[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 126 (Wednesday, July 23, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4601-S4602]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                Housing

  Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, when it comes to one of the most basic 
necessities in life for people--housing--both political parties have 
failed. Both political parties have failed.
  Housing costs more than ever today, with the median home costing five 
times as much as the median income for your average American. First-
time home buyers are fewer and older than ever. One in four renters is 
being forced to spend more than half of their income on rent, and 
homelessness is plaguing more people than ever before.
  This crisis was not inevitable; it is a problem that the government 
has created. There is not enough housing in this country because we 
have made it virtually impossible to build housing. Ask anyone who has 
tried to build anything--a shed, a patio, an accessory dwelling unit 
for their in-laws. They will tell you that the moment you try to do 
something, there are endless procedural hurdles and regulatory barriers 
that immediately get in the way--exclusionary zoning; minimum lot 
sizes; height restrictions; requirements for multiple staircases; 
environmental reviews; dozens of public meetings, where the grouchiest 
people in your neighborhood can stop the most virtuous project in your 
neighborhood; extensive permitting paperwork; years-long battles with 
community organizations and boards. And if you want to expedite your 
permit, you can pay a permit expediter. If you have 10 grand, they will 
put your thing on the top of the pile.
  Nobody should like this system.
  I cannot think of something so essential to American life--housing, 
whether you rent or you want to own--so essential to American life 
where the government has created the shortage on purpose, and then it 
strokes its chin, confused as to why there is a shortage. There is a 
shortage because of us. There is a shortage because of the government 
itself making it hard to construct the thing we all say we want.
  But the good news is this: If the government got us into this mess in 
the first place, it can help to get us out. Mainly, that means getting 
out of our own way and not preventing the very things we say we like.
  A lot of progressives in my own party like to say ``We are for 
housing. We are for clean energy. We are for transit and 
infrastructure,'' but you can't be for something if you don't want it 
near you. If you are for housing, you have to see the housing. If you 
are for clean energy, you are going to see a windmill or wind farm or a 
nuclear powerplant somewhere.
  As we envision a just and sustainable and wealthy country, we have to 
actually make the things that make us more sustainable and wealthy. 
There is nothing progressive about preventing a nurse or a firefighter 
or a teacher or a small business owner from actually living in the 
community in which they work. There is nothing progressive about making 
people drive an hour to work or, in Hawaii, forcing people to leave the 
State.
  Lawn sizes and building heights don't make neighborhoods; people do. 
Yet you will often hear people who oppose new housing say things like: 
We want to preserve the unique character of the neighborhood.
  And this is something that I am embarrassed to say I didn't know 
until I came to the U.S. Senate. I didn't understand what those words 
mean and where they came from. They are echoing a dark time in American 
history of the Jim Crow era. It was a time when communities 
specifically codified into law language that prohibited Black people 
and other racial minorities from moving into certain neighborhoods. The 
racial covenants would literally say:

       No lot covered by this indenture, or any part thereof, 
     shall ever be sold, resold, conveyed, granted, devised, 
     leased or rented to or occupied by, or in any other way used 
     by, any person or persons not of the Caucasian Race.

  That is from a covenant in St. Louis from 1949. And there were 
contracts just like that one in neighborhoods all across the country. 
Then, racial covenants were outlawed, but their legacy continues today 
because what happened was the racists, after this was outlawed, figured 
out a proxy for race. They figured out a way to keep people separated, 
figured out a way to keep people out of their neighborhoods, figured 
out a way to make housing more constrained. And that is exclusionary 
zoning. That is minimum lot sizes. That means you need interior 
staircases. All of these things that sound virtuous--safety, 
sanitation, environmental review, historic preservation--all of those 
things actually matter, but understand that they are being weaponized 
against the working class. They are being weaponized against the 
working class.
  I am not sure if this is permissible under the rules, but I am 
looking at a bunch of Senate pages, all 16 years old, trying to figure 
out: Where am I going to live when I get a job? Do I have to live with 
my folks and for how long? Am I going to be able to move to a suburb or 
a city or stay in my hometown? Where am I going to live?
  So how do we fix it? First of all, government has a role that is not 
just getting out of the way. On the financing

[[Page S4602]]

side, on the public housing stock side, on vouchers, on section 8, on 
HUD-VASH, there are lots of programs that work--on the low-income 
housing tax rate. There are a lot of government things that we do that 
have helped and can help more.
  But the truth is that the throughput capacity of the system is being 
constrained by the government itself. We could allocate $3 trillion to 
affordable housing, and if it is still hard to build a house in an 
individual neighborhood, all that money would get stuck. Actually, the 
State of California tried that. They allocated an enormous amount of 
money to housing, and they didn't get very much built.
  The county of Maui, many years ago, said: No new housing unless it is 
affordable--which kind of lands on the ears in a wonderful way, right? 
No new housing unless it is affordable. Do you know what happened? 
There was no new housing at all for a full decade.

  So we just have to embrace, on the left--the reason I care about this 
is because I think it is the single most impactful economic policy that 
we could implement, to make it easier to build housing for working 
people, for students, for the disabled, for the elderly, for the 
entrepreneurs, for cities, for towns, for rural neighborhoods. This is 
important because I care about that.
  Now, if you are a conservative, the basic principle is almost even 
more simple, which is: It is your damn property. You should be 
permitted to do what you want with your property within certain safety 
boundaries and all the rest of it.
  But if it is your property and you have a quarter of an acre and you 
want to build an accessory dwelling unit for your kids because they are 
adults and they just had a baby, you should be allowed to do pretty 
much whatever you want with your property. But we have inverted the 
presumption so that it is your neighbors that get to decide what you 
get to do with your property.
  So if you are a private property rights person, you should love the 
idea of deregulating the housing market. If you are a progressive and 
you see how much people are struggling right now, you should love the 
idea of deregulating the housing market.
  We need to reform land-use laws for upzoning to allow higher density, 
reducing minimum lot sizes, deploying manufactured homes, enabling 
single-room occupancy development wherever multifamily housing is 
allowed. We know all this works because it is working in certain 
places.
  It is hard to keep any issue out of the partisan crossfire. It really 
is. It is hard to keep anything out of the partisan crossfire. Everyone 
retreats to their own corner and starts talking past each other and 
trying to light the algorithm on fire.
  Our ability to come together, use common sense, and find a way 
forward will affect how people live and succeed for generations to 
come.
  Just this week, Senator Banks and I introduced legislation to 
incentivize local governments to build more housing near federally 
funded transit projects. Senator Young and I introduced the YIMBY Act, 
the Yes in My Backyard Act, which encourages localities to cut onerous 
regulations and adopt pro-housing policies.
  We can and we do disagree about almost everything, but on this, we 
should all be able to agree that in the richest country in the history 
of the world, people should not have to worry about having a roof over 
their heads. We can fix this, and we must.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.