Congress passed the most comprehensive housing bill in decades. Housing expert Vincent Reina of the University of Pennsylvania talks about the effort to make housing more affordable.
DON GONYEA, HOST:
Congress has passed the biggest housing bill in decades. President Trump has said he won’t sign it unless Congress first passes an unrelated voter ID measure. But today, House Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News he’s confident the president will sign the bill as early as tomorrow.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “SUNDAY MORING FUTURES”)
MIKE JOHNSON: I’m going to send the bill over to him. It’s passed by both chambers. I’m sending it to him on Monday, and it will become law. And I certainly want him to take the biggest, boldest marker that he has and do that big Trump signature proudly on that legislation.
GONYEA: If it does become law, what will it actually change? We called up Vincent Reina, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Housing Initiative at Penn, a housing policy research group. We started by talking about what’s in this bill.
VINCENT REINA: What this bill does is it really brings together essentially 40 different proposals that have been out there for a while and lumps them all together. There’s a few kind of fairly significant changes. One is just thinking about how to make it easier to build housing and maybe reducing federal and local regulations that make it harder to build and by virtue of making it harder to build make it more costly to build.
A good example of this is in the manufactured housing space. There’s a rule that manufactured housing has to be built on a chassis. So that’s a federal regulation that essentially doesn’t make much sense in modern times, especially as standards has increased around manufactured housing and what that actually means for their quality.
Another example is a supply fund where they’re essentially trying to create incentives for state and local governments to make it easier to build. So what they said is, essentially, we’ll reward you with financial resources from the federal government if you show us that what you’ve done is made kind of proactive efforts to actually make it easier to build housing in your locality.
GONYEA: If you’re a person who’s struggling to find a home you can afford in, say, California, it seems like that is a very different experience there than maybe doing so in Ohio or Mississippi. But I guess what I’m wondering is do they actually share common problems despite the differences in the markets?
REINA: One of the realities is that we could all have a housing problem, but it takes on different forms, right? So in some markets, like in Philadelphia, there are actually a lot of challenges around housing quality and home repair needs. Whereas in another market, I could just be paying an exorbitant amount of money towards my rent. Maybe it’s a high-quality unit, but there’s no option for me to actually find a cheaper unit.
So all to say is, I think, in some ways, what’s really interesting is when you look at the affordability and the quality challenges, you see the kind of housing challenges people facing take on slightly different forms across markets but still being quite significant. And the reality is, you know, we use a lot of measures like housing cost burdens. And they’re clearly really important measures, but they’re kind of one piece of the puzzle. For someone who’s low-income, even if they’re slightly below being housing cost burden, they still don’t have much income to spend on all other goods.
GONYEA: What’s the next conversation about housing that lawmakers aren’t having yet?
REINA: At the core of this, we have a housing affordability problem – right? – which is distinctly related to the housing supply problem. But when we think of solutions, we really have to center the affordability issues. As we’re kind of talking about bills that could make it easier to build, we actually need appropriations that come along and provide subsidies and supports for people to actually be able to afford housing, right? So building actually reduces price pressure, but when we see a wholesale loss of our affordable housing stock across kind of the ownership and the renter side, we need to think about building for the low- and moderate-income households, and that inherently involves some level of subsidy.
And then beyond that, you need, really, government agencies that are actively thinking about program development and both have the capacity and ability – both kind of staff-wise and financially – to develop these programs and deliver them properly.
GONYEA: Vincent Reina is a city and regional planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Thanks for helping explain this to us.
REINA: Thank you for covering this important topic, Don.
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