How Bloomberg, Sanders and Warren Responded to a Survey on Housing

March 3, 2020 En Sound Media Politics Comments Off on How Bloomberg, Sanders and Warren Responded to a Survey on Housing

Mike will:

  • Require Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to direct less of their taxpayer subsidy toward high-value mortgages, which the private market can serve, and more toward lower-income households — especially by supporting lending for multi-family units.

  • Engage the GSEs in other efforts to promote safe and sustainable homeownership for creditworthy low-income borrowers.

  • Ensure the interests of low-income mortgage borrowers are central to the ongoing debate about the future of Fannie and Freddie.

Mike will:

  • Update the Community Reinvestment Act to cover all lenders, and improve enforcement to ensure that banks are serving all communities in their assessment areas.

  • Enhance financial-literacy education at critical junctures, including high school.

  • Restore the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s payday lending rule, which would have curbed the business’s more predatory aspects but was reversed by the Trump administration. Empower the C.F.P.B. to oversee auto lending.

  • Order federally controlled and mandated mortgage guarantors to update their credit-scoring requirements, insist that scoring models be tested for racial bias, and encourage the use of alternative models.

Yes. Mike has a plan to create one million new black homeowners. He will:

  • Broaden access to basic financial services, including mortgage loans for creditworthy low-income households.

  • Direct Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) to prioritize lending for purchase of homes costing less than $70,000.

  • Provide federal matching funds to offer down-payment assistance to residents of the country’s 100 most disadvantaged communities.

  • Create a Housing Fairness Commission, funded with an initial $10 billion, to work with municipalities and nonprofits on testing policies aimed at reversing the effects of discrimination and expanding programs that work.

  • Order federally controlled and mandated mortgage guarantors to update their credit-scoring requirements, insist that scoring models be tested for racial bias, and to encourage the use of alternative models that use information such as bank-account history, rental payments, or mobile-phone payments to assess creditworthiness.

  • Enforce fair lending laws and keep gathering the data needed to do so.

  • Revive HUD’s efforts to enforce progress on housing desegregation (under its Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule) and ensure people’s right to challenge discriminatory policies in the courts (under its disparate impact rule).

Yes. From Mike’s Greenwood Initiative:

Many people in America suffer discrimination, but the African-American experience is unique. For centuries, black people were enslaved and forced to endure conditions worse than inhuman. Where slavery ended, mass incarceration began: To this day, one of the most notorious Southern plantations, Angola, remains one of the country’s most brutal prison camps. Where generous federal housing subsidies created a white middle class, black Americans were expressly excluded, instead crowded into neighborhoods where they were denied credit, starved of public investment and subject to financial predators — and to a large extent still are. The enduring legacy of this unconscionable history is reflected in the fact that, despite progress in closing education and employment gaps, the typical black household remains almost 10 times poorer than the typical white household.

Mike Bloomberg recognizes that the divide between black and white represents a deep, tragic flaw in the fabric of American society, one that must be addressed not only because it is morally unacceptable, but because it is preventing our whole nation from truly prospering. The black community is not a liability — it is one of the country’s greatest assets. To that end, Mike is making black Americans the focus of the first in a series of policies aimed at reversing the systematic discrimination that far too many Americans endure, based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. And while Mike recognizes that each group has its own unique history, the solutions he offers are not exclusive: They are primarily intended to benefit all disadvantaged groups.

Like Senator Sanders, Mike owns more than two homes.

No. Unlike Donald Trump, Mike’s not in the real estate business.

Mike rented a studio for about a decade, until the mid-1970s.

Improve the existing housing stock to revitalize communities, lower operating costs and cut carbon emissions:

  • Provide resources to help homeowners, building owners and tenants upgrade their homes to lower operating costs, save energy and eliminate pollution.

  • Provide funding for older Americans to modify their homes to be more accessible, allowing them to stay in their communities. Programs like CAPABLE are already demonstrating success at keeping seniors in their homes while lowering costs for the system.

  • Increase funding for energy retrofits through the Weatherization Assistance Program and ensure that the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program is fully funded to meet needs and is also designed to encourage efficiency improvements.

  • Expand nationally a successful New York City program to train building operators to identify low- and no-cost ways to save energy and train electricians and installers on energy- and cost-saving retrofits.

  • Create an Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant program to work with contractors, manufacturers, construction unions and retailers to retrofit homes and buildings to lower operating costs in new affordable housing units.

  • Make safety and health a priority in rehabilitating low-income housing, providing standard energy-efficiency upgrades, adding appropriate ventilation, etc.

Empower cities to combat the affordability crisis at home:

  • Build on President Obama’s “Strong Cities, Strong Communities” initiative by driving an interagency effort from the White House to build upon the capacity of local governments to develop and execute their plans, access technical support and get the resources they need when they need them.

  • Encourage the development of Regional Housing Initiatives to better integrate efforts at the state and city levels by launching competitions for federal funding.

  • Support efforts to widen participation in decision-making, especially by underrepresented groups and those most affected by the policies under review. Put new emphasis on data, transparency and accountability.

  • Require participating cities to collect data on affordable housing and homelessness in order to improve our ability to respond to the crisis and learn from best practices on what works.

  • Invest in data and technology infrastructure to help cities collaborate, spend money wisely and invest in what works.

Address affordability by raising incomes for Americans:

  • Raise the Earned Income Tax Credit — especially for workers without dependent children — and further enhance the EITC in especially hard-pressed areas. Pilot a program to pay EITC benefits by direct deposit, to ensure that the benefits are easily accessible for recipients to save or spend.

  • Increase the Child Tax Credit for the poorest families and make it fully refundable.

  • Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and tie it in later years to growth in median earnings.

Renter tax credit: Yes

National rent control: Yes

Just-cause requirement for evictions: Yes

Ban on source-of-income discrimination: Yes

Make Section 8 an entitlement: Yes

Federal down payment assistance: Yes

Mortgage interest tax deduction: Yes

Tax incentives for developers in distressed neighborhoods: No

Repealing the Faircloth Amendment: Yes

Ban shelter discrimination against transgender people: Yes

Renter tax credit

A renter tax credit must be paired with rent control to ensure it is not a windfall for real estate investors. Landlords cannot be allowed to raise rents to whatever they want, whenever they want, and then have the federal government subsidize those rent increases.

National rent control legislation

Bernie’s parents never made much money, but they were able to keep a roof over their heads because they lived in a rent-controlled apartment. Landlords cannot be allowed to raise rents to whatever they want, whenever they want. We need national rent control.

In America today, more than two-thirds of states pre-empt or limit the ability of their communities to establish rent control or stabilization rules to protect the American people against excessive increases in rent. That has got to change. We need to establish a national rent control standard and allow cities and states to go even further to protect tenants from the skyrocketing price of housing.

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