Today, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, took to the House floor to speak in support of H. Res. 1299, a resolution amending H.R. 6644, the “21st Century Road to Housing Act,” a landmark bipartisan legislative package aimed at addressing the nationwide housing supply shortage and affordability crisis.

“I rise in support of H. Res. 1299, amending H.R. 6644, the “21st Century Road to Housing Act,” sponsored by Chairman Hill and me.

Tomorrow, the House has an historic opportunity to pass an improved, bipartisan housing package negotiated in partnership with Chairman Hill and myself and with the input of many House Democrats.

Mr. Speaker, our Housing bill is the most comprehensive housing reform bill in a generation, and is a huge step towards finally addressing the affordable housing and homelessness crises in our country.

Let me take a moment to remind everyone what is at stake or who we are trying to help. The age of a median first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old. That’s largely because the average cost of a single-family home has skyrocketed, and wages have not kept pace. In fact, twenty-two million households spend over 30 percent of their paycheck on rent, and 12 million spend over 50 percent on housing. And what is most shameful, nearly 800,000 people experience homelessness on any given night. This is unacceptable, and we must act now.

The House first passed H.R. 6644 back in February. A month later the Senate amended our bill, stripping out numerous House provisions that would address real problems in the housing market. However, the Senate also added in a poorly drafted ban on large institutional investors buying new single-family homes. I say this, not as someone who is a fan of private equity ownership of these homes, but as someone who was concerned that the Senate’s drafting was unconstitutional and could lead to thousands of families and persons living with disabilities being evicted, students and servicemembers without housing options, and private equity being incentivized to use certain types of contracts with tenants that have been rife with abuses.

For this reason, I called on the Senate to join us in conference to resolve our differences. While I am disappointed that our Senate colleagues choose not to conference with us, Chairman Hill and I just kept on going, we pressed on, making those critical improvements to restore the legislation to its intent to address the housing crisis.

To be clear, the consequences of simply passing the Senate’s bill were stark. The Urban Institute concluded that 72,000 housing units would NOT be built as a result of the Senate’s bill. And, even more alarmingly, the Senate’s language also threatened tens of thousands of families with eviction.

Mr. Speaker, before I go on, I must say that the process to get here today has been less than ideal, that’s an understatement. Chairman Hill, the Speaker, the White House, and I were making changes to this text right up until the last minute.

While I support our final agreement, we must inform our colleagues about how this bill has changed since it was posted on Friday as they will be voting on it tomorrow. So, I’m going to describe those changes here.

• First, the bill removes section 204, which was the Build Now Act.
  
• Second, we added a new Sec. 107, called Housing Supply Frameworks.
  
• Third, Sec. 208, the Housing Innovation Fund, now sunsets after 7 years instead of five years.
  
• Fourth, we added language ensuring prevailing wage requirements under Davis Bacon apply to Sections 102 and 106 of the bill.
  
• And, fifth, we are revising Section 1001 of the bill, which relates to private equity ownership of single-family homes, by replacing our text with the Senate based language but removing the divestment requirement, changing the definition of Build to Rent, and inserting a renter hotline that requires HUD to respond to renter complaints.
  

Mr. Speaker, this revised House package of needed housing reforms preserves more than 90 percent of the Senate’s bill, while strengthening it by adding numerous, critical House-passed, Democrat-led housing and community banking provisions. As a result we will be providing more relief and support to millions of families and communities all across the nation.

The thing is, Mr. Speaker, there is broad recognition in this Chamber of the problems in our housing markets. We need comprehensive reforms at the federal, state and local levels, and a commitment by everyone to get America building housing again. How do we do this? We do this by:

• Creating a pilot to increase access to small-dollar mortgages, especially in rural areas;
  
• Allowing housing cooperatives, a type of affordable housing option, to participate in federal programs;
  
• Creating local databases about unused, government owned land, very important;
  
• Increasing access to more family-sized affordable housing units; and,
  
• Adding in community bank and credit union reforms so these small institutions can help.
  

These and so many other reforms in this bill are a huge first step towards finally addressing the housing crisis in this country.

Finally, the Senate added a temporary ban on central bank digital currencies that is the C-B-D-C. This is the status quo we have in effect already as Trump’s new Fed Chair has stated that he will not issue a C-B-D-C during his tenure. More importantly, this temporary ban is only partial and will still allow the Fed to study other forms of C-B-D-C, like the ones that more closely parallel how currency is used in our economy.

So, I urge you to join me in passing this bill and Mr. Speaker and Members, I just want to say we have learned an awful lot over a number of years about what we can do to create some real opportunities. We are now using our experiences, working on housing bills to interject into how we are going to be able to get more housing for all those who are in desperate need, and to get homelessness off our streets. We have learned a lot, and you are going to hear in this bill about how we are going to learn about land that is owned by cities and counties for years that they could get rid of and don’t have to do it for market value, on and on and on. And so, I’m very proud, even though this has been a real, real labor. I want to say of love, but it’s been a real labor, maybe not of love, but something that really had to be done. And so, I think we finally made these meaningful steps to address our nation’s housing crisis and strengthen our community banks. And so, I ask everyone to please support this bill.”

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