Democratic candidates pitch ideas to address housing costs [Independent Record, Helena, Mont.]
May 16—With housing prices dramatically increasing across the state and making some communities unaffordable for Montanans, the three
Communities in the newly drawn western district include some of the hardest-hit when it comes to affordable housing. In March, the
As people struggle to find places to live, businesses and local governments in communities like
The race is between
"In this district in western
She pointed to the
"Out of the federal government, what I can do in
Tranel said that, if elected, she also would make sure tax credits for projects go to people who are "capable of building and accountable for what they're building."
Another way
She also said part of the job in
"You can hold hearings. You can have town hall meetings. We can show up and ask questions and get publicity, which is so necessary to shine a light on things that are happening," Tranel said. "That's what I want to do. That's what needs to happen. People need to understand what's happening for their communities."
"We're in this, this is happening," Neumann said. "You can't stop it, but we need to make sure our working families, the engine of our economies, the heart of our communities, has housing that they can afford."
She said it'd be one of the first things she'd want to address if elected, calling it a "crisis."
One of the things Neumann called for was fully funding the
While in
"We need to make sure that the people who are driving our economy and keeping it intact have the housing that they need," Neumann said.
She also said he would look to connecting investors looking to make socially responsible investments in projects.
"The money is there, and where there's a will there's a way," Neumann said.
"I'm looking forward to exploring ways that the federal government can help unlock those investments and make sure that we have affordable housing and mixed use housing across this district, working with governments and nonprofit organizations to get it done," Neumann said.
"You can use federal housing policy (and) federal money to incentivize states and municipalities and counties to change their zoning," Winter said.
During a candidate forum in
"Our single-family home and homeowner policy ... was built over the course of 80 years to ensure that wealthy white people didn't have to live next to Native, Hispanic or Back people," Winter said. "It was. We are the inheritors of that, whether we like it or not. And we gain from that, whether we like it or not. And what we must do is change it."
Winter also said not enough landlords in
"That's called source-of-income discrimination," Winter said. " ... It's a discrimination against people who are poor so they can rent to people because the assumption by the landlord is that those people will be dirtier."
Winter said he wanted to see a dramatic revision to a system he said "incentivizes people to put as much money as possible into their extremely expensive single-family homes and scare everyone else away from being a part of it. We must acknowledge it, we must change it."
He called the problem an indicator of the country's broken economy and that there needed to be a larger solution than just less-expensive rentals or lower home prices.
"We wouldn't be having this conversation if there wasn't extreme wealth inequality," Winter said.
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