Washington’s plan to ease the housing crisis

0:00Sylvia Hui:Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. We've seen a real loss of those lower costs, rental units of those entry point homes, of those middle price homes. We need that production really to happen across the scale. A bipartisan bill to bring down the cost of housing passed nearly unanimously in the Senate. What will it do to make housing more affordable?

0:51Sylvia Hui:It's Tuesday, June 23rd, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.

1:00Sylvia Hui:Today on the show, a punishing heat wave sweeps Europe. We'll look at what the continent has learned since the 2003 heat wave that killed tens of thousands of people there. And religious freedom is back before the Supreme Court. Today, the justices ruled against a Rastafarian man who had his dreadlocks forcibly shaved by prison guards.

1:22Vincent Reina:So you could say it's about race, or you could say that it's about hostility from the majority to prisoners suing about their own conditions of confinement.

1:37Sylvia Hui:More on that in about 15 minutes. But first, America has a housing crisis. There are not enough homes, and those that aren't available are not affordable to everyone who wants one. Housing prices and rents have risen much faster than incomes, and the pace of building just hasn't kept up with demand. Americans know this. A recent Gallup poll found the share of Americans who expect to buy a home within five years has dropped to 25%, the lowest they've measured since they began asking that question in 2013. And while many of the fixes for America's housing crisis will have to be local, this week Congress took a federal step toward addressing the problem.

2:19Sylvia Hui:Here's how Senator Elizabeth Warren described the bill that she co-sponsored. The bill we're passing today sends a clear message to every American struggling to find a place they can afford. Elected leaders understand the problem and are actually doing something to try to solve it. That bill now heads to the House of Representatives. For more on what's in the bill, we called up Vincent Reyna, professor of urban economics and planning at the University of Pennsylvania. He told Peter O'Dowd he agrees with Senator Warren that it's the most significant federal housing legislation in decades. Yeah, this is quite a comprehensive set of legislation.

2:58Sylvia Hui:I mean, there are well over 40 provisions in this legislation. It really pulls together actually kind of a whole bunch of bills and ideas that people have been proposing for quite some time and have on their own actually had bipartisan support often and kind of brought them together to one big comprehensive bill. Let's tick through some of the key provisions here in this bill. The biggest one, the one that's getting the most headlines, would limit large institutional investors from owning more than 350 single-family homes. Senator Tim Scott is a Republican. Here's how he put it yesterday.

3:32Vincent Reina:Houses should be for people and not for corporations.

3:37Sylvia Hui:Okay, that echoes almost verbatim what we've heard from President Trump in the past. Do you think it's good policy? Look, there's a legitimate concern that banks and firms have access to cheaper capital and economies of scale that the everyday purchaser or renter does not have access to. So by virtue of that alone, they are going to be able to outcompete folks and essentially acquire properties that could have been a first-time home purchase for someone and potentially charge rents that are at market or even above market. The reality is, though, that banning those investors from those purchases on its own doesn't necessarily solve the problem.

4:13Sylvia Hui:We need people to be able to access capital to purchase homes. We need capital to actually go into repairing those homes. So all to say is that the concern about being outcompeted is legitimate, but we also have to kind of pair that with a broader sense of programs and opportunities for folks to actually be able to then access high-quality homes. I was in Nevada earlier this year reporting on an effort there. It was a state effort at the legislature to limit corporate ownership. And economists in Nevada weren't convinced that it would bring down prices because it actually might stop investors from building new houses.

4:50Sylvia Hui:And the most important thing here, they say, is adding more supply to the housing market. What do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, the reality is, is that we've underbuilt housing for, you know, well over a decade and we've gotten ourselves into a housing affordability crisis that in many ways is unprecedented, right? You know, we've seen essentially a wholesale loss of our affordable rental stock and a near doubling of the median sales price to the median income for homes across the country. And so when you're in that unprecedented scenario, you definitely need kind of large scale housing production to kick in, but you also need housing production that really occurs across the income spectrum because we've seen a real loss of those lower cost rental units, of those entry point homes, of those middle price homes.

5:35Sylvia Hui:We need that production really to happen across the scale. To that point, there is a provision in this bill that would eliminate the requirement for manufactured homes to be built on a steel frame and on wheels so that they could be moved around, which is interesting. Also, I see that cities will be rewarded for building new homes. I mean, aside from this corporate investors provision part of the bill, is there a section of the law that you think would actually be more effective in bringing the supply up and prices down? What's really hard about housing policy is we all want kind of the silver bowl that solves everything.

6:10Sylvia Hui:And we really actually need a broad set of things to be happening, right? So this legislation really looks to make existing programs work better and more efficiently. What you talked to about there with the manufactured housing is just common sense policy, and it will drive down the cost of actually producing manufactured housing and also make the financing work better. Importantly, there's a lot of new programs that are being essentially explored through this, right? Small dollar loans below$100 ,000. The whole home repair program, which actually we had here in the state of Pennsylvania, now doing kind of a federal pilot.

6:45Sylvia Hui:Looking at some of those incentives to actually incentivize localities to reduce the barriers to building, but also to create innovative programs that actually kind of fill that delta of the price that people can't afford. All of those things are absolutely essential and really importantly are meant to complement each other in key ways. Just briefly, clearly this is an issue that is resonating politically as lawmakers are just trying to help ease the mind of anxious voters ahead of the midterms. Do you think, though, that this bill is going to help stabilize the economy as we grapple with other challenges out there like gas prices and inflation across the board?

7:19Sylvia Hui:Briefly, please. You know, this is really necessary bill on many fronts, but then clearly for it to be sufficient, we have to see what happens on the appropriation side, right, to ensure that, you know, all of these programs both flow or funded sufficiently and are complemented by resources that actually kind of address the core affordability issue. But again, we can't do that without the precondition of these kind of programs existing. Vincent Reyna, professor of urban economics and planning at the University of Pennsylvania. Vincent, thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

7:58Sylvia Hui:Well, housing is also one of the reasons the current heat wave in Europe is hitting so hard. European cities just weren't built to deal with sustained temperatures above 90 degrees as they are now. So Peter has more on that story after the break.

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9:07Sylvia Hui:Dataiku is the platform for AI success. Built to bring it all together. Visit D-A-T-A-I-K-U dot com slash NPR. Western Europe is baking under an oppressive dome of heat. Today, France recorded its hottest day ever. And over the past several days of this heat wave, 40 people in France have drowned after jumping into canals and rivers to stay cool. With us now is Associated Press reporter Sylvia Hoy. She's covering the story from London. Sylvia, welcome. And we're going to talk about France in just a moment, but start with the UK also flirting with records, temperatures in the low 90s. What's it feel like and how are people coping?

9:50Sylvia Hui:Yeah, hi. Thanks for having me. It's forecast to reach 39 degrees Celsius tomorrow in London and southern England. So that's 102 Fahrenheit, I believe. the last time I remember it being this hot was 2022 it was 36 degrees so many people think this is unprecedented in London trains are being cancelled school closures are a big topic of heated discussion in parents' WhatsApp groups what's the best thing to do? do you keep the kids at home? do you send them to school? people are working from home train companies are actually telling people not to take trains unless absolutely necessary because the train infrastructure is not built to withstand the heat, extreme heat.

10:39So it could damage the rails or have issues with the signaling.

10:43Sylvia Hui:So, yeah, and, you know, the London Underground is not most of the lines. Maybe two of the lines are air-conditioned. So imagine being packed into, you know, the Underground train with no air conditioning. It's terrible. So, yes, the heat wave is all what everyone wants to talk about. No one wants to talk about anything else. Well, I mean, this is serious. Dozens of people are dead in France, as I said, including two children left in a hot car. Temperatures well over 100 predicted later this week. The French prime minister said today that 40 people have drowned because of the heat. How is that happening?

11:19Sylvia Hui:I think it's the officials have been saying it's a lot of people are trying to go and cool off in rivers and open bodies of water. So this has been happening in the UK, too, in recent months when it's the temperature goes high. A lot of young children, particularly like maybe 10 year old, 14 year olds going out to the swim of the river. And someone also died in the UK recently because they actually cannot swim. So these are teens. A lot of them are young people who just want to go and cool off with their friends. But yes, there's a lot of unsupervised swimming that we are warned against. And yeah, that's just been happening across Europe, not just in France.

12:03Sylvia Hui:Well, if you lived there, I'm sure you remember the notorious 2003 heatwave. 70 ,000 people died across the continent. Does it feel that Europe is any better prepared for these heatwaves than it once was? okay i mean i don't think so i was here in 2003 a train broke down on the way to from london to winter just in the middle of the track because the driver just uh didn't feel uh well enough to drive so that happened back then now the trains are some of them are air conditioned a lot of them are not a lot of infrastructure and public buildings and schools are not built for this kind of temperature.

12:45Sylvia Hui:And we are going to get more of this in the future. So this is what everyone wants to talk about. Can schools be better equipped? Can hospitals be better equipped? We hope so. Sylvia Hoy, reporter with the Associated Press, based in London. Sylvia, thanks. Stay cool. Thank you so much.

13:14Sylvia Hui:The Supreme Court issued several rulings today, including a decision against a Rastafarian man who sued prison officials over religious freedom. Damon Landor made a vow not to cut his hair as part of his Rastafari faith. But in 2020, prison guards forcibly shaved his head when he was serving time on drug charges. Landor has since been released, and today the court ruled 6-3 that his lawsuit cannot move forward. Former federal prosecutor Paul Butler told Robin Young the decision is about more than religious rights.

13:50Vincent Reina:So the case was about whether state prison guards can be sued when they violate the religious rights of inmates. There's a federal law that requires states to allow prisoners to practice their faith, and courts have specifically ruled that that applies to Rastafarians who want to grow dreadlocks. Today, the Supreme Court ruled that the law does not allow prison guards to be sued for money damages. The six conservatives on the court said that the language of the federal law does not clearly inform guards that they can be sued, and it would therefore be unfair to make them pay out of their own pockets.

14:35Sylvia Hui:Okay, I have to understand this. In other words, there is a law that says prisoners have to be allowed to wear dreadlocks if they're practicing a Rastafari faith, but it doesn't specifically say that if you prohibit them from doing that, you can be sued?

14:52Vincent Reina:So, yes, the remedy would be that the government be sued and enjoined, that is, stopped from doing this in the future. The problem is that there was already a decision on that issue from the Fifth Circuit. So Mr. Landor, he just had a couple of weeks left to serve. He'd been in Louisiana state prisons with no problems. He gets to this one prison, and he literally presents a copy of the federal court opinion to the prison guards. And Robin, they threw it in the garbage can. So all of the courts said that what the prison guards did was egregious. It was unconstitutional. but the remedy isn't that the state guards can be sued for money out of their own pocket.

15:53Sylvia Hui:Okay. And what did Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson say in the dissent, in which she was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan?

16:02Vincent Reina:So there's another federal law that uses almost identical language. And in another case, the court said that in those cases, plaintiffs can sue for money damages under that law. But the conservative justices responded that the language regarding that other federal law about religious freedom makes it clearer that it applies to federal guards. So part of the issue was that federal guards have different obligations than state guards. Justice Jackson and the two other justices didn't agree with that statutory interpretation by the majority.

16:49Sylvia Hui:Look, eight of the nine Supreme Court justices are Christian. And as we said, this case seems to go against some of the court's recent rulings, very much supporting religious rights and Christianity. I mean, is there a whiff here? We haven't said the word race. You know, Rastafarian, the faith is mainly Afrocentric. Is there something else happening here?

17:16Vincent Reina:so it's certainly the case that the supreme court has in recent years repeatedly advanced religious rights so in 2022 the court sided with a texas death row inmate who wanted his pastor to be able to touch him and pray for him at the time of his execution and the court has also said that a high school football coach has a constitutional right to pray after his team scores a touchdown Robin, there's another series of cases in which the court has limited the right of prison inmates to sue about their prison conditions. So you can think of those two series of cases in tension. And today, the court decided against religious right and in favor of this trend that, again, prevents prison inmates from going to court to sue.

18:17Vincent Reina:So you could say it's about race or you could say that it's about hostility from the majority to prisoners suing about their own conditions of confinement.

18:34Sylvia Hui:Former federal prosecutor Paul Butler, law professor at Georgetown, thank you so much.

18:38Vincent Reina:Always a pleasure.

18:42Sylvia Hui:That's it for the show today. Here and now, anytime, comes from NPR and WBUR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Will Walkie, Wilder Fleming, and Jill Ryan. Our editors were Mark Navin, Michael Scotto, and Kat Welch. Technical direction from Matt Reed and Marcel Damiano. Our theme music is by Mike Moschetto, Max Liebman, and me, Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin. And here and now's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with you tomorrow.

19:17Thank you.