Housing Crisis Response Act of 2023
The Housing Crisis Response Act of 2023 would provide more than $150 billion in fair and affordable housing investments, representing the single largest investment in affordable housing in our nation’s history. These funds would create nearly 1.4 million affordable and accessible homes, help 294,000 households afford their rent, and address the racial wealth gap through the first-ever national investment in homeownership for first-time, first-generation homebuyers. This bill is similar to the housing title of the Build Back Better Act, which the House passed last Congress.
Our nation is in the midst of a worsening affordable housing crisis. U.S. renters are now paying more than 30% of their income on rent—the highest cost-burden level in at least 20 years. Over the last three years, single-family home prices have skyrocketed by 40%—reaching historic highs and pushing the dream of homeownership further out of reach for millions of families across the country.
With households increasingly unable to keep up with rising housing costs, the risk of evictions and foreclosures threatens to push more families into homelessness. Currently, over 582,500 individuals are experiencing homelessness each night in the U.S., with some of the fastest-growing rates in rural America. The undersupply of fair and affordable housing is a primary driver of these increasing housing costs, which are, in turn, playing a major role in driving up overall inflation.
In fact, today, there is no state in the U.S. that has an adequate supply of affordable housing for the lowest-income renters. There is a nationwide shortage of nearly 14 million rental housing units for rent and purchase. Our public housing stock, which houses over 1.6 million people and has an estimated capital needs backlog of $70 billion, is also in dire need of investment to ensure that it can continue to provide safe and decent living conditions for the families who live there. In March 2023, housing made up half of annual CPI inflation.
Neglecting the worsening housing and homelessness crises not only hurts families and communities, but it is a lost opportunity to create jobs, boost our economy, and reduce inflation. According to the National Association of Home Builders, building 2,000 homes for rent and purchase generates nearly 4,200 jobs and over $166 million in state, local, and federal taxes and revenue.
This bill would address our nation’s affordable housing crisis, and chronic undersupply of housing, and bolster an equitable economy by providing over $150 billion in critical investments to support public housing, the creation and preservation of affordable and accessible housing, equitable community development, and expand homeownership opportunities. In addition, the bill includes provisions to improve equitable planning and development processes that affirmatively advance fair housing, including requiring grantees to report on fair housing outcomes and increasing housing accessibility requirements. This legislation would make the investments needed to increase the housing supply, decrease housing costs, end homelessness, and create jobs across the country. Here is a brief breakdown of the bill.
The bill provides $24 billion to fund Housing Choice Vouchers and supportive services, $7.1 billion of which is provided to serve people experiencing or at risk of homelessness or survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking. This is the largest one-time expansion of the Housing Choice Voucher program since its creation in 1974 and is expected to help more than 260,000 families over the next eight years.
The bill provides $1 billion for the first new project-based rental assistance contracts since 1983, providing 7,000 housing units that will be affordable to extremely low-income renters. The bill includes $65 billion to repair the nation’s public housing, preserving and improving over 500,000 public housing units, making public housing safer and healthier for millions of residents. The bill provides $1.6 billion to revitalize multifamily properties, improving 21,000 severely distressed assisted housing units.
Also Read: Housing Crisis in Australia