Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Mr. REED. Madam President, today, I am introducing the Affordable Housing and Homeownership Protection Act with Senators Smith, Gillibrand, Blumenthal, Klobuchar, Fetterman, and Baldwin. Our bill would provide up to $50 billion to help build and preserve approximately 3 million units of affordable housing and would be fully paid for through a transfer tax on investors who acquire and hold more than 15 single-family homes.

Driven by a shortage of as many as 6.8 million homes nationwide, home prices have surged 39 percent and rents 31 percent over the last 4 years, according the National Association of Realtors and Zillow. Higher rents and fewer opportunities for home ownership are devastating for millions of families. As housing costs skyrocket, more households are priced out of home ownership, while renters have less to spend on food, clothing, and other everyday necessities.

Low-income Americans are particularly strained. The National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates that 73 percent of extremely low- income households spend more than half their income on housing. Unsurprisingly, homelessness has risen in line with housing prices and is up 15 percent since 2019.

Unfortunately, Federal investments in low-income housing are insufficient to solve this affordability crisis. Indeed, researchers at Harvard University found that the three largest Federal housing programs serve nearly 300,000 fewer households today than they did 20 years ago, while approximately 25 percent more households are eligible but can't get aid.

At the same time, investors are buying a greater share of single- family homes sold each year--many of which they hold as rentals-- preventing more families from reaching home ownership and often driving up rents. Most households cannot compete with the largest investors, who are typically private equity and other institutional investors. That is because large investors can use their financial might to make all-cash offers, waive, contingencies, and provide other concessions that individual buyers simply cannot match. Through last October, more than one out of every four single-family homes sold in 2023 were bought by investors, not hard-working households--a 69-percent increase from investors' prepandemic share of home purchases.

Our Affordable Housing and Homeownership Protection Act would tackle both our affordable housing crisis and institutional investors who crowd out families in the housing market. It would raise $50 billion by taxing investors who purchase large numbers of single-family homes, with higher tax rates for the largest investors. Revenue would be split between the Housing Trust Fund, HTF, and Capital Magnet Fund, CMF, to help build and rehab over 300,000 rental units for extremely low-income Americans through HTF grants and help finance 2.7 million homes for low-income families via CMF, which leverages private investments.

In other words, our bill would help build and rehabilitate millions of homes for American families and boost households competing to buy homes with deep-pocketed investors, all without raising the deficit. This is a commonsense, fair proposal that tackles perhaps our Nation's biggest challenge.

I thank the bill's endorsers--the National Low Income Housing Coalition, National Housing Law Project, National Consumer Law Center on behalf of its low-income clients, National Housing Resource Center, Americans for Financial Reform, and Consumer Action--and urge my colleagues to support this important legislation.

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