One Democrat Votes Against Landmark Housing Bill Even Republicans Back
Source: The New Republic · Bias: Left
Summary
The Senate passed a landmark housing bill Thursday with a rare show of bipartisan support, but one Democrat still voted “no.”Brian Schatz of Hawaii was the lone Democrat to vote against the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which would create incentives to build new homes, launch a program to turn abandoned buildings into housing, and ban Wall Street from purchasing single-family homes, among other long overdue reforms.Co-sponsored by Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican Tim Scott, it passed 89-10, with all of the “no” votes coming from Republicans except Schatz. Why? Schatz gave a clue that he wasn’t happy with the bill Wednesday, claiming on the Senate floor that “there is a problem” with the bill.“It was written in such a way that it was trying to capture the hedge fund problem, but they wrote it wrong,” Schatz said, citing a provision in the bill that requires large institutional investors to sell their rental properties to families after seven years. He claimed that the legislation defines such investors as for-profit organizations that own over 350 single-family homes, not just hedge funds.Warren disagreed, and said Schatz was mischaracterizing the kind of businesses that own more than 350 homes, and that they could still build as much as they want.“Private equity can build as many multi-family homes as they want, as many apartment buildings as they want, and as many single-family buildings as they want,” the Massachusetts senator told HuffPost. “They can suck up all of the tax benefits that they’re currently entitled to, with the one exception that after seven years of benefits, private equity has to take those single-family homes and make them available for families to buy.”Evidently Schatz’s concerns were enough to get him to vote against the bill, which now heads to the House with its narrow Republican majority. The fact that so many Republicans supported it in the Senate is a good sign, but it still faces an uncertain future in the House and with President Trump, who reportedly told Speaker Mike Johnson that “no one gives a [bleep] about housing” earlier this week. But either way, Schatz appears to be in a very small minority allied with Wall Street, one even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent isn’t a part of.
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