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AOC, Sanders unveil ‘Green New Deal’ for housing

News Feed
Thursday, March 21, 2024

Progressives on Capitol Hill believe they have the answer to one of the most vexing policy challenges facing America: another "Green New Deal," this time centering on housing. Today, a group of lawmakers led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will gather to relaunch a so-called “Green New Deal for Public Housing.” The goal of the legislation, Ocasio-Cortez told POLITICO in an exclusive interview, is to “reimagine and reinvigorate public housing in the United States,” while addressing “many of the environmental injustices that public housing residents have faced.” It’s the latest sign that Democrats across the ideological spectrum are zeroing in on housing as an under-addressed issue that could carry a huge upside politically. It comes on the heels of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in which he outlined a plan to lower housing costs that he’s now taking on the road. But where Biden is addressing housing in general — the goal of homeownership has long been a centerpiece of the American dream, albeit one currently unattainable for many Americans — the progressives are zeroing in on public housing in particular. Ocasio-Cortez sees this as a moment in which those old ways of thinking are becoming “unsustainable” and out of touch with the realities of modern life. “For a long time, we could pass a tax incentive here or there and say, ‘Hey, we've got a great housing policy,’” Ocasio-Cortez told POLITICO. “And everyday people … were supportive because there was still that dream and that idea that ‘I'm going to be buying a home soon … that's within the horizon for me.’ Right now, we have an entire generation — that is ascending into becoming the most powerful electorate, the largest electorate — for which that is decades away.” The bill’s single biggest policy change is that it would repeal the Faircloth Amendment, a rule that is little known to the broader public but familiar to policy wonks: Since its enactment in 1999, the amendment has effectively blocked the Department of Housing and Urban Development from funding new public housing. Beyond that seismic shift, the bill’s latest version being unveiled today has some substantive changes from earlier drafts of the legislation, including directing more money to address the public housing backlog that affects millions of Americans and funding clean-energy improvements to public housing — including language to ensure that any jobs created are unionized. Those policy aspirations face a firewall in Congress, where neither the House nor the Senate is likely to pass the legislation. But as with the original Green New Deal, the goal isn’t simply to pass the legislation; it’s to have the fight and pull the Overton window to the left — reshaping the contours of the conversation about housing in America in the process. “No housing conversation is complete without a conversation around public housing,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “We in the United States have lived under the scourge of the Faircloth Amendment for decades, and that has helped precipitate — and contributed to — the housing crisis that we are living in today. A major part of our housing problem is a supply problem.” Toward that end, dramatically increasing the availability of public housing could ease the overall housing market. And by pumping more resources into revitalizing public housing, the bill’s sponsors hope that the stigma of public housing can be shorn away. “We have seen our counterparts, everywhere from Vienna to Singapore, engage in truly revolutionary public and social housing policies that have bettered the lives of working-class people,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “And the stigma around public housing has prevented everyday Americans from understanding that we can actually really have incredible housing in the United States under a public model.” Progressive groups on the left are already lining up to press their case on this. Analilia Mejia, co-director of the Center for Popular Democracy, told POLITICO that she hopes Biden will use the “power of the bully pulpit” to bring the issue home for Americans. “I think he can be a game changer,” said Mejia. “I think it will cut through the noise for some people.” Asked whether the Biden administration supports the Green New Deal for Public Housing, the White House was decidedly noncommittal. “As he laid out in his State of the Union address and again this week in Nevada, President Biden is laser focused on lowering housing costs for owners and renters alike,” said White House deputy press secretary Michael Kikukawa. “We welcome ideas from members of Congress to build on our strong agenda.” Still, Ocasio-Cortez is optimistic about what she’s seen lately from Biden on housing. “We are starting to see them wade into these waters,” she said. “We saw the president mention housing during his State of the Union. They're starting to do more events explicitly centered on this issue and [talking] about this issue more. I think that we are going to see the White House do more. And we're going to have to do more.”

With homeownership out of reach for many Americans, progressives will make new push to “reimagine and reinvigorate public housing in the United States,” says Ocasio-Cortez.



Progressives on Capitol Hill believe they have the answer to one of the most vexing policy challenges facing America: another "Green New Deal," this time centering on housing.

Today, a group of lawmakers led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will gather to relaunch a so-called “Green New Deal for Public Housing.” The goal of the legislation, Ocasio-Cortez told POLITICO in an exclusive interview, is to “reimagine and reinvigorate public housing in the United States,” while addressing “many of the environmental injustices that public housing residents have faced.”

It’s the latest sign that Democrats across the ideological spectrum are zeroing in on housing as an under-addressed issue that could carry a huge upside politically. It comes on the heels of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in which he outlined a plan to lower housing costs that he’s now taking on the road.

But where Biden is addressing housing in general — the goal of homeownership has long been a centerpiece of the American dream, albeit one currently unattainable for many Americans — the progressives are zeroing in on public housing in particular.

Ocasio-Cortez sees this as a moment in which those old ways of thinking are becoming “unsustainable” and out of touch with the realities of modern life.

“For a long time, we could pass a tax incentive here or there and say, ‘Hey, we've got a great housing policy,’” Ocasio-Cortez told POLITICO. “And everyday people … were supportive because there was still that dream and that idea that ‘I'm going to be buying a home soon … that's within the horizon for me.’ Right now, we have an entire generation — that is ascending into becoming the most powerful electorate, the largest electorate — for which that is decades away.”

The bill’s single biggest policy change is that it would repeal the Faircloth Amendment, a rule that is little known to the broader public but familiar to policy wonks: Since its enactment in 1999, the amendment has effectively blocked the Department of Housing and Urban Development from funding new public housing.

Beyond that seismic shift, the bill’s latest version being unveiled today has some substantive changes from earlier drafts of the legislation, including directing more money to address the public housing backlog that affects millions of Americans and funding clean-energy improvements to public housing — including language to ensure that any jobs created are unionized.

Those policy aspirations face a firewall in Congress, where neither the House nor the Senate is likely to pass the legislation.

But as with the original Green New Deal, the goal isn’t simply to pass the legislation; it’s to have the fight and pull the Overton window to the left — reshaping the contours of the conversation about housing in America in the process.


“No housing conversation is complete without a conversation around public housing,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “We in the United States have lived under the scourge of the Faircloth Amendment for decades, and that has helped precipitate — and contributed to — the housing crisis that we are living in today. A major part of our housing problem is a supply problem.”

Toward that end, dramatically increasing the availability of public housing could ease the overall housing market. And by pumping more resources into revitalizing public housing, the bill’s sponsors hope that the stigma of public housing can be shorn away.

“We have seen our counterparts, everywhere from Vienna to Singapore, engage in truly revolutionary public and social housing policies that have bettered the lives of working-class people,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “And the stigma around public housing has prevented everyday Americans from understanding that we can actually really have incredible housing in the United States under a public model.”

Progressive groups on the left are already lining up to press their case on this. Analilia Mejia, co-director of the Center for Popular Democracy, told POLITICO that she hopes Biden will use the “power of the bully pulpit” to bring the issue home for Americans.

“I think he can be a game changer,” said Mejia. “I think it will cut through the noise for some people.”

Asked whether the Biden administration supports the Green New Deal for Public Housing, the White House was decidedly noncommittal.

“As he laid out in his State of the Union address and again this week in Nevada, President Biden is laser focused on lowering housing costs for owners and renters alike,” said White House deputy press secretary Michael Kikukawa. “We welcome ideas from members of Congress to build on our strong agenda.”

Still, Ocasio-Cortez is optimistic about what she’s seen lately from Biden on housing.

“We are starting to see them wade into these waters,” she said. “We saw the president mention housing during his State of the Union. They're starting to do more events explicitly centered on this issue and [talking] about this issue more. I think that we are going to see the White House do more. And we're going to have to do more.”

Read the full story here.
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Silicon Valley’s ‘Audacity Crisis’

AI executives are acting like they own the world.

Two years ago, OpenAI released the public beta of DALL-E 2, an image-generation tool that immediately signified that we’d entered a new technological era. Trained off a huge body of data, DALL-E 2 produced unsettlingly good, delightful, and frequently unexpected outputs; my Twitter feed filled up with images derived from prompts such as close-up photo of brushing teeth with toothbrush covered with nacho cheese. Suddenly, it seemed as though machines could create just about anything in response to simple prompts.You likely know the story from there: A few months later, ChatGPT arrived, millions of people started using it, the student essay was pronounced dead, Web3 entrepreneurs nearly broke their ankles scrambling to pivot their companies to AI, and the technology industry was consumed by hype. The generative-AI revolution began in earnest.Where has it gotten us? Although enthusiasts eagerly use the technology to boost productivity and automate busywork, the drawbacks are also impossible to ignore. Social networks such as Facebook have been flooded with bizarre AI-generated slop images; search engines are floundering, trying to index an internet awash in hastily assembled, chatbot-written articles. Generative AI, we know for sure now, has been trained without permission on copyrighted media, which makes it all the more galling that the technology is competing against creative people for jobs and online attention; a backlash against AI companies scraping the internet for training data is in full swing.Yet these companies, emboldened by the success of their products and war chests of investor capital, have brushed these problems aside and unapologetically embraced a manifest-destiny attitude toward their technologies. 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It is audacious to massively jeopardize your net-zero climate commitment in favor of advancing a technology that has told people to eat rocks, yet Google appears to have done just that, according to its latest environmental report. (In an emailed statement, a Google spokesperson, Corina Standiford, said that the company remains “dedicated to the sustainability goals we’ve set,” including reaching net-zero emissions by 2030. According to the report, its emissions grew 13 percent in 2023, in large part because of the energy demands of generative AI.) And it is certainly audacious for companies such as Perplexity to use third-party tools to harvest information while ignoring long-standing online protocols that prevent websites from being scraped and having their content stolen.But I’ve found the rhetoric from AI leaders to be especially exasperating. This month, I spoke with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Thrive Global CEO Arianna Huffington after they announced their intention to build an AI health coach. The pair explicitly compared their nonexistent product to the New Deal. (They suggested that their product—so theoretical, they could not tell me whether it would be an app or not—could quickly become part of the health-care system’s critical infrastructure.) But this audacity is about more than just grandiose press releases. In an interview at Dartmouth College last month, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, discussed AI’s effects on labor, saying that, as a result of generative AI, “some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” She added later that “strictly repetitive” jobs are also likely on the chopping block. Her candor appears emblematic of OpenAI’s very mission, which straightforwardly seeks to develop an intelligence capable of “turbocharging the global economy.” Jobs that can be replaced, her words suggested, aren’t just unworthy: They should never have existed. In the long arc of technological change, this may be true—human operators of elevators, traffic signals, and telephones eventually gave way to automation—but that doesn’t mean that catastrophic job loss across several industries simultaneously is economically or morally acceptable.[Read: AI has become a technology of faith]Along these lines, Altman has said that generative AI will “create entirely new jobs.” Other tech boosters have said the same. But if you listen closely, their language is cold and unsettling, offering insight into the kinds of labor that these people value—and, by extension, the kinds that they don’t. 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‘People think they’ll smell but they don’t’: inside the Namibian homes built from mushrooms

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“People think the house would smell because the blocks are made of all-natural products, but it doesn’t smell,” says Kristine Haukongo. “Sometimes, there is a small touch of wood, but otherwise it’s completely odourless.”Haukongo is the senior cultivator at the research group MycoHab and her job is pretty unusual. She grows oyster mushrooms on chopped-down invasive weeds before the waste is turned into large, solid brown slabs – mycoblocks – that will be used, it’s hoped, to build Namibian homes.“We wanted a new, better way to curtail the housing crisis and a sustainable way to curb the negative effects of the encroacher bush on our environment,” said Magreth Mengo, the head of brand and marketing at Namibia’s Standard Bank. The bank worked with MycoHab – when it was affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the architecture firm Redhouse Studio and the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN) – to find a sustainable way to deal with several issues. “This project is a first of its kind and is still very much in the experimental phase but shows a lot of promise,” said Mengo.Namibia, with a population of about 2.7 million, urgently needs at least half a million new homes to address its severe housing shortage. Nearly 90% of households earn less than N$2,700 ($144.69) a month, according to 2016 figures, and can’t afford a home. One in five people live in makeshift homes made out of waste materials or zinc sheets.The remnants of the oyster mushrooms grown on weeds of encroacher bush will be used to create building blocks. Photograph: Ester MbatheraThe woody, wiry encroacher bushes occupy 45m hectares (111m acres) of Namibia’s land – pushing out grass and other vegetation. The plants are slowly creeping into Namibia’s agricultural regions and affect groundwater recharge in a country where rainfall is precious.The Namibian government plans to burn 300m tonnes of encroacher bush every 15 years to mitigate its environmental impacts and produce charcoal for profit, but this is increasing the country’s carbon dioxide emissions.“Traditionally encroacher bushes in Namibia are harvested and used for charcoal and wood production, hence there is a huge release of carbon emissions,” said Tulimo Uushona, an environmentalist.The MycoHab project decided to take a different approach. Rather than burning the bushes, MycoHab grinds them up and uses them as a substrate on which to grow gourmet oyster mushrooms. When fully grown, the mushrooms are sold to local retailers and the leftover waste is compressed and baked into building materials called mycoblocks, with each slab being made from about 10kg of bush.“If this technology becomes widespread, we could mitigate much of the more than 300m tonnes of bush the government of Namibia wants to thin,” said Haukongo. “In a normal mushroom farm, the substrate is thrown out or used as compost, but here we turn them into mycoblocks.”The first-ever mycelium-based home at MycoHab’s base in Namibia. Photograph: Ester MbatheraConcrete is believed to be responsible for 4 to 8% of the world’s CO2, emitting almost 1kg of CO2 equivalent per 1kg. MycoHab estimates that mycelium blocks store 0.8kg of CO2 equivalent per 1kg of materials produced. And because these slabs come from waste resources, the homes built using mycoblocks are “more cost-effective” and would require “less labour”, said Haukongo.“While these blocks are heavier when compared to standard bricks, they can be erected faster, resulting in lower construction costs. To build a small house for one family, over 12 tonnes of bush would be needed,” she said.This is not the first time fungi has been used as a building material. In 2014 an experimental building called the Hy-Fy in Queens, New York, was made out of crop waste and mycelium and architects and researchers have been investigating the possibilities of this material ever since.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionIn February this year, MycoHab opened its first mycelium-based home to the public, but the startup is struggling with scaling its operations to cover housing needs in Namibia. “We would love to see MycoHab inspire the architecture and building industries to develop more regenerative design,” said Haukongo. “MycoHab helps regenerate Namibia’s grasslands, mitigates greenhouse gas emissions, and provides food and housing – all from waste materials.”Heinrich Amushila, the co-director of the SDFN, loves the blocks but said cost would be an issue. “The bricks are fireproof and environmentally friendly, but the initiative is still working on buy-ins from aspiring homeowners to further fund the venture. This can pose a challenge, as prices would be relatively similar to concrete homes, because, although cheaper to make, transporting Mycoblocks to the housing location is still expensive.”Amushila said his organisation helps subsidise the elevated prices by involving candidates in the process of brickmaking as well as in the construction of the houses.The blocks are heavier than standard bricks, but can be erected more quickly, resulting in lower construction costs overall. Photograph: Ester MbatheraRomeo Muyunda, a spokesperson for the Namibian ministry of environment, forestry and tourism, welcomed the efforts aimed at preserving the environment.“We are happy that such initiatives are being made by Namibians,” he said. “This being a private initiative, however, I must encourage them to make sure they are compliant with the Environmental Management Act.”This article is published in collaboration with Egab.

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