Dear Editor,
Our right to vote is central and basic to every fundamental right we have. Without that we are not a free people.
HR6644 purported to be our great hope for affordable housing is a scam. It is not about helping homeless or making it possible for poor families to have the American Dream, building generational wealth and security. It is about supporting developers to create more apartments for rent.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is focused on infill so vacant lots with existing infrastructure. Its main goals are to deregulate building requirements and remove environmental protections so developers can build faster and cheaper.
It increases the definition of low-income to those making median income so more people are eligible. But if they really wanted to help the low income, they would double Section 8, increase the maximum that can be paid for an apartment, and open the lists which have been closed for years. There are more than 3 million vacant apartments and less than a million homeless so there are plenty of places to rent.
Instead, it sets up an entirely new bureaucracy, creates new committees, asks for guidelines to be developed in three years, and establishes a committee to make rules made up of builders, developers, officials, and academics – but not one organization that represents low-income people.
The loans are focused on apartments not homes. But apartment dwellers do not build up any equity nor create generational wealth that could lower the wealth gap.
The penalties section is struck out of the bill. The only penalty for theft and misuse of funds is a reduction in funds. You don’t go to jail, and you not only pass go, but the financier continues to get federal money just not as much.
In the push to eliminate FEMA, the bill starts a whole new disaster management office and turns it into block grants. The problem with block grants is that local people lose control of the money and it goes to politicians who often spend it on things it’s not intended for.
They suggest a study of public housing recipients which rings alarm bells. The “study” smells of repeating the Moynihan report done in 1965 that was intended to investigate the problem of Black poverty but rather than looking at historical discrimination and white racism, it blamed the Black families. The real problem is the huge and growing wealth gap now at its largest in 30 years. The top 1% own 32% of the nation’s total wealth and the bottom 50% hold just 2.5%.
One of the big selling points for this bill is that homes are for people not corporations and that this bill limits the maximum that institutional investors can buy to 30% of the market. I have read the bill three times and I cannot find that in it. It does limit them to 350 new purchases except for those exempted. What is exempted? Newly constructed, build to own, a program to boost home ownership, a loss mitigation, manufactured homes, or a purchase from another.
Today large institutional investors own less than 1% of total nationwide single-family housing stock. They own 3% of the single-family rental stock. Why would you increase that to 30%?
The “build to own” or “build to rent” schemes have a long history of predatory contract selling. “The Plunder of Black Wealth,” a study by Duke University found that $3.2 to $4 billion was stolen from the Chicago Black community in those scams.
This is not a bill for families. This is a bill for builders, developers, and corporations. They are not pushing single family home ownership that helps to build generational wealth but apartments that lock you into lifelong payments.
The Save America Act would destroy the very basis of America – our voting power. That act would strip millions of Americans of voting rights including every married woman who would have to prove with certified documents why her name today is different than her name on her birth certificate, every person who was born before birth certificates were common or available, every person whose birth certificate or naturalization record was lost in a fire or purged from records.
The Save America Act is terrible and certainly is not worth the price of a tawdry apartment three years down the road.
Dianne Post
