Opinion: Too many Americans can’t afford homes. But there is a solution

Editor’s Note: Hakeem Jeffries is the congressman from the 8th District representing parts of Brooklyn and Queens. Working families in every American city and town — particularly millennials and African American and Hispanic individuals and families — are denied one of the most effective ways to create equity and achieve stability that an affordable single-family home provides. That’s why we are calling for funding an additional one million affordable homes, not in 10 years, but in five years, to be included in the pending infrastructure bill. Two forms of subsidy — no-interest construction financing and no-interest second mortgage support with liens — would generate the kind of fundamental and generational improvement in the physical lives of America’s neighborhoods, but also in the social and economic lives of so many American families. We believe that the discussion about the American Jobs Plan, now in full swing in Washington, should include a more robust commitment to expanding homeownership and equity-building for all Americans — those who live in our inner cities, millennials still living with their parents because they cannot find an affordable home, and residents of the post-industrial towns of the Ohio River Valley region and similar areas.