Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Marcia Fudge recently toured Kansas City, Mo. to highlight how President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan will address the affordable housing crisis and revitalize the nation’s housing infrastructure.
She was joined by Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) and Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas.
“Our homes can serve as a bridge to greater opportunities and a better life,” Fudge said in a release. “The American Job Plan is a historic, once-in-a-generation investment in our nation’s infrastructure-including our housing infrastructure. If we want the United States to remain the greatest nation in the world, then we must first take care of home--in the most literal sense. To pass an infrastructure plan that fails to expand affordable housing and to revitalize our communities would be akin to building a road that leads to nowhere.”
Ahead of Fudge’s visit, HUD released a fact sheet on how the proposed plan would provide HUD nearly $150 billion to strengthen communities, expand access to affordable housing and create jobs for working and middle-class families that won’t require a college degree.
HUD said the American Jobs Plan will allow it to create tens of thousands of good jobs, with a free and fair choice to join a union, for workers around the country as they build, upgrade, and retrofit homes in their communities.
Employers would be required to pay workers prevailing wages; enter into project labor, community workforce, and local hire agreements; and use workers from registered apprenticeships and other labor or labor-management training programs. Employers receiving funding also would be required to remain neutral when their employees seek to organize a union and bargain collectively and may not require their employees to agree to mandatory individual arbitration.
The plan also calls for producing and preserving more than one million housing units for low-, very-low, and extremely-low income families and addresses longstanding public housing capital needs, including critical health and safety concerns.
The plan also calls for:
• Removing lead-based paint from 175,000 housing units.
• Incentivizing the removal of exclusionary zoning and harmful land use policies.
• Creating more climate-resilient communities.
• Investing $2 billion in HUD’s Section 202 Supportive Housing for the Elderly program, increasing the supply of affordable housing with supportive services for very low-income older Americans.
• Meeting tribal communities’ housing needs.
• Establishing an energy efficiency and resilience retrofit program for multifamily housing.
• Building affordable housing and supportive infrastructure in small towns across America.