Washington’s plan to ease the housing crisis

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

**Vincent Reina** (0:21)
We've seen a real loss of those lower costs, rental units of those entry point homes, of those middle price homes. We need that production really to happen across the scale.

**Chris Bentley** (0:32)
A bipartisan bill to bring down the costs of housing passed nearly unanimously in the Senate. What will it do to make housing more affordable?
It's Tuesday, June 23rd, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.
Today on the show, a punishing heat wave sweeps Europe. We'll look at what the continent has learned since the 2003 heat wave that killed tens of thousands of people there. And religious freedom is back before the Supreme Court. Today, the justice has ruled against a Rastafarian man who had his dreadlocks forcibly shaved by prison guards.

**Paul Butler** (1:22)
So you could say it's about race, or you could say that it's about hostility from the majority to prisoners suing about their own conditions of confinement.

**Chris Bentley** (1:38)
More on that in about 15 minutes.
But first, America has a housing crisis. There are not enough homes, and those that are available are not affordable to everyone who wants one. Housing prices and rents have risen much faster than incomes, and the pace of building just hasn't kept up with demand. Americans know this. A recent Gallup poll found the share of Americans who expect to buy a home within five years has dropped to 25 percent, the lowest they've measured since they began asking that question in 2013
And while many of the fixes for America's housing crisis will have to be local, this week Congress took a federal step toward addressing the problem. Here's how Senator Elizabeth Warren described the bill that she co-sponsored.

**Elizabeth Warren** (2:22)
The bill we're passing today sends a clear message to every American struggling to find a place they can afford. Elected leaders understand the problem and are actually doing something to try to solve it.

**Chris Bentley** (2:38)
That bill now heads to the House of Representatives.
For more on what's in the bill, we called up Vincent Reina, Professor of Urban Economics and Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. He told Peter O'Dowd, he agrees with Senator Warren, that it's the most significant federal housing legislation in decades.

**Vincent Reina** (2:55)
Yeah, this is quite a comprehensive set of legislation. I mean, there are well over 40 provisions in this legislation. It really pulls together actually kind of a whole bunch of bills and ideas that people have been proposing for quite some time and have on their own actually had bipartisan support often and kind of brought them together to one big comprehensive bill.

**Peter O'Dowd** (3:16)
Let's tick through some of the key provisions here in this bill. The biggest one, the one that's getting the most headlines, would limit large institutional investors from owning more than 350 single family homes. Senator Tim Scott is a Republican. Here's how he put it yesterday.

**Tim Scott** (3:32)
Houses should be for people and not for corporations.

**Peter O'Dowd** (3:37)
Okay, that echoes almost verbatim what we've heard from President Trump in the past, do you think it's good policy?

**Vincent Reina** (3:43)
Look, there's a legitimate concern that banks and firms have access to cheaper capital and economies of scale that the everyday purchaser or renter does not have access to. So by virtue of that alone, they are going to be able to outcompete folks and essentially acquire properties that could have been a first time home purchase for someone and potentially charge rents that are at market or even above market. The reality is though that banning those investors from those purchases on its own doesn't necessarily solve the problem, right? We need people to be able to access capital to purchase homes. We need capital to actually go into repairing those homes. So all to say is that the concern about being outcompeted is legitimate, but we also have to pair that with a broader sense of programs and opportunities for folks to actually be able to then access high quality homes.

**Peter O'Dowd** (4:34)
I was in Nevada earlier this year reporting on an effort there. It was a state effort at the legislature to limit corporate ownership.
Economists in Nevada weren't convinced that it would bring down prices because it actually might stop investors from building new houses. The most important thing here, they say, is adding more supply to the housing market. What do you think about that?