House Republicans Tackle Homeownership Affordability Crisis During Conservative Trifecta
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a new and exclusive episode of the Republican Study Committee’s Right to the Point podcast, Rep. Marlin Stutzman (IN-03) is joined by Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill (AR-02) and Rep.Mike Flood (NE-01) to make the case for critical legislation to expand the national housing supply and enable the American Dream of homeownership.
The episode, titled "Extreme Home Makeover: Road to Affordable Homeownership Edition," dives into the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, the bipartisan work of the House Financial Services Committee to identify the many factors that drove homeownership out of reach for a generation of Americans and seek common ground to address these problems, and why now is the best time to get it done.
Listen to the latest episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Read highlights from the episode below:
Rep. Marlin Stutzman: “We talk about so many different issues and regulations in the Financial Services Committee, and it kind of gets tedious at times. It impacts every American, every person in the country. Either you're trying to accomplish the American dream into buying a home, or you just need a place to live and to rent, you know? In the meantime, maybe you choose not to buy, maybe you choose to rent. But these are all such important issues that we deal with on the [Financial Services] committee.”
Chairman French Hill: “I do empathize with young people. I was probably 30 buying my first house in Dallas, Texas. This was in the Reagan administration, and Reagan inherited a depression when he became the president. The prime interest rate 20% fixed 30 year rates for housing were 15 to 17%. I was able to buy my home in Dallas because of an innovation which was an adjustable rate mortgage, which got a terrible name in the financial crisis. But this is, you know, generation one adjustable rate mortgage with no strings attached. It basically said in a 15% market environment, their opening was six and a half and it stair stepped over three years.”
Rep. Mike Flood: “When we started this process, we brought in everybody from the Habitat from Humanity and Huntsville, Alabama, to the Mayor of San Diego to the Republican mayor of a city in Ohio, Lincoln, Little Rock, Kansas City, all of these different agencies came in and uniformly, without regard to their red state, blue state status, their political affiliation. They said, we've got to pair back some of these regulations. And Emanuel Cleaver, to his credit, was with us and by extension, the ranking member of the whole committee, Maxine Waters. Now, did we get everything we wanted? No, but that's a negotiation. We got enough to move this forward. And I would say, if you're listening to this, watching this podcast in 1905, you could order a two story home out of the Sears catalog. Pre-built today, you couldn't do that.”