Dear President Biden: Affordable Housing for All Should Be Your Administration’s Moonshot

Seizing control of the Senate, House and presidency for the first time since 2010, the new Biden administration must leverage the Democratic legislative majority to lay out a moonshot initiative and make affordable housing attainable for all Americans. This idea is certainly not new. In 2016, reporter Jake Blumgart proposed a similar plan to rally the presidential campaigns before President Trump’s eventual election win, and author Matthew Desmond has been advocating for this policy through his research and book Evicted.

In last year’s general election, Biden plainly stated in his plan that housing “should be a right, not a privilege” and recognized too many Americans lack access to affordable housing, disproportionately impacting communities of color. To provide an affordable, decent home to every family, the new administration must prioritize affordable housing like national efforts undertaken to put the first person on the moon. Legislation should be proposed immediately that funds and supports mechanisms to bring universal housing vouchers for all low-income families who currently spend more than 30% of their income on housing.

A 2018 study by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies states that over 20 million households spend more than 30% of their income on housing, and 11 million pay more than half their income on housing. Although nearly all these households would technically qualify for voucher assistance, due to lack of funding less than one-quarter of them receive any federal rental subsidy. Households not receiving aid spend an exorbitantly high proportion of their income on housing, live on the margins, precariously close to eviction, and struggle to buy necessities like food, education and healthcare. (In less than 12 months the Covid crisis laid bare this unsustainable housing environment for many renters, as an estimated 30-40 million renters are at risk of eviction in 2021.) A universal housing voucher program could help over 17 million households including 6.3 million families with children. 

Families struggling with housing insecurity or evictions often end up in substandard housing in high-poverty communities, struggle with higher rates of mental and physical health issues, and have worse educational and career outcomes. Enabling people to move to higher-opportunity and lower-poverty areas is an intervention that holds much promise, as economist Raj Chetty and his team tested in an experiment with Seattle renters. They found that, by providing households with Housing Choice Vouchers so renters could relocate to housing in a low-poverty neighborhood and offering additional support through the rental process, the share of families moving to higher-opportunity neighborhoods increased from 14 to 54%. (In the study, “higher-opportunity” describes neighborhoods with a lower-poverty rate and higher-performing schools.) Long-term implications of “moving to opportunity” include lower school drop-out rates, higher college graduation rates and increased future earnings by as much as 30%.  

Implied in the Chetty study and other “move to opportunity” research is the necessity of complementary policies and monitoring protections that should be considered to ensure equitable treatment under a Biden universal housing voucher plan. These safeguards include:

• Reinstating the Affirmatively Further Fair Housing rule passed in 2016 but reversed by Trump in 2020, so jurisdictions receiving federal funds are held accountable for developing policies and practices to reduce discrimination and implementing plans to increase accessibility to housing for historically underserved populations. All indications are that Biden will move quickly in 2021 to roll back Trump’s Executive Orders.
• Adopting national policy similar to California’s SB 329 requiring landlords to accept federal housing vouchers and consider them as part of a rental applicant’s income source.
• Removing or providing exemptions to the requirement that voucher recipients must find housing in 60 days or risk losing funding. 
• Developing locally-viable frameworks for pooling renter support resources and data tools to assist voucher recipients find suitable housing and complete the rental process. Support functions could be provided through a community collaboration of local agencies, non-profits, and faith-based organizations.  
• Implementing supply-side support resources to educate and inform landlords about how to navigate the housing voucher process and what their duties are under the law.

With millions of new voucher recipients, the supply of housing available will certainly tighten in many areas of the country, particularly in denser localities already facing housing shortages. To address this, Biden’s housing budget should also include the $100 billion Affordable Housing Fund proposed by the campaign to construct or upgrade affordable housing units. Additional housing development can be generated through the plan to expand the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit by at least $10 billion and encourage private and nonprofit developers to rehabilitate or construct additional affordable housing. 

Putting into context how the increase of $25-30 billion in annual spending for universal housing vouchers will be critical to success, as at first glance this investment and large price tag may appear to be politically unfeasible. However, it’s imperative in the messaging and rollout of this moonshot to clearly articulate how much “investment” the federal government has made to incentivize homeownership in the last century.  As Desmond points out, each year homeowners receive substantial federal government subsidies in the form of mortgage interest deductions from their taxable income. In 2015, over $71 billion in mortgage interest deductions were taken by homeowners, and an additional $74 billion in deductions were taken through other forms of tax-saving policies targeting homeowners. These benefits essentially subsidize homeowners and real estate developers and are generally favored by most Americans of both political parties. The Biden Administration must make the case to the American people that investing in affordable housing for all is public policy and moral commitment the federal government must undertake to provide lower-income households inclusive and equitable opportunities. 

Like President John Kennedy’s once-in-a-century national effort to go to the moon, President Biden has the opportunity to use 2020’s favorable election results as a mandate to propose his own moonshot. By providing universal housing vouchers and committing funds and efforts toward affordable housing development programs, the new administration can improve the lives of millions of Americans and positively change long-term economic, educational and social outcomes of their children, right here on earth.

Jane Weaver is an MPA student at the Goldman School. Most recently, she managed and advised non-profit organizations that improve educational outcomes in the Sacramento region. In a prior life, she led marketing teams in high tech companies and is now a recovering capitalist striving to find sustainable, public-private solutions to the most challenging social problems.

READ MORE HERE:

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/mortgages/biden-housing-policies/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/struggling-rental-market-could-usher-in-next-american-housing-crisis-11603791000