Housing and Cost of Living
We all know the reality of the 5th District: housing has become unaffordable for the very people who work here, lead here, and have their hearts here. I’ll be straight with you, even as a business owner in this district, I live a few towns north because I simply cannot afford the current housing market here. Wilmington was affordable for my family and because we purchased our home in 2015 it still is.
If you didn’t buy a home before 2016, you are being locked out of the American Dream. And while career politicians offer subsidies and band-aids, they are refusing to address the bullet hole: Wall Street is cannibalizing our neighborhoods for investment properties.
1. Banning Corporate Ownership of Single-Family Homes, the number one way we can control the cost of housing is to increase supply and decrease artificial competition. I am proposing a federal ban on international entities, hedge funds, venture capitalists, and large corporations owning single-family homes.
If a corporation wants to invest millions into building a new apartment complex or a massive housing project, that’s their lane. But single-family homes are for families, not for a billionaire's balance sheet. By forcing these predatory entities out of the single-family market, we immediately return inventory to real people and stop the bidding wars that no middle-class family can win.
2. Ending "Comps" Manipulation We need to stop the tactical price-gouging that these corporations use to inflate their assets. Right now, a mega-corporation can buy 500 homes in a relatively small geographic area, "sell" three of them to their own subsidiary at a massive markup, and then use those "sales" to claim that the other 497 homes are now worth hundreds of thousands more because of "comparison pricing".
This isn't "market value", it’s a shell game. My legislation will categorize this type of self-dealing as market manipulation and consumer fraud. We are going to stop Wall Street from using your neighborhood to pad their books.
3. Real Solutions, Not Just Subsidies For too long, the government’s only answer has been to expand subsidies. But let’s be clear: a subsidy is just a taxpayer-funded check to a landlord. It tells the landlord, "It’s okay to keep charging that astronomical rent; we’ll cover the difference."
Subsidies make housing affordable for a select few, but they don't do a thing to lower the actual cost of the home. We need a federal and state-level "Build First" initiative that focuses on increasing the physical supply of housing, rather than just throwing money at a broken system.
Below is a more in depth explanation of the subsidy issues with housing and how I plan to fix it. This is a super complicated issue that took a lot of research to fully understand and I think they are counting on you not understanding how it really works.
In Massachusetts, we’ve always been a people who pride themselves on being ahead of the curve. We were the heart of the Industrial Revolution and the birthplace of American independence because we knew how to solve problems with grit and common sense. But today, when I talk to neighbors across the 5th District about the housing crisis, it’s clear that our current approach has us stuck in a loop that just isn't working.
For years, the establishment's answer to rising costs has been to simply throw more money at it. Between federal programs and our own state initiatives, we are currently spending roughly $3 billion of your hard-earned taxpayer money every single year across the Commonwealth just to help people keep up with rising rents. Right here in the 5th District, that’s about $450 million in taxpayer funds going out the door annually.
Now, let’s be very clear: these subsidies are a vital lifeline. They keep our neighbors in their homes today, and I am not interested in pulling the rug out from under families who are just trying to get by. As a small business owner, I have to look at the bottom line and find a solution, not a short term fix. When I see a $3 billion annual expense that never seems to end and never actually makes the problem smaller, I don't see a solution, I see a Band-Aid on a bullet hole.
The reality of this "Subsidies Trap" is that it creates an artificial floor for high rent. When the government increases subsidies to match average market rates, it inadvertently tells landlords they never have to lower their prices because the taxpayer will always be there to cover the gap. On top of that, when a new housing project is built about 30% of our housing funds "leak" out into developer fees, bank interest, and administrative red tape before a single brick is even laid on a new development.
Because average rents keep climbing, the "affordability gap" just keeps getting wider, and it feels like we’re being forced to choose between two dead-end paths. On one side, the Democrats want to just keep raising your taxes to fund even bigger subsidies that get eaten up by the next rent hike. On the other side, the Republicans want to just cut these vital programs altogether and leave people with nowhere to go.
I’m here to tell you that there is a third option. We need to stop being a "Middleman Government" and start being a "Building Government." This isn't about removing help; it’s about making that help unnecessary by actually lowering the cost of living.
My plan is simple: let's stop chasing the market and start leading it. We should be using federal funds to acquire the underutilized spaces we see every day, the vacant warehouses in Framingham and the dormant industrial lots in Waltham. Instead of giving tax credits to private developers and hoping they build something affordable, the federal government should contract that construction directly. By cutting out the profit motive and the middleman fees, we can build high-quality apartments and townhomes at their true cost.
Once they’re built, we turn the keys over to our own local Housing Authorities to manage them for a transparent, at-cost fee. Because the government would keep the deed, these homes remain affordable forever.
When we add this kind of high-quality, at-cost housing to our district, we finally create real competition. If a private landlord knows there is a beautiful, at-cost option down the street, they have to compete on price and quality to keep their tenants. This naturally pulls the average rent down for everyone. And as those rents stabilize, the need for massive taxpayer subsidies starts to shrink.
We can’t keep rinsing and repeating the same failed policies and expecting a different result. We need to stop subsidizing the crisis and start building the solution. It’s time to stop the Band-Aids and start building the American Dream again, brick by brick, right here in our own communities.