Source: United States House of Representatives – Congressman Jimmy Gomez (CA-34)
I really want to just appreciate the work that my colleagues have done. The question about affordability, I don’t need statistics to tell me that people are struggling. Because I grew up in a family of immigrant parents for my siblings were born in Mexico.
And they came here to work hard and to develop a better life for themselves and their kids. And they were able to buy a home, but still had to work four to five jobs a week to make ends meet, to put food on the table, to pay the mortgage.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have health insurance at the time. And we were always one crisis away from going under and losing that house. But here’s the thing, my parents thought, you own a home, you’ve made it in the United States. You own a home, you have security and stability.
And then your kids are going to be able to come back if need be, or they were inherent at home to build wealth and stability. So when I was about 39 years old, yes, 39, I bought my first house in Los Angeles. It was a lot of money back then. It’s even more today.
But my mom was more proud that when I bought that home than when I graduated from Harvard University. That’s what a home means. It means that the American dream is alive and well. But today, more people know that buying a home is out of reach.
And that comes for the fact that it’s no longer affordable. More people are renting, paying 30% of their incomes towards rent. More people are trying to buy a home, but then instead of buying it in their late 20s or early 30s or buying it in their 40s.
And parents now, because of that, believe that their children are going to be worse off than they were. So no longer is it believe that the next generation is going to inherit the idea that you work hard enough, you will do better, and your kids will do better. So housing and the housing affordability crisis is a big part of that.
That’s why we held the first ever congressional summit on the national housing affordability crisis in September, bringing together advocates from the renters, to the homeowners, to the developers to find a way forward. And this bill, the American Affordability Act, is a part of that moving forward.
Because it puts into place a lot of different pieces of legislation that we worked on in ways it means over the last several, I would say, last four years, including a bill to convert property, underused commercial and office real estate to housing, to provide down payment assistance to first time home buyers, to provide builders incentives to build starter homes across the country that will be affordable, not be big, but affordable, that they can actually afford to get into that first home.
We were trying to create a 21st century housing boom that will rival what we saw after World War II. And if we do that, we will bend the cost curve on housing and make America more affordable for everyone.
Donald Trump likes to talk about it, but he’s never going to do it. Just like when he talked about the infrastructure week, every week when I first got here, I never delivered. Well the Democrats, when we get back to Gavils, we will deliver and make America not only great again, but affordable again.
With that, I’ll like to hand it over to Jimmy Panetta, who is my colleague in Northern California.