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Opinion: Bernie Sanders: As a child, rent control kept a roof over my head
By Bernie Sanders
Updated 7:23 AM ET, Tue July 30, 2019
Excerpt:
I believe that every American should have a fundamental right to safe, decent and affordable housing. Stable and affordable housing is not only essential for a person to live with dignity, but without it, economic opportunity is simply an illusion.
As one of the first members of Congress to introduce legislation to establish the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund, I believe we must substantially expand this program to build the 7.4 million units of housing that lower-income people, senior citizens and people with disabilities desperately need. We must also invest far more resources into maintaining and expanding our public housing stock.
In the wealthiest country in the history of the world, we must end homelessness in America by doubling funding for HUD's McKinney-Vento homelessness assistance grants and providing critical outreach services.
We need to substantially increase grants for cities and towns that wish to create community land trust housing. This anti-gentrification tool -- which was first pioneered in Burlington, Vermont, when I was mayor -- allows low- and middle-income buyers to purchase homes at affordable, below-market prices on community-owned land.
We should also support communities' rent control ordinances and their mandates that developers include affordable housing in their new projects. And we must aggressively defend and promote the legal protections of fair housing, so that we are making sure no one is denied housing based on race, color, national origin, religion, gender or disability.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/30/opinions/bernie-sanders-2020-affordable-housing-policy/index.html