00:00Thanks. Brandon Peterson with Punchbowl News. I wanted to ask a little bit about some of the action we've seen in the Senate. The Senate has historically been an obstacle to federal housing policy, but the Senate Banking Committee put together a big bipartisan housing bill called the Road to Housing last month. I wanted to see if you guys have any reaction to that, as well as like the scope of the bill. It's a lot of small to midsize changes to housing, just throwing a lot of them at the housing system. How do you guys feel about that approach and lessons
00:30to be taken from the Senate? I think first, them just taking a big kind of swing or a butt swing, I guess, at the problem is, at least it shows that they know that they have a problem they want to address. The keynote speaker for the summit was Ruben Gallego, who sits on the committee, on the finance committee in the Senate. And one of the things he was stressing is that, you know, in California, we need to deal with some of the regulatory issues
00:59issues, which we all agree that the state legislature and the governor have tried to address. And I was when I was there, I was trying to address it. But it took them kind of years to get that to a point. He mentioned something regarding, they're kind of boxed in also by federal lands. And how do you deal with that? So I think some of the stuff that we can get done, we should get done. Stuff that doesn't cost money, stuff that will move the ball forward. But if we really want the scale, we're going to have to have
01:29investments in the billions and investments in the billions of billions of dollars. I asked one of the questions I asked, what do we need? And I think, how much would we need? The last in the low income housing tax credit, that expansion included about 16, about 15 to 16 billion. That would build about 1.2 million units over the next several years, 10 years, still too small.
01:55So that's why it's like, Congress is not going to be able to, like, we're going to play a role. But then a lot of it is also has to be done at the local level to streamline a lot of their regulations. If they're choking development, that's still going to impact the supply.
02:11Greg Kossar mentioned Austin. I want to go visit Austin because it's the only place that I've been able to find that has changed some of their zoning to allow more density to be built, thereby bending the price curve on rents. Only place.
02:29But imagine if we were doing that nationwide where you can bend the price curve on rents. But that means you need supply.
02:35So at least they got something done. We'd love to see the House get something done. It wasn't as much as I would like.
02:43And the main problem is a lot of times it does end up on the cutting room floor. But it's at least a step forward on the Senate side.
02:53I support the, I commend the Senate Banking Committee for prioritizing housing to an extent that we have not seen before from the Senate in Washington, D.C.
03:03And, you know, I'm proudly pro-abundance and I see it as a pro-abundance legislation because it's going to remove arbitrary regulatory barriers to creating affordable housing at a time when we have a housing deficit of 7 million units for the lowest income Americans.
03:18So it seems to me that housing abundance is neither Democratic nor Republican. It's neither progressive nor conservative.
03:24It's simply effective, efficient governance. It's about a government that can build.
03:30And he's absolutely correct. And one of my things is, like, if you say you're going to build up a certain number of units but it's going to take too long, well, that's a problem.
03:40If it's not a big enough investment, that's a problem.
03:43If each unit costs $800,000, well, that's a problem.
03:47Or even a million dollars in D.C.
03:48Yeah, exactly. Well, in L.A., those 800,000 units of...
03:52We might as well buy the home outright.
03:54Exactly. Or buy them a home somewhere else.
03:58So we have to think differently.
04:00And I think it's partly that Democrats have, I believe, come to grasp the severity of the issue.
04:08And that it just creates a lot of economic turmoil plus turmoil in our political system itself.
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