Democrats’ Housing Ideas Take Center Stage After Election Rout

After a decade of Trump-dominiated politics, Republicans suffered a generational wipeout on Tuesday after rising costs compelled Americans to vote them out of power.

By early Wednesday morning, Democrats achieved the unthinkable, flipping seats in deep-red parts of the South, the Midwest and the Great Plains to seize both houses of Congress. As of 2 p.m., Democrats were on track to hold their largest majority since the 2008 election. In the Senate, Democrats controlled 54 seats so far, adding seven while emerging slightly ahead in two too-close-to-call races in Alaska and Mississippi.

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who will likely lead the Senate next year, called the results a “generational remake of the Senate majority” and told reporters the first thing he would do is “reduce people’s costs and work the legislative process so it does.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is in position to become the first Black House speaker in the nation’s history, said his party’s mission will be to lower the cost of living instead of prioritizing retribution against Republicans.

“We made clear that we’re fighting for an affordable America and explicitly promised the American people that we would fight hard to lower the high costs of groceries, gas and housing,” Jeffries, whose district encompasses a lot of Brooklyn, told MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday. “Hardworking American taxpayers who are working hard and playing by the rules should be able to live an affordable life.”

President Donald Trump promised to reduce the cost of living while taming inflation when he ran two years ago. Instead, prices rose. Nearly half of Americans at the start of this year did not have the resources to cover their basic expenses and meet their needs, according to an Urban Institute study. Researchers also found that the prices of child care and rent have risen more quickly than household earnings over the past decade, and that concerns about affordability have spread beyond expensive cities into lower-cost metropolitan regions.

“Americans feel like prices are more expensive than ever for their daily needs. I think voters are reacting to that reality,” Yonah Freemark, a research associate in the Urban Institute’s housing division, told Commercial Observer. “If you get housing costs down, their overall cost of living can come down.”

Voters made their concerns clear for months. Four out of 10 Americans who cast their ballots said the economy was the most important issue in the election, while three-quarters of them described the economy as “not so good” or “poor,” according to the AP Voter Poll conducted just before the midterms. 

Now it will be up to Democrats to tackle housing costs, the largest expense for most American families, and get the president on board.  

“Washington can’t solve New York’s housing shortage on its own, but it can make housing dramatically easier to finance, approve and build,” said James Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York. “Congress should reward production, expand the capital available for affordable housing, remove unnecessary federal barriers and ensure that the programs it has already authorized are actually funded.”

Congressional leaders could end up taking two approaches that build on the ROAD to Housing Act that became law over the summer despite the president’s refusal to sign it. 

California Rep. Maxine Waters, who will likely chair the House Financial Services Committee, called for a $1 trillion investment in federal housing programs during a town hall in Los Angeles last month. She emphasized the new spending would be aimed toward reducing homelessness, expanding assistance for low-income homeowners, repairing existing homes, maintaining public housing properties, and financing small mortgages.

Some of that funding could restore Trump administration staffing cuts at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as well as cuts to federal rental assistance programs such as emergency housing vouchers and Section 8, which help low-income tenants pay their rent and landlords operate their buildings.

Erin Burns-Maine, chief strategy officer of the Community Preservation Corporation, said that recent proposals to put time limits on households receiving Section 8 should not advance in the new Congress. Instead, Congress should fund Section 8 well enough to signal its stability to the lending industry.

“Spending programs especially follow our values, and Section 8 is one of the programs that works by leveraging private dollars for public housing,” Burns-Maine said. “If you’re a lender and you have a voucher program on shaky footing, it’s much harder to underwrite permanent debt.”

Other ideas are even more ambitious. Members could take another look at Bronx Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Homes Act. That would establish an independent entity within HUD to acquire distressed housing and ensure it remains permanently affordable, at an annual cost of $30 billion. Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman and Illinois Rep. Delia Ramirez have backed efforts giving tenants a federal right to organize. And Queens Congress member-elect Claire Valdez campaigned in her primary this year for national universal rent control to expand rent-stabilization protections to other states.

But legislation that could serve as messaging bills, which only accumulate Democratic votes, could backfire even if the party amasses sizable majorities in both houses. Senate Republicans would be reluctant to pass anything with a $1 trillion price tag, while Trump would be more than happy to exercise his veto power to block a bill with Democratic support.

The incoming class of Democratic Congress members includes several members with backgrounds in affordable housing, including Micah Lasher, Brad Lander and Scott Wiener, who campaigned to reduce housing costs. Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico also said on Wednesday that he wanted to work with the president on legislation that reduces red tape to enable more homebuilding.

“My expectation is that housing is something that people will want to accomplish as opposed to making a policy statement,” said Mike Capuano, a former Massachusetts congressman and senior policy adviser at the lobbying firm Venable. “Everybody coming to Congress has good ideas. My hope is they don’t let individual great ideas become the be-all and end-all where they think, ‘If I don’t get what I want, we’re not going to have a bill.’”

Some national housing leaders have already been discussing what could be included in a ROAD 2.0 legislative package that would achieve bipartisan support. 

Nonprofit housing groups are floating programs that increase the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to issue longer-term construction loans for multifamily developments, accelerate the depreciation schedule for housing investment in new construction projects, and expand home-repair pilot programs allowing homeowners to afford necessary but expensive upgrades. 

“America’s homes are the oldest they’ve ever been and are falling apart,” said Ruthy Gourevitch, housing policy director at the Climate and Community Institute. “At the state level, there have been successful bipartisan efforts for passing legislation that combine basic home repairs with resiliency upgrades. It’s high time for both parties to work on this.”

Paul Williams, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Center for Public Enterprise, believes Congress should prioritize policies that increase new home construction, which will be most effective toward lowering the costs for the most people.

“Until the housing starts line goes up a lot, the problem is not solved,” Williams said. “We need to focus on outcomes — that is, what policy change can they do to make the line go up?”