A BIPARTISAN GROUP OF FOUR LEADING HOUSING authorities recently published a housing policy treatise that calls for the political parties to put partisan politics aside to solve the nation’s affordable housing crisis.
The book, Opportunity and Progress: A Bipartisan Platform for National Housing Policy, was published by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and co-authored by Henry Cisneros, Jack Kemp, Kent Colton, and Nicolas Retsinas. Cisneros served as HUD Secretary during the first Clinton administration; Kemp was HUD Secretary under President George H. Bush; Colton is senior scholar at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and was the NAHB’s CEO from 1984 to 1999; and Retsinas is current director of the Joint Center.
The authors offer 12 recommendations:
- End chronic homelessness.
- Redirect public housing funding streams.
- Protect and expand the Housing Choice Voucher program.
- Establish a national housing trust fund.
- Eliminate regulatory barriers to the production of workforce housing.
- Enact a federal homeownership tax credit.
- Create incentives for employers to provide housing assistance.
- Preserve the affordability of privately owned multifamily rental housing.
- Redefine the affordable housing mission for government-sponsored enterprises.
- Prohibit predatory lending.
- Institute university-based programs to train the nation’s housing professionals.
- Enforce the nation’s fair housing and fair lending laws.
To learn more about the book, visit www.jchs.harvard.edu. The book costs $20 for a single copy.
