A balanced, comprehensive housing policy requires pulling a variety of levers simultaneously to address the broad range of housing needs and challenges facing low and moderate income families. This means ensuring that both rental housing and home ownership opportunities are: 1) available, decent and safe, and 2) affordable to all families regardless of income. A balanced housing policy means ensuring that both rental housing and home ownership become synonymous with economic security, safe and stable communities, access to quality jobs, schools and services, and wealth building.

A balanced housing policy involves investing in people just as much as we invest in property. That means developing strategies that address housing needs from the income side, by improving the economic capacity of families so that they are able to climb up the housing ladder, including to homeownership if it is appropriate. If incomes are insufficient, it means providing adequate supplemental supports, such as health insurance and child care, to enable families to become economically self-sufficient. Emphasizing one housing option — homeownership — at the expense of other options does not work for all people, at every point in their lives, at all times in an economic cycle and in all communities across the country.