The Briefing Room: The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act

To go, I guess, to the, to the topic o- of this episode, which is this pretty broad, sweeping piece of federal legislation that you played some significant roles in.

When you were county executive, and I'm gonna mention when you were MACO president, Dom, but when you were with MACO, a lot of the talk was land use zoning happens really local.

The state has goals, and remember there was this, the two hats back and forth, you know, local, state.

And we always used to look at the feds as a source of resources we could pull down.

Mm-hmm.

The Road to Housing Act represents a real pivot around, I think, helping increase production, to, to your point.

Mm-hmm.

So could you just give some broad brushstrokes about some of the things that make up... 'cause there's a lot, what makes up the act?

Yeah.

And how do you think this really matters to us at the local level?

Well, interestingly, it is the one big thing that Congress got done that was bipartisan and that I think actually lowers costs, where will, will help move the ball forward, and it won't happen overnight.

But I think it sort of speaks to this notion that it's not a p- housing is not a partisan issue.

It really cuts across Democratic and Republican interests, and that we can come together.

So it was overwhelmingly passed by, by Congress, and at a high level, the 21st Road to s- 21st Century Road to Housing Act, it's really just about building more housing, making housing more affordable.

And, and so that's everything from streamlining permitting processes to helping communities increase their supply, putting some of the resources in place, making it easier to finance different kinds of housing deals, putting forward investments for repair and affordable housing, and really just generally making better use of some of the properties that are already, already there.

And I think what I love about the package is that it recognizes that there's no single silver bullet for the housing crisis.

One thing alone is not going to solve the, the challenge.

So we, we know that we need to build more.

We have to make it easier and less expensive to build.

We need to be creative around existing housing s- stock.

We have to address issues around infrastructure, as we already mentioned, and that is ultimately how we start bringing down costs.

More, more homes, more choices, more opportunity to find a place they can actually call home.

I think it's interesting also that this seems to be Congress acknowledging that the federal funds that we draw down at our level are complicated, and trying to make it less complicated across the board to use it in different ways.

You know, I don't know if you have anything you wanna comment about that, but I think that's huge to us is this idea that we're gonna make our federal money easier for you to spend in the ways you wanna do it.

Well, again, it's why it's helpful to actually have spent time in state and local government, right? So I understand how programs like HOME and CDBG, working with you and your team, Terry, how that actually gets deployed on the streets.