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Housing Have-Nots Deserve a Boost From Congress

For the record 68.2% of the nation’s families who own a home, housing is an American success story. It has added life to the economy, creating jobs and consumer confidence even during the midst of recession. It has laid the foundation for healthy communities and strong neighborhoods. It has provided all the comforts of home, while providing typical working families with their one sure guarantee of accumulating family wealth.

Unfortunately, there is another housing story that needs to be told. Amid good times for housing, America is facing a silent housing affordability crisis of epidemic proportions. Millions of families are being deprived of the opportunity to partake of the American dream. These are the facts:

• More than 14 million American households are spending more than half their income on housing or live in substandard units. Their ranks surged 67% between 1997 and 2001.
• Almost 28 million households spend “more on housing than the federal government considers affordable and appropriate,” according to the Millennial Housing Commission, a bipartisan panel created by Congress to assess the nation’s housing needs.

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• The homeownership rates for African Americans and Hispanics are 48% and 49% respectively, trailing far behind the 74% of non-minority households who own homes.
• Our country is losing almost half a million low-income rental units a year.

To address this housing crisis, one of the most important jobs facing this Congress is enactment of homeownership tax credit legislation. H.R. 839 in the House and S. 198 in the Senate would help achieve two key national objectives. These bills would aid economically distressed areas by creating new jobs. And they would close the homeownership gap for minorities by increasing the supply of affordable homes for sale.

The homeownership tax credit is included in the Bush Administration’s FY 2004 budget, and Congress needs to include it in pending economic stimulus legislation.

The tax credit is good public policy and it is good for the economy. Each year it would produce some 50,000 new and rehabilitated homes, 120,000 jobs, $4 billion in wages and $2 billion in taxes and fees. This would more than offset the $2.4 billion that the Treasury Department estimates it would cost over five years.

Last June, President Bush said that a home is “a foundation for families and a source of stability for communities. Part of economic security is owning your own home. Part of being a secure America is to encourage homeownership.”

Enactment of the homeownership tax credit will close the gap between America’s housing haves and housing have-nots. It is the medicine our lagging economy needs, and it is of the greatest importance for Congress to act on it now.
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