Elizabeth Warren’s Housing Plan 3.0 Bolsters Public Housing and Protections For Renters
By Henry Kraemer
Senator and Democratic presidential nominee Elizabeth Warren released the third installment of her housing plan on Monday, November 18, focused on reinvigorating public housing, bolstering safeguards and stability for renters, and holding nefarious landlords accountable.
Renters are long overdue for attention from politicians and policymakers, especially since they comprise one-third of the American population and, for nearly half of them, the cost of rent is burdensome. Warren was one of the first presidential candidates to put forward bold policies to improve the economic lives of renters but had recently seen her policies somewhat eclipsed in ambition by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Squad. Her new update makes up some of that lost ground.
Warren’s “Protecting and Empowering Renters” plan expands on Warren’s already robust Housing Plan for America, which proposes investing $500 billion to build over three million new affordable homes, abolishing exclusionary zoning, and reining in the financialization of housing—arguably a stronger and more comprehensive housing program than every candidate but Bernie Sanders. With her new updates, Warren takes clear cues from community-organizing coalition proposals such as People’s Action’s Homes Guarantee and the Center for Popular Democracy’s Housing Justice and a Home to Thrive campaign (alongside reports like Date for Progress’s Homes for All).
With the “Protecting and Empowering Renters” update, Warren builds on her prior plan in several critical ways, each of which makes for a stronger and more progressive platform:
She will ban no-cause evictions (and evictions by intimidation and/or price gouging), guarantee a right to lease renewals for tenants in good standing, and protect the ability of tenants to organize.
She will create a Tenant Protection Bureau modeled on her brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to enforce the new tenant protections and punish unscrupulous landlords (enabled in part by a national tenant hotline to report them to regulators).
She will legalize new public housing by repealing the noxious Faircloth Amendment, fully fund the repair and maintenance of existing public housing, ensure no net loss of public housing, and start to build new public housing.
She will allow Public Housing Authorities and other similar government bodies to use federal housing funds like the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, Housing Trust Fund, Capital Magnet Fund, and Home Grant program to build and upkeep public housing (since currently those funds can only go to private developers) and encourage those Public Housing Authorities to give existing tenants a say in how those funds are spent.
She will block the Federal Housing Administration from providing any support or funding (including loan guarantees) to landlords who harass, neglect, discriminate against, unjustly evict, or price-gouge tenants.
She will declare war on “land contracts”—modern versions of the redlining-era predatory loans that target families of color for legalized theft.
She will require major corporate landlords to publicly disclose median rent, evictions (by total and percentage), code violations, standard lease agreements, and company owners.
With this update, Warren rounds out her housing plan with a clear focus on restoring the federal government’s commitment to renters through significant, explicit tenant protections; revived support for public housing; and new restraints on unethical landlords. This renewed clarity plugs some (though not all) of the most significant holes in Warren’s housing plan.
While her Housing Plan for America continues to lag behind Bernie Sanders’s Housing for All proposal by several key measures—particularly the scale of investment in new affordable housing—Warren has further bolstered her housing bona fides and continues to show her devotion to considering policy problems from all angles and seeking out comprehensive, progressive solutions.
It’s an encouraging update to her plan and would improve the lives of tens of millions of tenants across the country.
Henry Kraemer (@HenryKraemer) is a writer and activist focused on housing, social democratic urbanism, and voting rights. He previously spearheaded the creation of America’s first automatic voter registration law in Oregon and its expansion across the country. He lives in Portland and works a day-job in renewable energy.