S.F.’s congressional candidates want more housing. Here’s how they’d build it.

ML: If you could wave a magic legislative wand, what would housing in America look like? 

Wiener: We would make it really easy to build. We would have massive investment to make sure that we are building for all income levels. We would help stabilize low income renters in their homes so we don’t fuel homelessness. And we would just get back into the American spirit of building the things that make people’s lives better, like housing, like transportation and water infrastructure. 

Part of my vision is also having a large and stable, skilled construction workforce that doesn’t get laid off every time there’s an economic downturn. We need countercyclical spending by the federal government, spending during economic downturns to ensure that the workforce doesn’t collapse every time there’s a recession. 

Chan: In every city there is actually housing that people could afford, working people. And it’s all sorts of housing. It could be apartment buildings. It could be, homes, townhomes, single family homes, any kind of housing, 2 to 3 bedrooms, the type of housing that works for rural areas, just as it would in an urban environment.

Chakrabarti: The centerpiece of my plan is really about creating something called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. It’s an entity that existed during the New Deal, World War II era. On one level, it can provide low cost financing to build out affordable housing. 

But it has more power than that. It could do things like spin off public developers to build out housing when private developers won’t do it. Of course, to do that, we have to repeal the Faircloth Amendment, which currently prevents us from building new public housing. 

[The Faircloth Amendment caps the number of housing units that any one public housing authority can manage.]

It could also do things like stockpile lumber and steel to control costs in the construction industry. It’s basically this proactive agency that can actually make this stuff happen. 

I think we have to move towards a housing model where we’re not fully dependent on private developers, a model like they have in Vienna or Singapore or Finland. You have rotating funds that continue financing not just the development but also the maintenance of that housing. You have to build out that ecosystem of low profit and nonprofit developers. 

Beyond that I think we have to do a lot more to prevent existing tenants from being displaced. So I call for doubling rental vouchers, Section 8 vouchers, federal support for tenants unions. Also, one way to get land banking to happen is just direct federal support for community land trusts, like the one that’s already happening in San Francisco. 

[Community land trusts buy existing properties and turn them into permanent affordable housing by setting legal restrictions on how that property can be used.]

ML: Should the federal government spend more money on building housing? If so, what kind of housing should be built? And where should the money come from? 

Wiener: The heart of my housing platform is a generational investment in housing. $1.2 trillion over ten years to be paid for by significantly rolling back the Bush and Trump tax cut giveaways to the wealthy and corporations. 

Social housing has to have a real deep mix of incomes. Middle income folks, even some upper middle income, but a lot more working class and lower income folks and some very low income folks. And they pay a percentage of their income.

Obviously the projects need to be financially viable so you have to be thoughtful about the income mixes. There are folks who have little to no income and we need to make sure that they’re housed and that requires more ongoing government subsidy.

ML: The 1.2 trillion, is that just for mixed income social housing?

Wiener: No, the biggest piece of it is for mixed income social housing. There’s a chunk of it that’s for paying cities $10,000 for every home that is actually built. And then there is funding for expanding Section 8 vouchers so that we can support more low income residents.

Chan: I think we should build more housing that people can afford, be it rental or home ownership. I’m sure you have heard about the Faircloth Amendment. Be it capping rental subsidies or be it capping the units that the city can build, if we lift up that cap it will solve a lot of problems for San Francisco.

[The Faircloth Amendment caps the number of housing units that any one public housing authority can manage.]

I think that right now we see that we seem to have either the option to build luxury housing driven by the market or we build low income or very low income housing, because that is where the public dollars are provided. To be able to lift up that cap will allow us to have more federal funding to build housing that is not just for low income or very low income, but to also be able to build middle income housing.

ML: Do you have more specifics?

Chan: There are only two key elements to building housing. Land and money. Let’s talk about money first. Let’s talk about financing tools for developers to build housing. That’s where the federal funding comes in. The way that I see that we can make that funding be made available is through progressive taxation.

Now when it comes to land, where do you build housing? For example, in the Richmond we have a long-closed funeral home located on Geary at Sixth Avenue, and through Supervisor Sandra Lee Fewer’s leadership identified that as a good piece of land where you can build housing. And the funding came from a 2019 $600 million bond from San Francisco voters. $40 million was allocated to that site, which then kickstarted a whole series of other monies that the city could get from state bond dollars and other financing. This land turns out to be 98 units of 100 percent affordable senior housing, mainly one bedrooms or studios. And they are for middle income or very low income or formerly homeless seniors. And they are eight stories tall. 

Another project that we’re working on is privately owned land by Alexandra Theater owner. It’s been a long closed theater. We’re now building 76 units, I think more than 76 units now, also at eight stories tall. But there are now 2 to 3 bedroom units out of which 12 percent is affordable. They are mainly going to be hopefully for families. 

Chakrabarti: Right now, the only involvement the federal government has in housing is essentially low income housing tax credits, which are not nearly sufficient, and they still rely on private developers to do all the building. And then [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development] has a patchwork of grants that are also entirely insufficient. 

[Low income housing tax credits are a type of affordable housing financing. Affordable housing developers apply for these tax credits and then sell them, often to banks. The banks get to pay less in taxes and the developers get a cash injection.]

I think we have to move towards a model where the federal government is getting into the process of actually planning out and making sure housing units are getting built. 

In Vienna the way their nonprofit housing sector works is the Vienna government provides 35-year long term financing that gets paid back. And importantly, it’s not just for super low income housing, it’s mixed income housing. That way you have the middle class having a stake in that social housing model, which makes it politically more permanent. The whole model is sustainable. They fund it through some taxes, but the nonprofit developers are required to put extra funds back into new construction rather than into profits for the developers.

ML: What type of housing do you want to see getting built with this money?

Chakrabarti: Housing at all levels. But I think the big dearth of housing in San Francisco specifically is housing for low income and middle income families and working families. 

ML: How do you plan to pay for it?

Chakrabarti: The easiest way would be to tax the rich. So a big part of my tax plan is a wealth tax on billionaires and millionaires that would raise hundreds of billions of dollars a year. 

Beyond that there’s things like closing the carried interest loophole, removing a bunch of loopholes on the estate taxes that exist right now. We need to raise taxes on corporations, especially in the age of AI, where we’re seeing more and more capital accumulation in the hands of a few corporations. We dramatically need to increase our corporate tax rate. 

The other piece of this is we continuously expand our defense budget. We just passed a $900 billion defense budget at a time where we are not funding HUD, we’re not funding grants for housing. I believe we have to slash the defense budget and reinvest that money into things like housing and healthcare here at home.

San Francisco builds both market rate housing, where rent and sale prices are set by supply and demand, and affordable housing, where units are offered below market rate to lower income households. 

ML: Do you think San Francisco needs to build more market rate housing? 

Wiener: Yes, absolutely, we need all of the above. Mixed income housing is incredibly important but it’s not going to be the entirety of the solution, it’s one piece of it. 

One of the worst parts of the housing policy debates is when different kinds of housing get pitted against each other as if you have to pick only one type of housing that you like, and therefore you have to hate all the other forms of housing. I find that to be really counterproductive. 

Historically in this country the private sector has built the vast majority of new housing. Even if we significantly ramp up public investment in housing, which I very much want to do, the private sector is always going to play a significant role. 

Chan: No, I believe that if your demand is affordable housing, then your supply has to be affordable housing. At the end of the day, when it comes to luxury housing, housing that is just driven by the market and that is being built and provided with the sole purpose of the biggest margin of profit, then you end up only going to be able to be in the hands of those people who can afford it. 

This is a moment that government does have a role, to recognize that almost any housing that we now build in San Francisco, if we want it to be affordable to working people, that’s including people who are middle income, it will have to be subsidized either during the time of land purchase or during the time it’s being built and developed, or even at the time that it’s being sold or leased.

Chakrabarti: Adding market rate housing should be part of it, but it’s not the answer. There’s one vision of this that says, if we just made it easy for market rate housing to get built, that alone would solve our affordability crisis and I don’t think that’s the case at all. 

That has to be paired with a massive social housing program with actual federal investment, directly building affordable housing.

ML: Some people argue that excessive regulation makes it really difficult to build housing and that’s a significant reason why cities like San Francisco are unaffordable. Do you agree?

Wiener: It is one of the factors for sure. Over the last 50 years, we’ve made it systematically harder and harder to build housing. We have put more and more restrictions, more and more rules, at times arbitrary rules. 

For example, you used to be able to build multi unit apartments pretty much anywhere in San Francisco. And then in the 70s, the city downzoned and overwhelmingly banned new apartment buildings. Today you can go around Noe Valley or Pacific Heights or the Sunset or other neighborhoods that are largely low density and you see a 20 or 30 unit apartment building which was built before the downzoning. We should have zoning, but when zoning is too restrictive, that is a government regulation that limits the amount of housing you can build. 

And then there’s permitting. If the permitting process is either onerous, or designed to allow anyone with an ax to grind or anyone who’s opposed to turn your permit process into a five year morass, that fuels the housing crisis. 

There are other kinds of regulations that we’re looking at trying to reform. For example, the types of construction that you can do. Cross-laminated timber was largely not allowed in California. That’s changed. That can bring down the cost of construction and is a good option for builders of taller buildings. Now, we’re seeing more modular housing, prefabricated housing. The law should not prevent the industry from modernizing.

Right now four, five, six story small apartment buildings are required to have two staircases, one in the front, one in the back. That is not required in many other countries. For these smaller apartment buildings, when you require two staircases it significantly increases the cost of construction and it reduces the amount of housing because it takes up a huge amount of space. It’s really important in California to get rid of the ban on single staircase apartment buildings. We’re trying to do that under the leadership of Assemblymember Alex Lee and I’m honored to coauthor that legislation. 

Chan: I believe that there is a difference between efficiency of government versus regulation of government. Just because a process is not efficient doesn’t mean that we should not have regulation. We can have regulation, like zoning and planning, and be efficient. We just need to do better with issuing the permits and evaluating the project more efficiently and in a timely fashion.

Chakrabarti: I think some regulation has been counterproductive. We also do need to do things to make it easier and cheaper to construct. That’s why part of my housing plan is providing federal financing to cities that speed up how quickly you are building housing, whether that’s market rate or affordable housing.

ML: State laws have eliminated discretionary review, a process by which members of the public can contest a code-compliant project, for most new housing. Do you support that?

Wiener: I authored a law, Senate Bill 423, that pretty much eliminated discretionary review of new housing in San Francisco. 

In San Francisco, we created a system where every single permit for housing is discretionary, meaning it’s a political decision. So even if you propose a project that complies with all of the rules, you’re still not entitled to a permit. You have to then go into the political mosh pit and fight it out for years or longer. And maybe you get your permit, maybe you get denied. Maybe your project gets chopped in half. Maybe you just run out of money because you can’t sustain a fight for three, four or five years.

We should set the rules ahead of time and if you follow all the rules, then you should just automatically get your permit. No discretion, no political fighting. That is also known as good government. When you allow people to jack up a project that follows all the rules and then you start making every project a bespoke political processm that is government at its worst, and it can lead to corruption.

Chan: I think that discretionary review, it’s empowerment for neighborhood input and for community input. Do we see then at times it could be abused? Absolutely, like any other law. But that does not mean we abandon it. How do we then do better to be able to have a discretionary review threshold, but not completely eliminate discretionary review?

Chakrabarti: I’m not for discretionary review. I believe we should have by-right housing development where we make it clear what you have to do to get housing built. We should have a robust planning department that can do the proper inspections and make sure the housing gets built, but I don’t believe it should go through a discretionary review process.

ML: Should cities reform their zoning systems, which set limits for how tall a new building can be and how many units it can have?

Wiener: Zoning is important. It’s important to have rules about ‘Here’s where you can build taller, here’s where you can build a little bit shorter.’ 

There are some bottom lines, like you should zone for more density around public transportation. That’s a law that I passed last year, Senate Bill 79, to say you can’t ban apartment buildings near high quality public transit. 

In general, cities should have flexibility in terms of their zoning, with the understanding that you have to zone for enough homes. 

Part of the problem in San Francisco and California is that historically, we didn’t really require cities to zone for enough homes, and that helped fuel the housing crisis.

Chan: Zoning itself is necessary for land use policy. Rezoning, or in this case, upzoning, sometimes is necessary. But one size fits all upzoning only creates real estate speculation and puts tenants and small businesses at risk.

ML: What do you mean by one size fits all upzoning?

Chan: For example, the entire Geary corridor, you can actually build 85 feet or taller, no matter which lot. 

ML: Do you think it should be more tailored lot by lot?

Chan: It’s not so much a lot by lot, but more like the neighborhood but also corridors or blocks, not lots. Inner Geary versus Inner Clement, you can probably have a bit more density on Inner Geary, but you probably wouldn’t do that on Inner Clement where there are a lot of small businesses and our farmers market is currently located. If you were to just say, ‘Oh, for the entire Inner Richmond, you should just be able to build everywhere six to eight stories,’ I cannot be in agreement with you. That is without consideration of the farmer’s market space and the small businesses that are nearby and the rent control units right above most of these small businesses. It actually doesn’t make any sense when it comes to that kind of approach to land use.

[The upzoning plan that San Francisco passed in December allows six to eight story buildings along commercial corridors in San Francisco, including most of Clement and Geary. Areas not along commercial corridors mostly retained a four story height limit and buildings with three or more rent controlled units were exempted from the plan.]

Chakrabarti: I do think we need significant zoning reform, but I think it has to be coupled with anti-displacement measures. In a world where currently we are so reliant on private capital and private developers who are building, it creates incentives for private developers to come in and speculate on existing housing and evict existing tenants. 

Under the California Environmental Quality Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, new housing projects can be required to undergo environmental review, which can be time consuming and costly. Opponents of new housing then file lawsuits and appeals challenging those reviews to block or delay housing.

Recent state laws have exempted most new housing in already-developed areas from CEQA. At the federal level, a recent Supreme Court ruling and regulatory changes now limit the ability to use NEPA to block projects.

ML: Do you support these reforms to CEQA and NEPA? 

Wiener: CEQA is frequently used and frequently weaponized to stop new housing, even new housing in cities and near transit and near jobs. And that’s inappropriate. So we’ve made reforms to CEQA to ensure that it is used to actually protect the environment, not to undermine sustainable urban infill housing. 

NEPA is a very important law that helps ensure that for large projects in particular that there’s environmental review and if needed mitigation. NEPA, like CEQA, should be a tool to protect the environment and to protect community health, not to undermine climate action or to be weaponized by people trying to stop a project for reasons having nothing to do with the environment. I want environmental laws to protect the environment and to advance climate action, not to impede environmental protection and climate action. That to me is a bottom line.

Chan: Absolutely necessary.

ML: Do you think CEQA and NEPA need to be changed at all?

Chan: I think what needs to be changed is the way it’s being reviewed efficiently and actually have an expected timeline.

Chakrabarti: CEQA and NEPA I do think do need reform. I’m pro, for example, exempting infill housing development from CEQA review. 

We can’t throw it out entirely. I believe we definitely need environmental review processes, especially for industrial use. But what we’re seeing all too often is CEQA does get weaponized to block new housing in urban areas where we know that building dense urban environments is environmentally the right thing to do.

For some housing projects, construction workers are required to be paid a “prevailing wage” that is typically based on union pay levels in the area. Supporters say that construction workers ought to be paid well, but opponents argue that wage requirements make housing too expensive to build and should be eliminated.

ML: Do you support prevailing wage requirements for new housing? 

Wiener: I’ve always been a supporter of prevailing wage. I want our construction workers to have good paying jobs, to be able to be part of the middle class, and so I have authored various laws containing prevailing wage and healthcare requirements. And I’ve partnered with the carpenters and the laborers and the operating engineers, cement masons, SEIU, and other unions on that kind of legislation. 

There is an ongoing discussion that has been happening for as long as I’ve been in the legislature between the construction industry and the trades unions about whether there should be something called a residential wage.

Residential development, especially lower rise wood frame residential development, has different economics than, say, high rises or large commercial developments. So there’s been a conversation about whether there should be a residential wage that is lower than the prevailing wage. Still a good wage, but lower. 

ML: Do you support a residential wage?

Yes, I would, and there were conversations that came very, very close, I believe, in 2018, 2019, and it fell apart. 

I want to be clear, the residential wage would be a big pay raise for an awful lot of construction workers. And unfortunately, 91 percent of residential construction workers in California are not unionized and so we have a lot of work to do to really lift up our construction workforce. 

Chan: Absolutely necessary. Labor standard is absolutely something that we need to fight for. Workers deserve a prevailing wage and opportunity for apprenticeships, skills and trained jobs and project labor agreements that not only benefits the labor but also yields community benefits for the neighborhood that is going to be impacted by the project. I think that workers also deserve to be able to afford the housing that they build. 

Chakrabarti: I believe we should have prevailing wage standards, especially if we’re talking about a federal program to build out housing. 

People building housing, working on housing construction should be able to afford to live in the city that they’re building this housing in.

Section 8 is a federal program that gives low income households housing vouchers to help them pay rent. 

ML: What reforms do you think should be made to the Section 8 system?

Wiener: First and foremost, we need to make it bigger. There are huge waitlists for Section 8. Anyone who qualifies for Section 8 should be able to access it. 

It is also way too hard for landlords, especially smaller landlords, to become part of the Section 8 program. I actually know a very small landlord, I think she has maybe 1 or 2 units that she rents, and she’s very progressive and she really, really wanted to have at least one Section 8 voucher holder as a tenant. She started applying to be in the program and she gave up. She said it was just so convoluted and onerous she just couldn’t get through the process and so she stopped. That should not ever happen.

Chan: First of all, I would like to see the expansion of Section 8 program, meaning increasing rental subsidies to go to more people, and inclusive of middle income. Right now there’s not enough resources for the Bay Area, so I’d like to see more of it.

Chakrabarti: We should double it. But, I think right now we’re too reliant on Section 8 vouchers alone as being an anti-displacement measure. And so we can’t just have demand-side protections. We also have to have supply-side. And that’s why I called for federal investment in building out social housing.

ML: People living in HUD buildings across San Francisco like Thomas Paine in the Fillmore or Alice Griffith in the Bayview often deal with broken elevators, mold, and other maintenance issues. What would you do to help them?

Wiener: This is what happened when Ronald Reagan dramatically scaled back that program and the federal investment in it. We saw public housing around the country start deteriorating. 

In San Francisco we’ve done a lot of work to renovate, but also to replace some of this housing. In Sunnydale, we are also seeing replacement of very rundown public housing by beautiful new housing for those residents. It’s important that the residents there have a place to live while the construction is happening and then are able to go back at the same rent. 

I was able to deliver funding for the Sunnydale Hub, which is a huge community center. People can stay in shape and play sports, but there’s also the Boys and Girls Club and childcare. I was able to get state funding to help complete that project, which is now open and it’s beautiful and amazing. 

You also want to make sure that as you rebuild public housing, you are including the amenities that people need to succeed. That needs to include a grocery store because, particularly in our southeastern neighborhoods, in Bayview-Hunters Point, there’s a food desert. 

The federal government should absolutely be financially supporting these efforts.

Chan: Chinatown Community Development Corporation is a great partner to the city. They took over the management of public housing like Ping Yuen. That’s the model that I would like to see more. 

[Community development corporations are non-profits that support low income people in a neighborhood or town. They are often involved in affordable housing development.]

I was just in D.C. and as a part of the North America Building Trades Conference. I met with some of the community development corporation leaders nationwide, having some of those preliminary discussions about what we can do as a model in terms of federal regulation and federal policy. 

We can expand both in the development model as well as once these housing developments are completed how can we have ongoing partnership to maintain them and stabilize rent. That is the way that I envision we can do better with, you know, a lot of people call them projects and now we’re saying that these are public housing. 

Like Alice Griffith, how do we make sure that we maintain a quality of living in the living environment and continue to maintain, make capital improvements of these spaces and stabilize rents for tenants and have a long term and sustainable, safe and quality living environment for them?

Chakrabarti: There’s two things I can do in the federal government. One, in some cases, you actually do see private managers of these buildings who are at fault and you have to actually hold them accountable for maintenance. They’re just simply not doing it even when they have the funds. And I’ll use the power of congressional oversight to hold them accountable. 

The second piece is with something like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, I’m essentially talking about setting up a permanent operating fund, not just for the development, but also for the maintenance of these buildings. 

One of the big problems with how we’ve done maintenance for HUD buildings, which has been a disaster for years, is it’s reliant on constant new federal appropriations from the government to fund any sort of maintenance. And so you see tons of deferred maintenance over years and we are in completely substandard living standards right now.

ML: In the Road to Housing Act, an amendment was added that would ban institutions from owning more than 350 single family homes. Do you support that amendment? Why or why not?   

Wiener: Yes. Having mass ownership by corporations, by private equity of single family homes is problematic and so there should be limits on it. And the Road to Housing Act I think is a reasonable limit. 

In California, we have not seen rampant institutional ownership of single family homes. Typically rented homes are owned by an individual renting out their own home or they might own a small number of homes. 

Having rental stock, whether it’s multi-unit or single family is important. Not everyone is in a position to own and we want to make sure that there is a rental market and that’s always included single family homes. 

[The senate version of the Road to Housing Act requires single family homes built expressly for renting to be sold within seven years.]

Chan: Absolutely. I absolutely support the practice of banning purchase of single family homes by private equity firms in that large scale. 

Blackstone private equity firms can come in and start buying up a whole block. We are seeing that happening, it is occurring in San Francisco. There are billionaires, there are firms buying up an entire block. We saw that in Fillmore [where a billionaire bought several storefronts]. It is something that I think it’s concerning and seeing that kind of buying power and what it can do to our neighborhoods one block at a time. 

Chakrabarti: Yes. Right now we are seeing private equity playing a huge role, especially in the single family housing market. They’re not a huge owner of the total number of single family homes but if you look at the transaction volume they’re starting to take up more and more of the transaction volume of single family homes. And they’re doing it to speculate on single family homes as part of their balance sheet. I don’t believe housing should be a commodity to be traded on Wall Street. It should be for people to live in.

ML: How will you get your housing agenda passed in Congress? 

Wiener: Two years before I got to the State Capital, David Chiu was elected to the State Assembly and I remember him telling me, ‘Oh, boy, it’s a little lonely, there aren’t that many members who are really into housing.’ 

By the time I got there in 2016, there were more of us, but it was still pretty limited. But we just got going. The day I was sworn into the State Senate, I introduced my first bill, SB 35, a housing law that has led to almost 5,000 affordable homes being built in San Francisco and more and more happening day by day, week by week, year by year. 

We created coalitions to support pro-housing bills. And then over time more and more members were elected who were intensely pro-housing and very focused on it and we grew our coalition. 

The same is true in Congress. Obviously, Congress is different than a state legislature. It’s bigger, it has different complexities. But there are more and more members of Congress who are passionate about housing and making it easier to build housing. The fact that the Road to Housing Act passed the Senate with 89 votes shows that it’s bipartisan. In the legislature, every major housing law that I passed has been supported by both Democratic Socialists and MAGA Republicans. 

The goal is to go in there, quickly learn the institution — which I did on the Board of Supervisors and I did in the State Senate — identify all of the members who care about housing, build those internal coalitions, build an external coalition, which also is forming at the federal level of amazing advocacy organizations that focus on pro-housing policies, and then start advancing policy proposals. 

And you’re not going to get them passed right away. Maybe lightning strikes, you never know, but it may take time. It could be years. But you keep working and you keep plugging away and you never give up. When you get knocked on your rear end, you just get right back up. You keep building the coalition, you expand it, you strengthen it and eventually you get things done. That’s what we’ve done in the legislature, and it’s what we’ll do in Congress.

Chan: When Senator Adam Schiff introduced the BOOM Act increasing federal dollar investments to build middle income housing and rental subsidies, I signed on to it and had legislation on a local level urging the passage of it in Congress. I do believe that Democrats in the House and Senate understand what Californians need and that we need investments in housing and we need federal dollar investments. 

There are things in the Road to Housing Act that I have questions about including prefabricated, modular housing. I have questions about that, I have questions about labor standards, are we upholding the labor standard nationwide? But otherwise, I think that you do see the understanding that we need to build housing, not just in San Francisco, but in rural areas too. 

A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, we just end up building housing in a rural area.’ I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, they need that too. We need housing in farm spaces too, even in California. Because our farm workers need housing. 

It’s not just housing, but we need infrastructure. We need better water utilities and power system. We need transit. All these things should be investments to go along with housing nationwide. That is not a red or blue state issue. It’s definitely every state that faces that challenge. And we need to be able to work together to accommodate that.

Chakrabarti: The status quo has been completely broken on housing, right? And part of the problem is we have a lot of corporate interests that profit off of the existing status quo. It’s very difficult to repeal the Faircloth Amendment because private developers don’t want that to happen. And the real estate lobby spends millions of dollars on campaign contributions to elect politicians who won’t make that happen. So any solution that’s large enough to tackle the housing crisis is going to require changing what’s politically possible in Washington, D.C.

I’m going to go into D.C., not just as a single vote, but as someone who’s going to try to support others who support this vision to primary not just Republicans, but also corporate Democrats who are not willing to go big enough on housing. 

I’m going to fight to change Democratic Party leadership, because the current party leadership wouldn’t support big ideas like this. 

Change is politically possible in DC, but it requires A) taking no corporate money, so you’re not beholden to current interests that are profiting off the system, and B), being willing to take the political risks to actually change the system in DC. That’s what I’m willing to do.