Remarks by NHC’s President and CEO David M. Dworkin at the National Housing Conference’s 2024 Housing Visionary Awards Gala.
Good evening and welcome! Thank you for joining us tonight to recognize the work of our distinguished honorees who are dedicated to transforming communities through bipartisan housing solutions. They represent the heart and soul of NHC’s vision of an America where everyone is able to live in a quality, affordable home in a thriving community.
We are also joined by many of the people who work every day to make this vision a reality. I want to acknowledge just a few of them: Acting HUD Secretary Adrianne Todman, FHFA Director Sandra Thompson, FDIC Director Jonathan McKiernan, Acting Ginnie Mae president Sam Valverde, Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.), Representative Darin LaHood (R-Ill.), two dozen bipartisan staffers from the House and Senate, and officers from the White House, HUD, Ginnie Mae, Treasury, the OCC, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the FDIC, FHFA, CFPB, and USDA.
Tonight’s celebration would not be possible without the generous support of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Rocket Mortgage, Wells Fargo, and many others. Thank you for your commitment to affordable housing and the work of the National Housing Conference. Thank you all for working together to develop tangible, impactful, and achievable solutions to our affordable housing crisis.
And a crisis it is. Today, according the NHC’s Paycheck to Paycheck database, the annual income needed to afford a typically priced home in the United States has doubled over the past four years. Whether you are from Little Rock, Arkansas, where a police officer cannot afford to buy a median priced home, or Boise, Idaho, where a paramedic cannot afford to rent a two bedroom apartment, or in Denver, where a high school teacher can’t afford to rent a one bedroom apartment.
The reason for this is not complicated. The law of supply and demand cannot be repealed or circumvented. A recent analysis by Freddie Mac found that the U.S. housing market is short at least 1.5 million units, about half for sale and half for rent. Other estimates are higher. We cannot wish our way out of this. We have to build our way out.
Politically, this issue has rarely been more prominent. According to a poll by the National Housing Conference and the Bipartisan Policy Center, to be released this week, 65% of adults say home prices in their community are less affordable and over half expect them to continue to rise. At least half of both Democrats and Republicans believe Congress should approve bipartisan legislation to deal with the housing affordability crisis.
In another poll conducted by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, 56% of voters between 18 and 29 said housing was the most important issue facing the U.S. today. Over half of Republicans agreed.
In this room, we have the knowledge, experience, and political skills necessary to solve America’s housing crisis. We know how to succeed. By working together. And that means compromising – not on our principles, or even our priorities, but on what we can do now and what we can continue to advocate for later. And we have done it. And I mean us, the people in this room.
In 2020, the world was hit with a devastating, once in a century pandemic. More than a million people died in this country alone. And millions more were at risk of losing their homes along with their jobs as the world shut down. There were a wide range of viewpoints on how we should protect them, and disagreement among housing advocates could have easily delayed support, or worse.
NHC brought together a diverse group of stakeholders to develop principles on how rental assistance would be spent, so that we all could work together to advocate for the maximum amount of federal support to keep people in their homes when they couldn’t pay their rent through no fault of their own. Landlords and tenant advocates worked together, and as a result, the federal government spent $46 billion in emergency rental assistance to cover 10 million rental payments.
We led the coalition to enact the Homeowner Assistance Fund, which helped 240,000 people keep their homes. And in the past year, when a flawed regulation on bank capital risked making it even harder for first-time homebuyers to afford a mortgage, NHC formed another unlikely coalition with the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Mortgage Bankers Association and the National Association of REALTORS® to successfully urge regulators to reconsider their approach.
Partisan, one sided approaches to the larger affordability crisis have not worked. A major step towards closing the rental housing gap has already made progress. The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act would create 200,000 additional units of affordable rental housing. It passed the House 357 to 70. The Senate must take up this bill.
And the Neighborhood Homes Investment Act, which would build and rehab thousands of affordable houses for first-time homebuyers has 85 cosponsors in the House, half of whom are Republicans. In the Senate, it has 15 cosponsors, including 7 Republicans.
In the months ahead, we will have opportunities to pass legislation to address this crisis. But some of our priorities will not be included. We should not be deterred in fighting for what we believe in, but we must be united in supporting those initiatives that can be achieved now.
We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If we can do this, we will refine our skills in working together and have a better opportunity to do more later.
Nothing succeeds like success.
And that brings us to our celebration tonight. Our honorees share one major quality in common – a passion for working across traditional political lines to get things done.
Tia Boatman Patterson has personified this principal throughout her career at the California Housing Finance Authority, the Executive Office of the President, and most recently leading the California Community Reinvestment Corporation.
The bipartisan group of Congressional Leaders of Affordable Housing Tax Policy have worked together to put housing affordability near the top of the Congressional agenda despite so much partisanship on other issues. They are a model of how we can all work together.
And Joe Ventrone, whose five-decade commitment to housing issues has been an exemplary journey of service and leadership, leaving an indelible mark on affordable housing initiatives nationwide.
We appreciate your work and are proud to recognize all of you for your ongoing commitment to solving our nation’s housing challenges. Thank you.