Scott Wiener proposes trillion-dollar housing fix for U.S.

When it comes to housing, sharpened teeth and whacking sticks might best characterize Scott Wiener’s tenure in the California Senate. His policies helped revolutionize the state’s role in addressing the shortage, coercing cities and counties into upzoning their communities and streamlining project applications.

Since Wiener launched his bid last year to replace Nancy Pelosi in Congress, many have wondered how his aggressive approach to housing could translate at the federal level. Especially since he is unlikely to neither enjoy a party supermajority nor — at least immediately — enthusiastic backing from President Donald Trump.

Wiener made clear on Monday that on Capitol Hill, he would retire his sticks and shoot more for carrots, planning to get inventive through incentives.

The state senator’s recently published congressional housing platform mentions neither upzoning nor penalizing unwilling jurisdictions, in contrast to his methods in California. Instead, it talks about a trillion-dollar investment by the federal government as part of an effort to build 8 million homes by 2037.

Wiener’s camp estimates solving the nationwide housing shortage would cost $2.8 trillion. Under his plan, the federal government would directly foot $1.2 trillion through a new National Housing Investment Fund, paid for by “reversing tax cuts passed under presidents Bush and Trump.”

“This is not about Congress taking over local land-use,” Wiener said during a news conference Monday. “It’s about providing financial incentives. If you’re building housing, you should get money for that, and real money so that cities have an incentive.”

The federal subsidies would help finance the construction of 4 million homes under a social housing program. Those homes would primarily be for low- and moderate-income households, with some market-rate units. Subsidized units would remain affordable in perpetuity.

Wiener also wants to double the housing production through the federal government’s low-income housing tax credit program to 3 million units over the next decade.

Yet, as was the case in California, housing production will depend on local conditions like permitting and zoning. For this, Wiener said he will create a Pro-Housing Incentive Fund that “rewards jurisdictions that are actually getting housing built.”

Here, his federal approach diverges from the one taken in Sacramento. In California, the real incentive for cities and counties to upzone and streamline permitting was to avoid financial penalties, lawsuits, and implementation of builder’s remedy, which allowed developers to skip over local zoning in getting their projects built.

In Congress, Wiener wants the federal government to send tens of billions of dollars per year to cities and counties that boost their housing production, whether through updating codes or eliminating fees, for example.

His plan proposes paying local governments $10,000 per new unit of housing built.

Regulatory changes aren’t confined to just municipal codes. Wiener proposes streamlining the Fair Housing Act so multifamily projects can be developed at scale, and reforming the National Environmental Protection Act so it can’t be used to stop housing that would otherwise be approved. That echoes Wiener’s work in Sacramento to stop the increasing practice of using the California Environmental Quality Act to stall housing projects.

All of these housing proposals are likely “year one bills,” Wiener told The Real Deal.

“Whether it’s all in one bill or five different bills, you just put it out there right away and see what can move when,” Wiener said.

The congressional primary is set for June 2.