Wednesday, September 18, 2019
"My administration will
be looking out for working families and tenants, not the billionaires who
control Wall Street."
In the wake of "abhorrent"
comments made by President Donald Trump about homeless people, Democratic
presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday unveiled his $2.5
trillion "Housing for All" plan, which calls for building millions of
affordable housing units and providing billions of dollars in rental assistance
over a decade.
In the richest country in the
history of the world, every American must have a safe, decent, accessible, and
affordable home as a fundamental right," the Sanders campaign declares in the
plan, which will be paid for by a wealth tax on the top one-tenth of the one
percent.
After teasing his
housing plan at an event Saturday, the Independent senator from Vermont said in
a statement Wednesday: "There is virtually no place in America where a
full-time minimum wage worker can afford a decent two bedroom apartment. At a
time when half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, this is
unacceptable."
"For too long the federal
government has ignored the extraordinary housing crisis in our country,"
he added. "That will end when I am president."
Billy Gendell, a Sanders
campaign policy staffer, highlighted some of the plan's proposals in a tweet:
One of the key proposals, the
Sanders campaign explains, stems from a bill the senator put forth in the U.S.
House nearly two decades ago:
In 2001, Bernie first
introduced legislation to create the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund,
based largely on the success of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Trust
Fund. After a 15-year effort, in 2016, a modest version of Bernie's legislation
became the first new federal affordable housing program funded in several
decades. Administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development,
it is funded through a small percentage of revenues from the
government-sponsored housing agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Over the
past four years, this program has invested $905 million on the construction,
rehabilitation, and preservation of affordable housing throughout the
country—but unfortunately that is not nearly enough compared to the demand.
Sanders proposes investing
$1.48 trillion in the trust over 10 years "to build, rehabilitate, and
preserve the 7.4 million quality, affordable and accessible housing
units." He further proposes spending $400 billion on building two million
mixed-income social housing units, expanding a U.S. Department of Agriculture
program by $500 million for new developments in rural areas, and boosting funds
for the Indian Housing Block Grant Program to $3 billion.
During the first year of his
presidency, Sanders would prioritize 25,000 National Affordable Housing Trust
units to house people who are homeless. He would also double McKinney-Vento
homelessness assistance grants to more than $26 billion over five years and
provide $500 million for states and localities' outreach programs.
In contrast, Trump was
lambasted after he claimed during a rally in California Tuesday night
that homeless people are ruining the "prestige" of major U.S. cities.
Progressives, meanwhile, praised Sanders' understanding of the crisis and his
bold proposals to address it.
The plan claims that
"most public housing is in desperate need of reconstruction and
rehabilitation" and calls for a $70 million investment to improve
accessibility and provide access to high-speed broadband in such units. Sanders
also promises to "ensure that public housing has high-quality, shared
community spaces."
Decrying the federal
government's failures to provide adequate housing assistance to low-income
people, the campaign says that "today, 7.7 million families in America are
forced to pay more than half of their limited incomes on rent because they are
eligible for Section 8 rental assistance but do not receive it because of a lack
of federal resources. As a result, many of these families are forced to choose
between paying rent or buying the food, medicine, or prescription drugs they
need."
Sanders calls for fully
funding Section 8 assistance at $410 billion over the next decade as well as
strengthening the Fair Housing Act and implementing a Section 8
non-discrimination law.
The Housing for All plan also
proposes various tenant protections—including a national cap on annual rent
increases at no more than 3 percent or 1.5 times the Consumer Price Index, a
"just-cause" requirement for evictions, and a guarantee of renters'
right to form tenants unions. Sanders further proposes creating an independent
National Fair Housing Agency similar to the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau and an office within that agency for mobile home residents.
Sanders' housing plan
incorporates various existing pieces of legislation that the senator
supports—calling for the passage of the Equality Act to include LGBTQ+ people
in the Fair Housing Act as well as the Green New Deal to fully transition to
sustainable energy nationwide by 2030. Sanders proposes decarbonizing all
public housing through the Green New Deal and providing grants to low- and
moderate-income families so they can weatherize and retrofit homes and invest
in cheaper energy.
The housing plan is designed
to help out not only people who are homeless and renters, but also first-time
homebuyers. Sanders proposes investing $2 billion at the USDA and $6 billion at
HUD to create an assistance program for first-time buyers and making
pre-purchase housing counseling available to all potential buyers.
The plan also proposes "a
25 percent House Flipping tax on speculators who sell a non-owner-occupied
property, if sold for more than it was purchased within five years of
purchase" as well as "a 2 percent Empty Homes tax on the property value
of vacant, owned homes to bring more units into the market and curb the use of
housing as speculative investment."
Sanders vowed in his statement
Wednesday that if he secures the Democratic nomination for president and wins
the 2020 election, "my administration will be looking out for working
families and tenants, not the billionaires who control Wall Street." In a
campaign newsletter, Sanders staffer David Sirota explained a proposal designed
to do just that:
One of the major planks in
Bernie's plan is a proposal to finally end the mass sale of mortgages to Wall
Street firms and crack down on predatory practices of Wall Street landlords.
That includes the firm run by Donald Trump's billionaire adviser, Steve
Schwarzman—the financier who throws
himself multimillion-dollar birthday parties and bankrolls
the GOP, while his firm fuels a housing crisis and traps tenants in a cycle
of squalor, predatory
fees and evictions.
In the wake of the financial
crisis, the federal government helped private equity giants like Schwarzman's
firm Blackstone buy up foreclosed homes, and then convert them into rental
properties. The
Atlantic reports that between 2011 and 2017, these giants gained
control of more than 200,000 homes. This has been great for Blackstone, which
has been cashing
in on the scheme—but it hasn't been great for everyone else.
The Housing for All plan,
Sirota concluded, "will crack down on corporate landlords that are
destroying too many communities throughout America."
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