How America is About to Build More Housing

Описание: I took to the Senate floor to implore my colleagues to pass the first comprehensive, bipartisan housing package in nearly 30 years.

We know that without a safe, stable, affordable place to call home, nothing in life works. Not your job, not your family, not your education, and not your health. That’s because a home has more than just four walls and a roof. It’s a source of stability and comfort. It gives you the freedom and opportunity to build the life you want. But this idea of home is out of reach for far too many people. Every day, Americans are trying to figure out how to afford their lives. And millions – across urban and rural parts of this country – have a hard time affording their rent or buying a home.

One of the most significant aspects of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is the bipartisan Rural Housing Service Reform Act that I wrote with Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD). It will help preserve almost 400,000 affordable rental units across the country in small towns and rural places. Often these buildings are the only affordable place to call home in these rural communities.

What are these properties? Most of them were built in the 1960s with federal mortgages to help finance the creation of affordable rental units across the country. This has allowed for hundreds of thousands of Americans to live where they work, live where they want, and to age in place with dignity and respect.

But now as these mortgages start to mature, the units start to age out of that program. Without reforms, that means in some select cases, the properties would get torn down altogether, or in most cases stop being affordable. Our bill preserves the affordability of hundreds of thousands of units across rural America so that the people living in these communities, often our elders on fixed incomes, don't lose their homes. This is a trusted, existing strategy for expanding access to affordable housing in rural communities that is in desperate need of modernization and improvements so it can work well.

Pass the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act.