Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Alex Padilla (D-CA) sent a letter to congressional leadership on April 6 calling for the inclusion of robust housing investments in any future budget reconciliation package. The letter urges leadership to ensure that the targeted housing investments in the House-passed “Build Back Better Act” remain in any future reconciliation bill.
In the letter, Senators Feinstein and Padilla emphasize that the affordable housing and homelessness crises existed before the pandemic. The senators also express concern about the potential for a rise in homelessness when emergency rental assistance funding is spent and eviction moratoriums are lifted. “The lack of affordable housing is a key driver of the homelessness crisis in California and nationwide, largely resulting from the high cost of construction and slow pace of building new affordable housing units,” write Senators Feinstein and Padilla. “That is why we worked to make sure that the House-passed ‘Build Back Better Act’ included much-needed investments in addressing these challenges.”
Senators Feinstein and Padilla request that any revised version of the Build Back Better Act include $25 billion for affordable and accessible housing production, including $15 billion for the national Housing Trust Fund; an expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit; $25 billion for housing vouchers; and $65 billion for public housing repairs.
The housing investments proposed in last year’s Build Back Better Act, passed by the House in November 2021, called for $150 billion to address the country’s growing affordable housing crisis. Since stalling in the Senate, President Biden and congressional Democrats are plotting a path forward to enacting a significantly scaled-down reconciliation bill. As the new reconciliation package begins to take shape, it is crucial that advocates continue to contact their members of Congress to urge them to retain historic, targeted investments in affordable housing in any reconciliation package, including:
- $25 billion to expand housing vouchers to more than 300,000 households.
- $65 billion to preserve public housing for its 2 million residents.
- $15 billion for the national Housing Trust Fund to build, preserve, and operate more than 150,000 units of affordable, accessible homes for households with the lowest incomes.
Read the letter at: https://bit.ly/3DR8AcV