Warren Hosts Press Conference and Roundtable with MA Mayors on Landmark Bipartisan Housing Legislation
“(This bill) is a statement that the federal government is committed to being a good partner to the towns that are trying to build more housing.”
Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ranking Member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, sat down for a roundtable discussion on the bipartisan Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream (ROAD) to Housing Act with mayors from across Massachusetts. Following the roundtable, the Ranking Member held a press conference alongside mayors.
Last month, the Committee passed the ROAD to Housing Act – the first major piece of bipartisan housing legislation to pass the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee in over a decade – with a unanimous 24-0 vote. The bill is an important first step to bring down housing costs by helping to expand housing supply and empower local communities with tools they need to reduce regulatory and development barriers that exacerbate housing shortages.
Below are Ranking Member Warren’s remarks at the press conference:
Housing is a crisis in Massachusetts, and the problem is we just don't have enough.
Why are prices so high? Because we don't have enough.
Massachusetts is currently about 200,000 housing units below where we need to be just to house our people, and we are not building that housing fast enough.
We need more housing of every kind. We need housing for first time home buyers. We need housing for seniors, housing for people with disabilities, housing for veterans, housing for families that are growing and need a bigger space. Housing for renters, housing for people who have no housing at all. We need more housing and we've been saying pretty much the same thing for decades, shocked at how high prices are on that house that was just sold down the street, and yet not making any appreciable difference.
I want to give a big shout out to the Governor and to the Lieutenant Governor who have really put their shoulder into trying to get more housing built in Massachusetts. And I want to give a double shout out to the mayors who are on the front lines, who are trying to make their cities more affordable, who are trying to get more housing built, more housing that is affordable for the people who live in their towns and cities, more housing that works for more people, but they need a partner. They can't do this on their own.
The ROAD to Housing bill for which I am the principal co-sponsor and have just pushed through the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee is the first step in changing the role of the federal government. Always before the federal government has been involved in financing housing and doing a very modest amount in public housing and beyond that has said to cities and towns across this country, “it's your problem”.
The ROAD to Housing is our first step in doing three things.
The first is to increase the toolbox available to local communities that want to build more housing. So for example, we changed the rules around the Environmental Protection Agency so that if you get approval, faster and easier. Change the rules around manufactured housing, so that there are more options available for how to get something built. So, part of it is increasing the number of tools in the toolbox.
The second part is for the federal government to step up and be a partner with communities that are actually trying to build, and that means by Innovation Fund. So if a community says, “we are going to make changes here”, and the community will decide what those changes are. We're going to make changes to bring down the cost of building more housing. If we start getting more housing units built, the federal government steps up and says, “we'll be a partner in that, and you can use the money in the way you most need”. That may be something fancy, like sewer hookups or a new elementary school or new roads, but whatever is needed locally so that you can make this increase in the housing supply work for your community.
And then the third part is to address specific problems with access to housing for homeless veterans, appraisal bias attacking directly.
The fact that we know right now that the appraisal of homelessness is different for black families and for white families, and sort of taking that problem head on and addressing the problem of homelessness overall, about how to get more people into sustainable, long term housing.
The good news about this bill is it is a statement that the federal government is committed to being a good partner to the towns that are trying to build more housing. It has real momentum. I know that talking without getting anything done in a sharply divided Washington sounds like a dream, but this is a dream that we can make a reality.
We just got this bill through the Banking Committee unanimously. That means 24 senators, Republicans and Democrats, all voted for this bill. All have an interest in seeing this bill make it forward and end.
So this is a moment when I celebrate a step forward.
I stop to acknowledge there's work we need to do. Private equity needs to be held back from buying out every house in some of our communities, and further driving up prices and pricing out people who want to own their own homes. We have a lot of work to do, but this is an important first step. This is a step that says we acknowledge that there is a housing crisis in Massachusetts and across the country, we recognize that it is a supply problem, and the federal government is determined to be a good partner to the communities that are trying to build more housing.
Again, I want to say thank you to all the mayors who are here, not just because they're here today, but because they've been here over and over 40 years now, as they have explained their approach to how to get down those costs in housing and have told me how it is that the federal government could be a better partner to them.
I'm looking forward to expanding this partnership and getting more help to the towns that are trying to do such a good job.
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