All Americans Deserve Safe, Clean, Stable, Affordable Housing

Floor Speech

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Ms. STRICKLAND. Mr. Speaker, all Americans, regardless of age, ZIP Code, or income, deserve to live in a safe, clean, and stable home they can afford. This is exactly what a healthy, just, and secure community relies on. It ensures that people are able to meet their basic needs. When over 145,000 Social Security beneficiaries in my district, the 10th Congressional District of Washington State--representing nearly 21 percent of the population--only have 100 to $200 to spare for groceries, utilities, and other basic expenses after paying their rent or mortgage, we know that prosperity is not being shared equally, nor equitably.

When our servicemembers at Joint Base Lewis-McChord simply cannot find homes off post or on post for their families, due to lack of supply or the cost of housing, we must clearly improve our mission to support our Nation's heroes.

These are just a few of the stories that thousands of Washington State residents and families are experiencing, just like millions of Americans across the country. And we know the driving factor behind this housing crisis is lack of supply. We don't have enough housing, and we aren't building it fast enough to meet the demand. And some of the housing that we do have is not fit for human habitation.

According to Up for Growth, an organization that advocates for more housing, their report on housing underproduction from 2010 to 2017 in Washington State identifies some startling data points: For every one household that moved into my district, there were .64 housing units produced in Pierce County, .76 in Thurston County, and .62 housing units in Mason County.

So this means that for every family that moved into our district, that we were producing two-thirds to three-quarters of the housing that we needed to accommodate them. This also means that for over 7 years the population increased and demand far outpaced supply, resulting in this crunch or lack of inventory that so many families are feeling right now.

What's more, there remains a shortage of nearly 160,000 homes for extremely low-income renters, and nearly half a million renters in Washington State are rent-burdened, which means that they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing alone.

Now housing experts have told us that we need a once-in-a-generation solution to our housing supply shortage. That time is now. Now is our opportunity to build smarter, build better, and to do it inclusively.

We have solutions on the table, and it is well past time to use them. We can build to higher-density inside transit corridors, leveraging existing infrastructure. That is why I was so proud to help introduce the bipartisan Build More Housing Near Transit Act with Representative Scott Peters to make sure that when we are investing $2.3 billion each year for large-scale transit projects, we are ensuring that local land use policies, which are often the biggest barrier to increasing housing supply, will encourage sensible development around these major infrastructure investments. For so long we have built housing infrastructure around automobiles and that is a relic of the past; now we must invest in transit to utilize good and smart land use policies.

For our military servicemembers and their families, we can find solutions in our National Defense Authorization Act provisions, which passed out of the House in a bipartisan manner just weeks ago. I offered one provision, which will direct the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy, Installations, and Environment to answer one question: How long are wait times for housing located on military installations in competitive housing markets? And we want them to produce a strategy to address this demand for housing.

It is simply unacceptable that servicemembers and their families must wait more than 6 months to be assigned housing on Joint Base Lewis- McChord. I urge all of my colleagues to support this inclusion of several reports that will address the issue, including a report on how and the extent to which commanders of military installations are connecting military families with local nonprofit organizations and government entities that provide services to the military, including assistance with finding housing.

And importantly, we must pass both our bipartisan infrastructure proposal and the Build Back Better Act and specifically deploy the Unlocking Possibilities Program.

This competitive grant program through HUD will be used to support cities and towns to design and implement policies that eliminate exclusionary zoning and artificial barriers to adding more housing. I urge all of my colleagues to work to retain this important program in our build back better proposal.

Being securely housed is a fundamental human right regardless of your political affiliation. The cost of continuing to ignore our lack of supply is far too great, especially when the tools we need are at our disposal. Let's use them, and let's show our constituents that we can and will build back better. To do otherwise is irresponsible.

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