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Floor Speech

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Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, I want to say congratulations and thank you for your leadership.

We just passed a housing bill with 89 Senators in favor of it. Now, this is a bill about increasing supply, and anybody who wants to try to block this bill is going to have to explain to the American people why they don't want to see us build more housing and have that housing in the hands of homeowners, to make that happen.

I thank the Presiding Officer for all you have done, for your leadership, to get us here.

Our Nation is in a full-blown housing crisis. Across rural communities, small towns, suburban neighborhoods, and major cities, home prices are sky-high, rent is through the roof, and just last year, the median age of a first-time home buyer hit 40 years old.

Housing is the single biggest purchase that most Americans will make in their lifetime, but it is far more than that. Owning a home means building economic security. It is the No. 1 retirement plan for families across the country: You pay off your home and live on your Social Security. It helps people have the financing to start small businesses in their communities, and it is the main asset that families can pass down from one generation to the next. Owning a home affects the jobs you can get, the schools your children can attend, and the kinds of communities you can live in.

But for too long, the Federal Government has been asleep at the switch while the crisis grows. Hundreds of thousands of families are priced out of homes by private equity. Many State and local governments have too many rules holding back housing construction. Young people cannot buy their first homes. Seniors and veterans are being left behind. Home ownership is out of the reach of too many families, especially Black families.

We need to act, and that is why I stand here today in support of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. This landmark bipartisan bill will help tackle the root cause of this crisis by getting more homes built in every community across this country. It will make sure that families own those homes, not giant corporations looking to jack up the rent and squeeze every nickel of profit they can out of American families.

House Republicans should immediately take up this bill and pass it. If they do not, they will have to explain to families across this country in November why they refuse to lower the cost of housing.

(Ms. LUMMIS assumed the Chair.)

This is the biggest package of bills to make housing affordable in 30 years. This bill has more than 40 provisions, every single one of which is designed to help increase housing supply and bring down housing costs.

Here are just a few of the things this bill will do. It removes regulatory barriers and streamlines environmental reviews to speed up affordable housing development and construction approval processes.

It rewards communities that build more housing, and it prods those that are not building to step up and build more. It strengthens the Community Development Block Grant--CDBG--and HOME Programs to get more affordable housing built and to permanently authorize the CDBG-Disaster Recovery Program to get more money out to disaster-stricken communities faster.

It makes it easier and cheaper to build new manufactured housing by removing the outdated chassis requirements, bringing down the cost of a new unit by up to $10,000.

It creates an Innovation Fund, one that I have been proposing for years, to reward communities that are successfully building more housing with new funding for community infrastructure or even to build more housing.

It will make long-needed improvements to rural housing programs to preserve affordable housing for 400,000 rural families.

It offers new and streamlined funding opportunities for cities and towns to bolster local infrastructure and to convert abandoned buildings into new housing, for homeowners and landlords to make structural home repairs, and for homebuilders to finance new manufactured and modular housing.

And there is so much more in this bill. This bill supports more housing opportunities for veterans, it takes action to reduce homelessness, and it helps address appraisal bias.

And, finally, this bill takes a good first step to get single-family homes back into the hands of American families, not corporations. An overwhelming majority of Americans, across party lines, want to stop private equity from snapping up single-family homes, and this bill does exactly that. It also makes sure that corporate landlords who don't follow the law pay up, and it invests any money they pay in fines into the HOME Program to build more housing and to help first- time home buyers with direct assistance for downpayments, closing costs, and interest rate buydowns.

The bill does another thing that is very important. It preserves the power of State and local communities to tackle the problem of corporate landlords making it harder for families to afford rent and to own a home.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act has overwhelming bipartisan support. It includes the vast majority of bipartisan housing provisions that passed the House of Representatives, and the bill has strong support from the White House.

Americans have been clear that they want their leaders to focus on lowering costs. There is no excuse to delay this relief. The American people will be watching.

I want to say thank you to Senator Tim Scott for his partnership in this historic bill. His leadership made this bill possible, and I am grateful to work with him on an issue that will matter so much to so many families. I also want to note that every single member of the Banking Committee--Republicans and Democrats--added ideas and specific provisions that made it into this bill. I thank them for their thoughtful and creative contributions and thank them for helping make this a much stronger, better bill.

I also want to offer a very special thank-you to the local and State officials, including the mayors across Massachusetts and all around the country, who helped shape this bill and then who raised their voices to help get it passed. I also want to thank the advocates who have worked tirelessly to push for more and better housing all across America.

So let's get this bill to the House. Let's get it signed into law as quickly as possible. There is no time to spare.

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