Tom Steyer on Welfare & Poverty Democratic Presidential Challenger; CEO

Think much more ambitiously about poverty and how to end it

Racism is not in the past so we need reparations to fix it

Billions for affordable housing; market won't do it

STEYER: This is a straightforward problem. We have too few affordable housing units in the United States. It's not hard to figure out why prices go up. There's too little supply and too much demand. We need more affordable housing units, to the tune of 7 million affordable housing units. And the reason is that the federal government decided that "the market would provide," that if we just stepped aside, the market would provide affordable housing. And now we have this gigantic problem, which is, it didn't. So we're going to have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building affordable housing units in a smart way across this country. Here's an example of an absolute market failure that is absolutely predictable, that the government has to step in and solve. And we've got to get over this idea of these Republican lies that government is bad and the market will provide.

Increase the earned income tax credit

When you look at inequality, you have to start with housing

STEYER: When you look at inequality in the United States, you have to start with housing. Where you put your head at night determines so many things about your life. It determines where your kids go to school, the air you breathe, where you shop. What we've seen in California is, as a result of policy, we have millions too few housing units. And that affects everybody in California. It starts with a homeless crisis, but it also includes skyrocketing rents. We need to apply resources here to make sure that we build literally millions of new units. We are going to change policy and make sure that the localities and municipalities who have worked very hard to make sure that there are no new housing units built in their towns, that they have to change that and we're going to have force it, and then we're going to make sure that those units are affordable.

Our affordable housing situation is a crisis