Editor’s note: Este artículo está traducido al español.

With President Donald Trump in the White House and Republicans holding majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, there are few opportunities for congressional Democrats to make their mark on the federal budget.

One came last week: a 17 1/2-hour marathon meeting of the House Ways and Means Committee where Democrats proposed dozens of amendments to the tax bill.

Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., told the Sun before the meeting that he was looking to implement parts of his three-prong housing plan into the bill, but those amendments never came.

It wouldn’t have mattered. The GOP stood together to vote down each proposed Democratic amendment.

“Republicans made clear that their ‘Screw America’ budget — a budget that takes health care from 13.7 million Americans to give tax breaks for billionaires like Elon Musk, wasn’t a serious opportunity for bipartisan legislation,” Horsford wrote in a statement to the Sun.

Horsford said he’ll continue to push for the housing platform, which includes increasing oversight of hedge funds buying up housing and making it easier to release federal land for development.

One potential avenue he can use is a new bipartisan caucus bubbling up focused on reducing bureaucratic hurdles for housing. It was inspired by the book “Abundance” from New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson.

The book argues that some liberal or progressive regulations have become overbearing, especially when it comes to developing housing in states like New York and California.

“Where we can find … an approach where there’s an abundance that meets the needs of all of our constituents that actually creates economic opportunity … that is an approach that I think my constituents expect me to take,” Horsford said.

While Horsford isn’t part of the “roughly 30-member bloc” Politico reported this month, he said he’s been “in touch” with Rep. Josh Harder, D-Calif., the leader of the new caucus.

“I believe you’ll see us joining the caucus in the near future,” Horsford said.

Horsford’s housing package

The congressman’s platform comes after a district-wide listening tour about the ongoing housing crisis in Clark County. Over half of the county’s renters put at least 30% of their income toward housing, according to the most recent Regional Fair Housing and Equity Assessment.

One of the culprits Horsford has identified is corporate hedge funds. The largest homeowner in the county is likely Progress Residential, a property manager owned by New York hedge fund Pretium Partners, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported in March.

Horsford called that fact “egregious,” especially as a quarter of homes in North Las Vegas are owned by out-of-state investors, according to a 2023 UNLV study.

“They’re pricing out homeowners and making it harder for people to afford the cost of rent, and they’re not doing it in the suburbs. They’re doing it in working-class neighborhoods,” he said. “Hedge funds don’t give a damn about our communities.”

Nicholas Irwin, research director at UNLV’s Lied Center for Real Estate, said it’s difficult to evaluate the impact of hedge funds buying single-family homes to then rent them out because public ownership data is so lackluster.

“We just see that LLC. We don’t see that control back to one super company that absorbs all the LLCs,” Irwin said. “We still haven’t quite grappled — real estate economists — with the welfare effects of having so many of these single-family homes be permanently off the market.”

And while some websites may list a property as being “investor owned” or “corporate owned,” there’s a big difference between someone having a pair of properties and a Wall Street firm buying up 5,000, he added.

The House Oversight and Mitigation Exploitation (HOME) Act wouldn’t ban corporations from buying up properties, but it would enable the Department of Housing and Urban Development to investigate potential price gouging.

“If it’s proven to be market manipulation, (the hedge funds) need to be fined, and those fines would go into a Housing Trust Fund to actually build more affordable housing,” Horsford said.

Horsford’s concerns seemingly crosses ideological barriers. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, wrote on social media last year that, despite his support of free markets, large-scale homebuying “seems to be distorting the market.”

Fellow battleground Democrat Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia this month announced his own investigation into out-of-state corporations pumping up the cost of owning a home in Georgia. That inquiry includes Invitation Homes, which owns property throughout Clark County.

“I’m on the Problem Solvers caucus. I co-chair the Labor Caucus, and we will work with anyone on the other side of the aisle who agrees that we have to take on these corporate hedge funds,” Horsford said.

But price gouging is difficult to prove and enforce because, as Irwin said, “one person’s idea of price gouging may just be what the market demand is.”

The bill would also make it illegal to rent or sell housing “at a price that … is unconscionably excessive” during a housing crisis declared by the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Horsford’s UNLOCK Housing Act deals with a problem Nevadans likely understand better than anyone else: federal land. But it goes about freeing up that land for housing development in a unique way.

The legislation would modify the Recreation and Public Purposes Act, which allows the Bureau of Land Management to sell or lease public lands to state and local governments or certain nonprofits for recreation or a “public purpose.”

That has typically meant structures like hospitals, courthouses and hospitals, but Horsford’s bill would expand the definition to include affordable housing.

“I was surprised to learn that we had not used housing affordability as a criteria for public purpose,” Horsford said. “It’s a new approach, and it’s something that we got input from our constituents (on) that this could be a real solution.”

Irwin said he’d never seen this approach either. The research director said it could at least encourage the Bureau of Land Management to “think more strategically” about offloading properties to meet the demand for affordable housing.

The land would be sold at below market rate, Horsford said, which would then get passed on to the renter.

“Right now what we’ve done is made land available for development of housing, but quite frankly, it’s gone to a bunch of master plan developers,” he said. “They’ve built communities in the outskirts that haven’t really met the need of affordable workforce housing.”