Housing

Every night, millions of Americans go to sleep without shelter or a place to call home. Millions more are finding it harder to afford their monthly rents or to save to purchase a home.  With state and local housing organizations operating at maximum capacity and emergency shelters already strained, it is imperative that Congress act on a long-term strategy for combatting housing unaffordability. 

We need to take three crucial steps to improve housing affordability and access: 

1. Improve supply  
2. Ensure competition for housing is fair 
3. Reimagine zoning 

Proposed Legislation

I’ve been fighting for over three decades to introduce legislation to tackle housing in this country. In February 2025, I partnered with Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) to introduce the Humans Over Private Equity (HOPE) for Homeownership Act, which would go after hedge funds that own and control large parts of our housing market, driving up both rents and purchase prices for single-family homes. This bill was offered as an amendment to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — and Republicans rejected it during the reconciliation process. 

In the 118^th Congress, I also launched the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act, which would crack down on corporate greed by banning hedge funds from owning single-family homes and requiring them to sell at least 10% of the total number of single-family homes they own to families per year over a 10-year period. After a decade, the hedge funds would be completely banned from owning single-family homes.  

The Prefabricated Housing and Zoning Enhancement Act (PHAZE Act), which I introduced in November 2024, would address housing shortages across our country due to reforming zoning and encouraging new building efforts. This bill would cut through red tape by incentivizing prefabricated housing construction and streamlining affordable housing development. This is just some of the work that I’ve done to make housing stronger in our community.  

I also believe we must invest more in programs like the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program, make our public housing stock more environmentally sustainable and resilient in the wake of climate change, and increase housing supply to reduce the shortage of housing nationwide, particularly in America’s growing cities. 

How This Impacts the Ninth District

Seattle and King County represent one of the most expensive areas in the country, with the average home costing about $1.3 million.  Washington has the third-highest population of people experiencing homelessness among U.S. states in 2024, with 31,554 people across the Evergreen State lacking housing. Unless it’s addressed, this is a chronic cycle.  

We need to add more housing and decrease the cost of housing. The average family cannot afford to foot the price of their rent, so we need to bring down construction costs, take down barriers for single-family homeowners, and kick out greedy investors who want to monopolize our housing industry. By providing more resources to Washingtonians experiencing homelessness, we can break the pattern of homelessness.