[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 182 (Wednesday, November 8, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7080-S7081]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           Affordable Housing

  Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I rise to talk about the affordable 
housing crisis that is gripping our Nation. When I say ``crisis,'' I 
mean I know that people here are on the precipice of talking about what 
we are going to do in response to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma and Maria, 
and I would like to say, the housing crisis that will exist in the 
aftermath of those hurricanes is real, but there are also even greater 
implications from the housing crisis that exist today without those 
hurricanes, and it is only going to continue to grow and get worse 
until we deal with it.
  This past February, more than 2,000 families packed into the New 
Holly Gathering Hall in South Seattle. Each family was hoping to hear 
its name called. It wasn't a contest. It wasn't a game. It wasn't the 
lottery. It was a lottery to see if families could get affordable 
homes.
  The Mercy Othello Plaza would soon open 108 affordable housing units. 
That is hardly a match for the more than 2,000 families who were 
interested in trying to get into one of those affordable units. Based 
on the numbers alone, their chance of getting an affordable home was 
lower than an applicant's chance of getting into Harvard.
  Ninety-five percent of the families attending that night left 
disappointed, continuing to search for affordable housing. This is just 
one story of how the affordable housing crisis is gripping our Nation. 
I am sure every one of my colleagues in the Senate could talk about a 
story they have heard in their State because this crisis impacts every 
State. It impacts every community, both urban and rural alike.
  As I have traveled across the State of Washington, I have seen some 
of the most hard-hit areas for affordable housing. I even have veterans 
returning home not being able to find affordable housing. I have seen 
an aging population living longer and also not having the resources 
when looking for affordable housing. I have seen young workers who want 
to be close to where their employment is and yet having to drive so far 
away because that is the only place they could find affordable housing. 
We have seen homelessness in numbers that harken back to previous days 
when we had a true recession.
  The most damning part of the housing crisis is, we know how to solve 
it. We just need the courage to act.
  For decades, the housing growth was the most stimulative part of our 
economy. Throughout the 1980s, housing was 18 percent of GDP. Today 
that number has dropped to just 15 percent. When people discuss tax 
reform and GDP growth, housing is still one of the ways that economists 
will tell us that we can grow GDP.
  In the sixties, seventies, and eighties, if somebody asked, How do we 
stimulate our economy, usually a cheer would go up for housing, but 
since the economic downturn, we haven't heard that cheer. In fact, it 
is almost as if we have forgotten how stimulative housing is to our 
economy.
  The total number of houses built between 2007 and 2016 total just 8.9 
million units, which is far below the 15 million-plus average for every 
10-year period through the seventies and nineties. We are off the pace 
of what it takes to provide affordable housing. As a result, the 
vacancy rates and inventories of homes for sale have also fallen. The 
national vacancy rate--which is the number of homes for sale--has 
receded to the 2000 level, erasing all the runup we saw in the housing 
boom. Moreover, homeownership in the United States is now at its lowest 
rate since the 1960s.
  Twenty million American families, including 11 million renters, are 
now spending more than half of their income on housing. That means less 
money for other essentials like food and healthcare and gas.
  The National Low Income Housing Coalition tells us that 7.4 million 
more available affordable homes are needed because we have seen an 
increase of 60 percent since the year 2000 in the need for affordable 
housing.
  So the United States has become a rent-burdened economy. If we don't 
address this crisis, the problem is only going to get worse. In fact, 
one study found that if we don't address this crisis, we are going to 
see another 25-percent increase in the number of Americans spending 
more than half of their income in rent.
  I know my colleagues on the other side of the aisle in the House of 
Representatives are talking about what they want to do in tax reform. I 
would say they should look at this data as it relates to where we are 
with homeownership and housing and things that would eliminate the 
private activity bonds--one of the key drivers of affordable housing 
production. It would be a big mistake if they got rid of that. 
Obviously, there are units of affordable housing that are being planned 
and built right now. In fact, one estimate is that over 1,000,000 units 
wouldn't be completed just because of the House provision.
  Obviously, limiting the mortgage interest deduction for new 
homeowners could potentially increase taxes on homeowners and thereby 
limit the number of people who could afford a home. Almost one-third of 
taxpayers nationally claim the property tax deductions. They could also 
see an impact to that. I hope our House colleagues and our Senate 
colleagues will see, in light of the housing crisis, what a terrible 
idea those things are.
  How did we get to this crisis as it exists now? Part of the issue was 
demand. For starters, the 2007 housing crash pushed millions of 
families into the rental market and reduced wages on working families. 
The demand for rental housing skyrocketed.
  Over 7 million Americans lost their homes to foreclosure, and they 
demanded more affordable places to live. Today the homeownership rate 
is the lowest in our Nation since the 1960s. The last 10 years have 
seen the largest gain of renters on record. The demand for rental 
housing shows no sign of slowing down.
  Millennials, like many of the young people we see who want to be 
close to jobs in our burgeoning economy, are forced to rent instead of 
own. They are seeing that challenged, in big numbers, by the fact that 
there is not enough supply.

[[Page S7081]]

  At the same time demand was going up from returning veterans, from 
aging seniors, from workplace needs, from many more people needing 
affordable housing after being pushed out of the homeownership market--
at the same time demand was going up, supply failed to keep pace. 
Affordable housing stock is being, and was being, converted to market 
rate-based units. That means they got taken out of the affordability 
framework.
  A new report found that the number of apartments being deemed 
affordable for low-income families dropped 60 percent over the last 6 
years.
  With all this pressure and demand of people falling out of home and 
back into the market and pushing things down, we saw so many units that 
were affordable units get transferred over to market-based rates and 
thereby losing supply.
  The new production of affordable housing has not filled the gap, and 
production of affordable housing is at its lowest 10-year production 
rate on record since 1974. It, too, has played a role in this problem.
  The combination of increased demand and lack of production has caused 
the explosion in our affordable housing crisis. The number of Americans 
facing extreme unaffordability--that means they are paying more than 50 
percent--has gone from 7 million Americans to 11.2 million Americans. 
That is a 60-percent increase in the number of people in the United 
States who are in this area of extremely unaffordable rates for 
housing.
  While I know we are going to discuss natural disasters and helping 
communities recover--everywhere from the families who have been 
impacted in Florida, in Texas, and various places--we also have to look 
at the issue of affordable housing everywhere from Seattle and Portland 
and San Francisco to all the way across the country, to Philadelphia 
and Miami and many other places.
  In the aftermath of Katrina, Congress passed an expansion of the low-
income housing tax credit, and it built 28,000 affordable units on the 
gulf. I know my colleagues will want to do something similar for Texas 
and the Gulf States to make sure we are doing something, but we need to 
understand that at the time of Katrina, there was a need due to more 
than 275,000 homes destroyed by that hurricane. Building 28,000 units 
was barely a blip.
  The low-income housing tax credit helped rebuild some units, but it 
came nowhere close to solving the housing crisis in New Orleans. Market 
rates in New Orleans are 35 percent higher after the storm, and 37 
percent of households are paying more than half of their income in 
housing. Now, 12 years later, another disaster has hit, and we are 
going to try to address this crisis, but the housing burden for 
extremely low-income families in Texas and the major metro areas of 
Texas is among some of the worst in the Nation. That was before the 
crisis. Before the actual impact of hurricanes, Texas was already at a 
crisis point.
  Texas has only 29 affordable units for every 100 low-income 
households looking for those options. Houston is the third worst in the 
country for housing availability for extremely low-income people. Now 
families from Florida to Puerto Rico are going to also be finding a 
very difficult situation.
  Expanding the tax credit could help, but we have to do more than just 
expand the tax credit for those disaster States. We need a very big 
systematic investment in affordable housing all across the United 
States, and expanding the low-income housing tax credit is one way to 
do that. The good news is, we have good bipartisan support for the low-
income housing tax credit enacted in 1986. It helped build 3 million 
rental units across this country over the last 30 years. If you want to 
make a dent in this crisis, both in response to the hurricanes and the 
crisis that already existed, we need to begin filling that gap by 
increasing the credit.
  That is why I joined Senator Hatch in introducing the Affordable 
Housing Tax Credit Improvement Act, something that would help us build 
hundreds of thousands of new units in the next 10 years. I am glad 
Senators Wyden, Portman, Sullivan, Merkley, Scott, Bennet, Collins, 
Kaine, Heller, Leahy, Shaheen, Murray, Schumer, Murkowski, Young, 
Graham, Schatz, Booker, Hassan, Isakson, and Sanders are all 
supporters.
  We have good, bipartisan support from people who understand that this 
crisis is real and that it is only going to grow. But we also know that 
the additional tax credit would create almost 450,000 new jobs over the 
next 10 years. That is because housing is stimulative to the economy. 
Construction alone supports over 2 million jobs. And it helps by making 
sure that the economic impact to GDP is realized now through this 
investment.
  It also helps us save money as an economy and a country by putting a 
roof over people's heads. One of the reasons I was so excited to work 
with Senator Hatch on this was because in his home State of Utah, they 
made such great progress in dealing with their homeless veteran 
population. The community decided that by putting a roof over someone's 
head, they actually helped lower overall costs. One study found that 
placing people in affordable housing lowered Federal Medicaid 
expenditures by an average of 12 percent, and a University of 
Pennsylvania study found that taxpayers could save $16,000 per homeless 
person who was placed in affordable housing.
  So we need to act. We need to realize that housing provides an 
investment in job creation and has historically contributed between 2 
to 4 percent of GDP growth since the 1980s; that it is an underpinning 
of our economy; and that we need to make sure that our Tax Code works 
and make sure that people are purchasing homes as well as finding 
affordable housing.
  As our colleagues deal with the end-of-the-year policy issues and 
deal with our response to these storms, I hope we will realize that 
this underlying crisis also needs attention. We have worked on a 
bipartisan basis in the past to address it, and we can work on a 
bipartisan basis in the future to both stimulate our economy and solve 
these problems.
  Ninety percent of the affordable housing units being built in the 
country use these tax credits, so it is only by extending the tax 
credits, putting a roof over people's heads, that we are going to be 
able to deal with this crisis. The good news is, it helps us save money 
and it helps us with GDP growth.
  I thank the Chair.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Moran). The Senator from Maryland.