‘Hallelujah Happy’: Cleaver touts funding for affordable housing in Biden spending bill
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver has a photo of his Texas childhood home in his Congressional office. It’s a two-room house that didn’t have electricity, where he lived before moving to public housing. He likes for people to see it when they come in.
“Housing is the most impactful for the country,” Cleaver said earlier this month when it appeared funding for affordable housing might be in jeopardy. “I know as well, maybe better, than anyone up here.”
So Cleaver on Thursday said he was “hallelujah happy” at the $150 billion for affordable housing that remained in the Biden administration’s social spending package making its way through Congress.
“There is no question that I would have preferred to stick with the original $3.5 trillion proposal released earlier this year,” Cleaver said. “However, I would have to be crazy to say that I am anything less than hallelujah happy to see $150 billion for affordable housing in the Build Back Better framework released today.”
For the past three months, Democrats have battled over what to include in the far-reaching spending bill intended to cover wide swaths of Biden’s agenda, from increasing access to healthcare, to addressing climate change and funding universal pre-Kindergarten.
On Thursday, the White House released the framework of a smaller $1.75 trillion bill, the product of negotiations with progressive Democrats and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. The two conservative Democrats had refused to support the larger spending package.
While several provisions, like incentives for companies to move away from fossil fuels, paid family leave and free community college appear to have been sliced from the bill, funding for affordable housing remained — albeit at smaller levels than originally proposed.
Around $65 billion would go directly toward building and maintaining public housing throughout the country with another $15 billion for the National Housing Trust Fund, a program that helps build and preserve housing for people with low incomes. The money could build or preserve around 150,000 rental homes, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Of the $15 billion from the Housing Trust Fund, around $96.2 million could go to Kansas and another $242.7 million to Missouri.
The bill also contains $25 billion in rental assistance (down from $90 billion in the original). The money would boost a program that helps people with low-incomes pay rent. Around 75 percent of those eligible for rental assistance do not receive it, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
Some of the money in rental assistance is allocated to the Housing Choice Voucher Program, which Will Fischer, senior director for housing policy and research at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, said is effective at decreasing homelessness and overcrowding.
“Vouchers are well targeted to help low wage workers or very low income seniors or people with disabilities to be able to afford housing when often they wouldn’t be able to afford rent in the market without assistance,” Fischer said.
Around 11 percent of those who use the voucher program live in rural areas, according to Fischer. It means the bill could help address affordable housing issues facing rural communities where new construction can often be expensive. The bill also contains around $2 billion for housing assistance programs run through the USDA.
The programs have been underfunded for the past 20 years, said Robert Rapoza, a lobbyist for the National Rural Housing Coalition. While the program has financed 2 million home mortgages since it was created in 1962, Rapoza said, now it only finances about 7,000 mortgages a year.
“One of the impediments to economic development or growth in many rural areas is a lack of decent housing,” Rapoza said. “People drive 1-2 hours to get to a job, you have businesses that say they can’t hire people because people can’t find a place to live.”
Rapoza called the proposed funding the most significant investment in rural housing he’s seen in 40 years.
Cleaver celebrated the bill as the single largest investment in affordable housing in the nation’s history, saying it would help create 1 million affordable homes and assist tenants in paying rent.
“For decades, our nation has underfunded affordable housing programs, which has limited the potential of countless families, particularly those in the Black and Brown communities, from climbing the economic ladder and realizing the American dream,” Cleaver said.
Cleaver said he is excited to vote for the bill, but it is unclear when it will be put up for a vote.
Sharice Davids and Medicaid
While Cleaver advocated for affordable housing, Kansas Rep. Sharice Davids promoted increased access to healthcare. One of the provisions she pushed for — allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, was dropped for lack of support in the Senate.
In a call with reporters on Wednesday, Davids said she often heard “heartbreaking” stories about people who could not afford their medication. Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, she said, would bring down costs and is popular in her district.
“This is something that would save the government billions,” Davids said.
The bill would, however, attempt to provide coverage for people in states that have not approved expanded Medicaid.
Davids has been pursuing the issue for years, seeing a federal solution as a way to get more Kansans access to health insurance. The state has failed to pass legislation that would allow those who make less than 138 percent of the federal poverty line ($36,570 for a family of four in 2021) to qualify for Medicaid.
Residents of states that haven’t expanded Medicaid (like Kansas) would be eligible for a stipend to help pay for their insurance through the federal healthcare exchange. Originally, lawmakers proposed that people would be eligible for stipends until the federal government created a program to provide them with access to Medicaid.
“Hundreds of thousands of Kansans are uninsured simply because state politicians are choosing to leave money on the table and leave them out in the cold,” Davids said. “I’m glad to see that the framework released today includes a federal strategy to close the Medicaid coverage gap.”
The latest proposal ditches the permanent federal program. Manchin, a roadblock to several provisions in the bill, said he was concerned a federal program would be unfair to states that had expanded Medicaid on their own.
This story was originally published October 29, 2021 at 5:00 AM.