Senator Elizabeth Warren came to Lynn Thursday with a plan to solve the city’s worsening housing problem.
It involves help from the federal government, she said, in the form of a bill that passed the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs this summer with bipartisan support — a rare feat in Washington these days.
The measure itself — which offers new funding to communities that commit to building more — would only go so far in a working-class city where Zillow says the average two-bedroom now rents for $2,600 a month. But the sentiment Warren brought to Lynn on Thursday could hold more promise: After years of telling cities and towns, ‘it’s your problem,’ Washington is getting serious about housing.
“This is a step that says we acknowledge that there is a housing crisis in Massachusetts and across the country,” Warren said. “And the federal government is determined to be a good partner to the communities that are trying to build more housing.”
That would be a significant shift. Over the last few decades, the federal government has slowly gotten out of the housing business, capping its public housing program and demolishing thousands of subsidized units in some cities in the 1990s. More recently, the government has flatlined budgets for affordable housing programs that have grown significantly more expensive to operate, leaving cities and states struggling to fill ever-growing gaps.
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Meanwhile, housing prices in much of the country have soared, and as a result, many Americans can no longer afford a home in the communities where they live.
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What sort of impact the feds could have on the cost of housing in a city like Lynn is an open question.
The bill the Senate passed last month would, among other things, streamline permitting for new development and incentivize municipalities to build more homes faster. About a dozen Massachusetts mayors joined Warren at Lynn City Hall to support the bill Thursday, saying they need whatever help they can get.
“People are being displaced. More people are becoming homeless. Homeownership is absolutely out of the question for folks when just a generation ago, it would have been a given,” said Lynn Mayor Jared Nicholson. “This is a problem of national scope, of national import, and it needs [a] national solution.”
The bill still has many hurdles to clear before passing into law, navigating a sharply divided Congress and winning the support of President Trump. And it would do little to address one key root of the housing shortage: local opposition to new housing in communities that typically write their own zoning rules to govern what gets built where. Rather, it’s oriented around incentive programs to encourage those sorts of places to build more; it’s more likely to help around the edges than trigger a building boom.
There was, of course, a time when the federal government did more. Between the 1930s and 1970s, for example, it built a massive portfolio of public housing across the country that housed hundreds of thousands of lower-income residents. And after World War II, it vastly expanded homeownership across the country by offering veterans low-interest home loans — the start of generations of home equity for many families.
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These days, Congress may not be willing to go that far on housing, but perhaps, said Warren, it can begin to move the needle.
“This,” she said, “is an important first step.”
Andrew Brinker can be reached at andrew.brinker@globe.com. Follow him @andrewnbrinker.