Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey is taking issue with high housing prices and believes federal policy is part of the reason to blame.
He spoke during a Senate Banking Committee hearing this week and said not much has changed over the last fifty years.
“In 1970, 52 years ago, the home ownership rate was 64 percent. Today, maybe trillions of dollars later, it’s 65 percent. Black home ownership levels are almost the same as when the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968,” Toomey said. “These government policies have run up a lot of debt, but mostly they’ve just made houses more expensive.”
Toomey advocated for a few policies he believes would cut down on prices.
“To improve housing affordability for both renters and home owners, we should favor policies that leverage the power of free enterprise,” Toomey said. “We should phase out demand-sized subsidies like down payment assistance and focus FHA on a narrow subset of barrowers.”
He also encouraged the Biden administration to cut tariffs on steel, lumber, and aluminum in order to reduce construction costs.
