Republicans: Affordable housing isn’t just the Democrats’ issue

Expanding affordable housing is commonly considered a Democratic issue. But the issue is tailor-made for Republican approaches to policymaking — and Republicans in Congress should seize this opportunity.

A renewed Republican focus on affordable housing is a must because the shortage of affordable homes is affecting Democratic and Republican areas alike, and because Americans of all political stripes consider the problem one that Washington should try to fix.

More particularly, 77 percent of Republicans consider it important that the federal government addresses homelessness, while 75 percent said the same about high housing costs that help drive inflation, according to a recent Morning Consult poll. Most Republicans also support funding to help preserve affordable rental homes in rural communities, address the shortage of skilled home construction workers and ensure all homeless veterans are connected with permanent, affordable housing.

As outlined in more detail below, an effective Republican response would include tax incentives to encourage much greater private investment in affordable housing production and preservation. That would help achieve such Republican priorities as putting more people to work (by building more homes), spurring upward mobility as more Americans have stable housing with which to pursue the American Dream and combating inflation (shelter costs account for nearly half of the increase in the Consumer Price Index, according to the latest findings of the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

The affordable housing problem is big and growing. Nearly half (21.6 million) of all renters are now considered “cost-burdened” because, as Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies has reported, they spend at least 30 percent of their income on housing. Of the 1.2 million increase in cost-burdened renters since 2021, 1.1 million spent more than half of their income on housing.

Republican states and districts are not immune. Rents soared by 24 percent in Florida’s biggest metropolitan areas in 2022, at least a third of renters in Ohio are spending 35 percent or more of their income on rent and other housing costs in 42 of 88 counties, and affordable apartments in Boise, Idaho are among the hardest to find in the country.

A Republican focus on addressing the problem would hardly be a radical departure for the party. As recently as 2016, the GOP platform said the American Dream “means a decent place to live, a safe place to raise kids, [and] a welcoming place to retire” and proposed reforms to federal housing programs.

Nearly three decades earlier, Jack Kemp, President George H. W. Bush’s housing and urban development secretary, established a program to encourage public housing tenants to buy their apartments, launched efforts to fight housing discrimination, sought tax incentives to revitalize troubled neighborhoods and proposed removing regulatory barriers that impede the construction of new affordable homes.

To boost economic growth and expand prosperity for low- and moderate-income families, Republicans today should support the following steps:

First, increase the production of affordable housing. The United States has “underbuilt” housing by millions of homes since the Great Recession of 2008, contributing to high costs in both the rental and homeownership sectors of the market, but policymakers can help build and rehabilitate more than 2.5 million homes over the next ten years.

To do so, they should expand the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), which encourages private investors to build and rehabilitate rental homes for those with incomes below certain levels; create a new tax credit to encourage private investment in owner-occupied homes in distressed areas; and create competitive grants to encourage states and localities to eliminate unnecessary barriers to building affordable housing.

Second, preserve the existing stock of affordable housing. Preserving the existing affordable housing stock is more critical than ever because it’s generally less expensive and more cost-effective than building more affordable housing, and it prevents the displacement of families from their homes.

Policymakers should ensure that affordable rental homes that are financed by the LIHTC remain affordable “in perpetuity” rather than allowing affordability requirements to expire; expand the Rental Assistance Demonstration program to preserve and improve more public housing units; empower the U.S. Agriculture Department to preserve more affordable multifamily rental housing in rural areas; and support the preservation and continued affordability of manufactured housing.

Third, help families afford and access housing. Federal rental assistance is essential to housing stability for millions of low-income families, but fewer than 1 in 4 eligible households get such assistance due to limited federal funding. Meanwhile, owning a home is increasingly out of reach for millions of families, particularly Black and Hispanic households, and that helps widen the racial wealth gap.

Policymakers should provide incentives for landlords to increase the number of rental units for which they will accept housing vouchers; fund additional vouchers for families with young children so they can move to communities with better schools and greater opportunities; increase rental and other assistance for families facing eviction; remove barriers to building transitional housing for veterans; and develop new wealth-building products that allow lower-income borrowers to build up equity in their homes in a more rapid but sustainable way.

In essence, today’s housing affordability crisis cries out for Republican approaches to policymaking. Republicans should seize this opportunity and make affordable housing a top GOP priority. The party will benefit as will millions of our fellow Americans.

Scott Brown is a former U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. Carlos Curbelo is a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida. Both are Republicans and members of the Advisory Committee of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s J. Ronald Terwilliger Center for Housing Policy.