Rep Ilhan Omar (D-MN) announced she will introduce legislation that would guarantee a home for every person in the United States.
Omar, one of the members of the so-called “squad,” a group of young Congresswomen headed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), said that the “Homes For All” bill would fix a “moral stain” our country deals with as “half-a-million or more people [face] homelessness.”
The bill would put the federal government in charge of investing “in the creation of millions of homes,” Omar said. Adding that Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the squad would support the effort.
This isn’t the first time one of the young members of Congress discussed housing.
Over the summer, Ocasio-Cortez claimed that luxury living should be the standard for everyone. The comment was made while she discussed her move into a luxury apartment in Washington, D.C.
“I move into this building, and it’s marketed as a ‘luxury’ building in D.C., right? I’m keeping it 100% with you,” she told people during a town hall. “So I move into this luxury building in D.C. And what does it have? It’s an efficient building, it’s clean, it has public space, it has a rooftop garden — y’all watching my Instagram — it has all these things, right? It has clean air, it has clean water. And I think about this and I’m like, ‘Hm, this is what a luxury building is like.'”
To the congresswoman, “another world is possible,” she added, where “all people have a right to a dignified home, and it’s not science fiction and it’s not just for the rich. Because what we have been taught and what we have been conditioned is that basic rights are luxury and a privilege when they are not.”
While Omar didn’t mention luxury standards of living for all those who would benefit from this bill, she claimed that she wants to see an America where an immigrant like herself doesn’t get to arrive to see “people sleeping on the side of the streets.”
But despite the excitement revolving around her announcement, Omar failed to take a closer and more critical look at the very policies that made homelessness such a big problem in America in the first place. And as mentioned by some Twitter users, subsidizing housing is what led to the subprime mortgage crisis that happened between 2007 and 2010, in addition to the Federal Reserve’s easy credit policies.
Why would she think that offering more subsidies and inflating the housing market any further would actually help those in the low- and middle-income brackets?
While many will rally behind her efforts, Omar’s plan is rooted in nothing but wishful thinking. If the goal is to help people who struggle to find housing, she would be fighting to remove legislative interference from the picture, kill all housing subsidies, and allow bad lenders to fail.
Unfortunately, many of Omar’s supporters are unaware that when government enacts charitable policies, the consequences are the very opposite of what politicians promised. In the end, officials never take the blame, choosing to, instead, point the finger at lack of funding, capitalism, or other, less agreeable colleagues in D.C.
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