In the News

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is now the law of the land. It is the most significant piece of housing legislation to pass Congress since 1990 — and it includes six bills I wrote.

If you live in the Hudson Valley, you don't need me to tell you why it was necessary. You see it every single day.

In early 2019, the median single-family home in Westchester sold for $605,000. Last year, it topped $1.1 million. In Rockland, the median went from $445,000 to $780,000 over the same stretch. In six years, the price of a home in the two largest counties in my district rose by hundreds of thousands of dollars, far outpacing rising wages.

Then add in the cost of borrowing. Under the Biden administration, mortgage interest rates reached 30-year highs, topping 7.7%. They have come down, but not fast enough, which means families are paying far more every month for far less house.

The results are predictable and heartbreaking. The typical first-time homebuyer in America is now 40 years old, the oldest ever recorded. A generation ago, that buyer was in their late 20s. First-time buyers have fallen to just 21% of the market, the lowest share ever measured. Young families aren't choosing to rent into their 40s; instead they've been priced out of homeownership.

Here in the Hudson Valley, the squeeze hits everyone. Young couples can't buy a starter home in the towns where they grew up and want to set roots down. Seniors can't afford to downsize. Volunteer firefighters, who staff nearly all of our fire departments, struggle to live in the very communities they protect.

Why did this happen? Housing is a basic supply-and-demand issue, and by some estimates America is as many as 8 million homes short of what our people need. For decades, this country has not built enough, and government at every level made the problem worse with red tape, duplicative reviews and outdated mandates that add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of construction.

What does the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act do?

It streamlines the environmental reviews that can delay a housing project for years. It helps communities adopt “pattern books” of pre-approved home designs, so builders spend less time and money on permitting. It scraps the outdated federal mandate that every manufactured home sit on a permanent steel chassis, a rule that adds $5,000 to $10,000 to the cost of some of the most affordable homes in America. It stops the largest institutional investors, those holding 350 or more single-family homes, from buying up more of them and outbidding young families who can't compete with all-cash offers. And it rewards communities that actually build by steering existing federal dollars their way, without adding a dime of new spending.

Six pieces of this law began as bills I authored:

• The Community Investment and Prosperity Act raises the cap on community banks' public-welfare investments from 15% to 20%, freeing up private capital for affordable housing and small-business lending.
• The HUD Accountability Act requires the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to testify before Congress every single year; if Washington is going to spend billions on housing, the person running the department should answer for the results.
• The Housing for America's Middle Class Act directs the Government Accountability Office to finally define “workforce housing” so that federal policy no longer ignores families who earn too much to qualify for assistance but too little to afford market rents.
• The Improving Public Housing Agency Accountability Act requires annual reporting on troubled public housing agencies, including chronically mismanaged systems like NYCHA, to protect residents living in deteriorating conditions.
• The Improving Housing Access Act examines the barriers keeping seniors and Americans with disabilities from housing that meets their needs.
• The SAFE Act will tell us, for the first time, how many families live within a mile of a Superfund site.

I also cosponsored other measures included in the package, from allowing modern single-staircase apartment buildings to giving localities a real roadmap for zoning reform to helping veterans access the home loan benefits they earned.