Economic Justice Issues

Floor Speech

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Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. Madam Speaker, I thank Congresswoman Tlaib for hosting this Special Order hour on housing and our chair for presiding during this very critical conversation.

We are here today to talk about one of the most core, important issues facing the American people, which is housing.

Each and every year, it feels as though, as our wages remain stable or the same, rent is going up, and it becomes harder and harder to afford the very things that keep ourselves afloat and alive, whether it is healthcare, housing, or an education.

During the financial crisis of 2008, American households lost $16 trillion in wealth. Many lost their homes and saw their savings and retirement funds depleted. More than half of all renters in America, over 21 million households, were rent-burdened in 2015, meaning that they spent 30 percent or more of their income on rent.

We are in one of the worst renter crises in a generation. At a time when our country is at its wealthiest, in the city of New York, we are seeing populations of people who are homeless at the highest rates since the Great Depression. But there is another way.

When we start to legislate housing as a human right, we begin to change our priorities and move away from looking at housing as a for- profit commodity for speculation and toward something that should be guaranteed for all Americans at an affordable rate that can be accessible to all working people in America.

That is one of the reasons why I have introduced A Place to Prosper Act, which includes provisions like universal rent control, just cause evictions, a ban on income discrimination, access to counsel, improving the quality of the housing stock, and a disclosures requirement on corporate landlords to rein in bad actors.

Additionally, we also know that the area of housing and construction is one of the largest contributors to carbon emissions, which is why we have also introduced the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act. What that does is that it works and aims to decarbonize the entire public housing stock in the United States of America.

It is what must be done; it is in accordance with the science; and it changes the value system through which we approach housing away from the volatile boom-and-bust speculative environment and toward a secure and stable economic environment that treats housing as a right.

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