The Homes for All Act misdiagnoses the roots of the country’s housing problems, then adds a boundless faith in the feds’ ability to solve them.
By Christian Britschgi | Reason
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) is the latest politician to release an ambitious, expensive proposal to fix America’s affordable housing problem. The congresswoman, a member of the so-called “Squad” of recently elected leftist legislators, wants to spend $1 trillion building new public housing.
“Our current free-market housing system is not meeting the needs of working families,” said Omar in a press release last week announcing her Homes for All Act. “Housing is a fundamental human right. It’s time we as a nation acted like it and end the housing crisis once and for all.”
To secure this fundamental human right, Omar’s legislation would spend $800 billion over the next 10 years developing 9.5 million new units of public housing. Another $200 billion would be spent through the existing federal Housing Trust Fund to subsidize the development of 2.5 million private affordable housing units.
