Affordable Housing

Stable, dignified housing should be guaranteed for everyone.

Housing in this country has been treated as an investment vehicle for the wealthy rather than as a basic human need. The result is exactly what we see around us: skyrocketing rents, families pushed out of neighborhoods their grandparents helped build, working people priced out of every city they might want to live in, and millions of Americans without homes. 

The main causes of homelessness are stagnant wages, an artificially restricted housing supply, rent collusion among corporate landlords, and insufficient medical and mental health care driven by our for-profit healthcare system. None of these problems are accidents. They are the predictable outcomes of a market that has been designed to extract wealth from working people through one of the most basic necessities of life.

I will fight to build a federal housing policy that treats housing as a human right. That means investing in public housing at scale, protecting tenants from predatory landlords, building new homes priced for working people, and pushing back against the speculation and corporate consolidation that has made this crisis what it is.

The Trump Administration's Attack on Housing

The current administration has used the past year to gut federal housing programs at the worst possible moment. HUD has been targeted for massive staff cuts and budget reductions. Section 8 voucher funding has been threatened when the need for it is greater than ever. Fair Housing Act enforcement has been deprioritized, leaving discrimination claims to languish. Programs supporting unhoused veterans, families, and people with disabilities have been hit by indiscriminate cuts. All of this makes the crisis more severe and it falls the hardest on the most marginalized groups in the country. 

Housing-First Approaches

A housing-first approach is the most effective response to homelessness. The evidence has been clear for years. Without a stable place to live, it is next to impossible to hold down a job, receive medical or mental health treatment, or rebuild community connections. Conditional models that require people to address other issues before being given a home have a long track record of failure. Direct, unconditional access to housing produces better outcomes for less money.

I will fight for substantial federal funding allocated to states for the creation, maintenance, and expansion of public housing for low-income individuals and families. Specifically, I support:

• Restoring and expanding HUD funding so that public housing can actually be built and maintained at the scale this crisis demands. 

• Direct federal investment in social housing that operates outside the speculative private market entirely, with permanent affordability guarantees. 

• Strengthening services connected to housing, including healthcare, mental health treatment, addiction services, and employment support, building on the proven housing-first model. 

• Repeal of the Faircloth Amendment, which has artificially capped public housing construction since 1998 and is one of the single biggest legal obstacles to actually solving the affordability crisis.

Financial Aid for Hardship

When someone loses a job, an unexpected medical bill arrives, or an emergency strikes, it can threaten an entire family's housing in a matter of weeks. Unemployment assistance is vital and  we also need short-to-medium-term financial aid available specifically for rent, mortgage payments, security deposits, and utility bills. These programs should help people keep the homes they already have rather than forcing them into a far more expensive and traumatic crisis.

I will fight for federal grants to state-administered programs that provide this kind of support, including zero- and low-interest loans with appropriate repayment periods. California already operates down payment assistance programs for first-time home buyers, and we can use those programs as a model for temporary hardship aid. The cost of preventing a family from being evicted is far lower than the cost of dealing with the consequences once they have been.

Legal Help for Renters

Renters are almost always in financially precarious situations. When a landlord decides to raise the rent, refuse to renew a lease, or convert a property to a short-term rental, most tenants have no real recourse. Lawyers cost money tenants do not have. Housing courts move slowly. Eviction can happen faster than legal protection can be activated.

I will fight for federal funding for state-level programs that provide legal aid, mediation, and case management services for renters. Studies have repeatedly shown that tenants represented by lawyers are dramatically less likely to be evicted and far more likely to retain their housing through difficult periods. Right-to-counsel for tenants in eviction proceedings should be a federal baseline, not a privilege available only in a handful of cities that have managed to fund it locally.

Building New Homes

There is plenty of housing in this country. The problem is that most of it is priced for buyers who do not exist, while corporations and tax loopholes encourage owners to leave properties vacant until someone is willing to pay an inflated price. Imagine a city full of vacant million-dollar homes. There may be sufficient housing on paper, but if it is out of reach for the people who actually need somewhere to live, it might as well not exist.

We need publicly funded home development at scale, designed to match the actual income needs of local communities. Most of that development should be multi-family, dense housing supported by public transit and walkable neighborhood infrastructure. New units can be tailored to the buying power of local residents through adjustments to size, design, and location. State and local governments should then sell or rent these units directly to residents, undercutting the inflated pricing of private developers.

Done at scale, public housing development would put downward pressure on private markets, create good jobs in the regions where it is built, and deliver some of the green and energy-efficient infrastructure the country urgently needs. I will fight to allocate federal funding for new home development, paired with the zoning and tax reforms that would actually allow it to happen.

Imposing Vacancy Taxes

Across the country, residential properties sit empty as speculative assets while families struggle to find a place to live. Corporations and wealthy investors hold homes off the market, betting on appreciation. Short-term rental conversions take housing stock that was once available for long-term residents and turn it into hotel rooms. Foreign buyers and Wall Street firms accumulate properties they have no intention of using as housing at all. Meanwhile, the supply available for actual residents shrinks, prices rise, and the people who work in our cities are forced further and further out.

I support a federal vacancy tax framework that disincentivizes holding residential property empty for speculative purposes, with revenue directed to public housing investment in the same communities. Vancouver, Oakland, and a number of other cities have already implemented vacancy taxes and seen meaningful results. A federal floor would prevent corporate landlords from shifting strategies between jurisdictions to avoid local taxes, and the revenue would directly support the housing solutions communities need.

I also support strict limits on the conversion of long-term housing into short-term rentals like Airbnb, with federal tools that empower local governments to control the impact of these platforms on their housing markets. In the most affected cities, short-term rental conversion has stripped tens of thousands of units from the long-term rental market, and existing local regulations have struggled to keep up.

Creating Public Home Insurance

I will fight to develop a public home insurance program covering all climate impacts, including flood and fire damage, funded through taxes on the biggest polluters. Public insurance would be designed around providing real security for people whose lives can be upended by a disaster they did not cause, rather than around maximizing profit. A program like this is especially critical in regions where private insurers have refused to write new policies or where premium rates have become inflated well beyond actual local risks.

For the private insurers who continue to operate in the market, we need to disincentivize them from ripping off policyholders, denying valid claims, and refusing to insure entire categories of properties. Escalating penalties should include fines on the company, criminal sanctions for executives directing illegal conduct, and the corporate death penalty for the worst and most repeat offenders.

In some cases, homes have been built in areas that are increasingly prone to wildfires, floods, and other climate-driven disasters. Public home insurance should cover existing builds in those areas, but it should not be available for new construction in the highest-risk zones, as designated by state and federal scientific guidelines. The availability of insurance is a powerful tool for shaping where and how new homes get built. We should be using it to encourage development in environmentally sustainable areas with sustainable practices, rather than continuing to subsidize building in places we know will burn or flood.

Ending Speculation and Corporate Concentration

I oppose foreign and Wall Street speculation on single-family homes. Over the past decade, institutional investors have moved aggressively into the residential housing market, buying up entire neighborhoods of single-family homes and converting them into rentals at extractive prices. This practice has pushed first-time home buyers out of markets, driven up rents, and concentrated ownership of the most basic American asset in the hands of a small number of corporate landlords answerable only to their shareholders.

I will fight for federal legislation that:

• Prohibits the bulk acquisition of single-family homes by hedge funds, private equity firms, and other institutional investors. 

• Establishes meaningful federal limits on foreign speculative purchases of US residential housing. 

• Requires public disclosure of the corporate ownership behind residential property, ending the LLC and shell-company structures that obscure who actually owns the homes in our communities. 

• Empowers cities and states to enact stronger local rules against corporate consolidation of residential real estate, including rights of first refusal for tenants and community land trusts when properties are sold.

These reforms tie directly into the corporate concentration and antitrust frameworks in my platform. The same logic that says we should not let a handful of corporations control our food, healthcare, or tech infrastructure says we should not let them control our homes either.

Fixing Zoning Laws

You cannot build the housing this country needs on top of zoning laws that were designed to prevent it. Most American cities have zoning codes that mandate single-family-only housing across enormous areas, ban mixed uses, and impose excessive parking requirements that make new housing more expensive and walkable communities harder to build.

Many of the zoning reforms I support align with my walkable cities platform: mixed-use zoning, eliminating parking minimums, and planning density around transit corridors. For housing supply specifically, I support federal incentives and funding tied to local zoning reform that:

• Allows varied density housing, including duplexes, triplexes, courtyard apartments, and small multi-family buildings, in neighborhoods currently restricted to single-family homes only. 

• Eliminates exclusionary single-family-only zoning, which has historic roots in racist housing agreements and continues to lock in segregated, unaffordable patterns of development today. 

• Streamlines permitting and review processes for affordable and publicly funded housing development, while maintaining environmental and community oversight. 

• Creates faster pathways for the conversion of underused commercial space, including vacant offices and retail, into housing.

Zoning reform alone, without the public investment and corporate accountability described above, mostly opens land for the same private developers and speculators who have driven the crisis to begin with. The reforms have to come together to actually deliver homes for working people.

Eliminating Predatory Fees and Junk Charges

Renters in this country are increasingly subject to a maze of predatory fees that landlords have figured out how to charge on top of rent. Pet rent is one of the most egregious examples. Tenants who already pay deposits and additional security for animals are then charged ongoing monthly fees, often substantial, simply because they live with a pet. Application fees can run hundreds of dollars per unit, with no guarantee of approval. "Amenity fees" charge tenants for the privilege of living in their own buildings. "Convenience fees" charge people for paying their rent. New junk fees appear faster than tenants can keep track of them.

I will fight to ban predatory rental fees at the federal level, including:

• Banning monthly pet rent. Reasonable, refundable pet deposits to cover potential damage are legitimate. Ongoing pet rent is a tax on tenants for having non-human members of their family. 

• Capping or banning rental application fees, with limits on how many fees a single landlord can charge across multiple applications. 

• Requiring full upfront disclosure of every fee and charge associated with a rental, so that the advertised rent is the actual rent. 

• Eliminating fees for paying rent, including online payment fees, "convenience fees," and similar predatory charges.

These reforms are small individually and significant together. They are also a useful test of which side a politician is on: the side of the tenants paying the rent, or the side of the landlords figuring out new ways to extract more money. 

Making Sure Everyone Has a Home

Housing is the foundation of every other thing a person does in life. Stable housing is what allows a child to focus in school, an adult to hold a job, a sick person to recover, an elderly person to age with dignity, and a community to form the kinds of relationships that hold neighborhoods and democracies together. A country that fails at housing fails at most of what depends on it, which is to say almost everything.

We can do far better. The reforms in my platform are the kinds of policies that other wealthy countries have already implemented to varying degrees, and that the United States used to consider mainstream public investment until the ruling class decided to outsource the basic necessities of life to corporations whose only obligation is to their shareholders.

I am running because I believe housing is a human right and because the people of this country deserve a representative who is willing to fight for it.