing and used smart mechanisms to keep a reasonable level of control over them ever since.
The social housing secret: how Vienna became the world’s most livable city.
AOC is a brilliant national treasure. Whenever any of us are feeling down we can look to her to remember that we still have people smart enough in this country to actually solve problems, if we just let them do it.
UPDATE: Thanks for all of your many many great ideas, folks. I’ve rarely seen people get so excited and so detailed with how they think a problem should be solved. Clearly everyone has experience on what’s right and wrong about their own home buying or renting experience, so everyone is very interested and invested in this issue. Hopefully, we can finally get something productive going on this at the congressional level!
