Elizabeth Warren Makes Housing a Cornerstone of Presidential Bid

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) pens a guest column for the opinion page of the Reno Gazette Journal to tout the potential benefits of a very pro-housing development platform for residents of the state of Nevada.

Warren starts the narrative with an anecdote from the mortgage crisis of the Great Recession, a reminder that today's exorbitant housing prices in many of the parts of the country follow a decade of housing insecurity and many more decades of housing policy that has increasingly left behind low-income and middle-class Americans.

Warren's housing platform takes a pro-development approach to what the presidential candidate describes as a head-on approach to a big problem. "My housing plan attacks the growing cost of rent by addressing the root cause of the problem: a serious lack of affordable housing supply."

Warren also promises to invest a lot of taxpayer money in the lack of affordable housing in places like Nevada:

My plan brings down rents by investing $500 billion over the next 10 years to build, preserve and rehabilitate units that will be affordable to lower-income families. By building millions of new units across the country, including in Washoe County, my plan will reduce the cost of rent for everyone. An independent analysis found that my plan would reduce rental costs by 10 percent over the next t10 years. And because my plan invests in housing construction and rehabilitation, it would create 1.5 million new jobs.

My bill also makes additional targeted investments in communities that desperately need it. It invests half a billion dollars in rural housing programs. It invests $2.5 billion in the Indian Housing Block Grant and the Native Hawaiian Housing Block Grant to build or rehab 200,000 homes on tribal land. And it invests $4 billion in a new Middle-Class Housing Emergency Fund, which will support the construction of new housing catering to middle-class renters in communities with severe housing supply shortages.

Planetizen is not endorsing Warren's candidacy for president, but continuing an ongoing effort to highlight the position of housing policy in the upcoming presidential election. Previous posts have focused on the campaign platforms of Senators Kamala Harris (D-California) and Corey Booker (D-New Jersey).

• How the Next President Might Take on the Housing Crisis
• Democratic Presidential Contenders May Elevate Housing Policy
• Debating a Renters' Tax Credit at the Federal Level

Planetizen has been closely monitoring federal housing policy under the Trump administration, mostly organized under the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development tag.