There’s a lot to unpack in Biden’s reconciliation bill (and there are no doubt improvements that need to be made) but there’s one area that’s turning some heads in the equity world — Biden’s housing plan.
Ryan Cooper, author of Biden’s bold plan for American housing and national correspondent for The Week, writes that Biden’s new housing plan would be the biggest and most game-changing improvement to American housing policy in decades.
In terms of general priorities, it’s quite good. It would assist millions of people who desperately need it. Crucially, it would also create millions of new rental units and homes for purchase so that assistance doesn’t simply drive up prices on a fixed housing supply. Protecting and expanding public housing in particular is a sea change in American housing policy. Williams figures homelessness — created above all by excessive housing prices — might be more than halved. More broadly, the plan signals to towns and cities that they should be building more, by hook or by crook, and the federal government will help them in that effort.
The plan aims to do a lot of things, but there are three areas in particular that experts believe will really make a difference.
Those are: (1) increase section 8 vouchers by 50% over the course of five years, (2) put $80 billion into capital grants for new public housing, and (3) initiate a grant program that incentivizes communities to “upzone” (meaning replace single family zoning with multi-family zoning and allow duplexes, triplexes, etcetera to be built).
Even better news is that despite the amount of pushback the reconciliation bill is receiving, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of opposition to the housing plan.
None of the Democratic moderates who are apparently resistant to this package have made an argument against it, as far as I can tell. Their opposition is especially weird because it would directly address one of their biggest complaints about the Biden agenda: inflation. In a recent op-ed, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) — with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), one of the two key holdouts to passing the bill — complained that passing the Biden agenda risks fueling price increases. But as White House economists Jared Bernstein, Ernie Tedeschi, and Sarah Robinson carefully explain, one of the biggest factors fueling overall inflation numbers today is housing. Rents are going up fast, and so are home prices.
Full Story: Biden’s bold plan for American housing by author Ryan Cooper; originally published on The Week on October 8, 2021.
