Eager to get their hands on some of the $2.3 trillion in infrastructure money proposed by President Joe Biden, far-leftists Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.) are set to unveil legislation meant to completely overhaul all 950,000 public-housing units in the United States. They’re calling it the “Green New Deal for Public Housing Act.”
The new legislation is merely the first of many proposals expected by leftist lawmakers looking to cash in on the hoped-for $2.3 trillion in “infrastructure” funds Biden has proposed. In Biden’s original infrastructure proposal, $40 billion was earmarked for pulbic-housing infrastructure, while Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders are calling for up to $172 billion.
The new bill has an ambitious goal: to retrofit all public housing in the United States in a way that improves the general health and overall safety of the approximately two million residents of these buildings, all while eliminating carbon emissions.
A summary of the bill states that the expected carbon-emissions reduction would be 5.6 million metric tons annually, the equivalent to taking 1.2 million cars off the road.
“With America facing an affordable housing crisis and the perils of climate change, we must invest in our housing infrastructure now,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement. “We must also be honest about the scale of the problem.”
Ocasio-Cortez went on: “Just to address the backlog of critical maintenance in [the New York City Housing Authority] and nowhere else — chipping lead paint, broken heating systems, failing gas utilities — would require $40 million…. This bill would invest up to $172 billion in ten years, improving the lives of nearly 2 million individuals and securing the long term future of our nation’s public housing stock.”
In a clearly orchestrated move to announce the bill’s launch, the far-left group Organize for Justice released a short documentary detailing the many horrors of having to live in public housing in New York City. In the video, Representative Jamaal Brown (D-N.Y.) laid out his case for the budget busting legislation.
“A Green New Deal for Public Housing would allow people to live with dignity and respect,” Brown said. “We all have to pressure the Biden administration, from both inside and outside of Congress, to make sure he continues to move on implementing a Green New Deal.”
Sanders and AOC project that the new legislation would create 240,000 new jobs, over 30,000 in New York City alone. These must be the “green” jobs that Joe Biden promised would be coming when he threw thousands out of work by stopping the Keystone XL Pipeline with a stroke of his pen.
The bill definitely won’t save any money on labor costs, as it practically demands that anybody who works on any project be a member of a union. A summary of the from Bernie Sanders’ website explains: “In order to qualify for these grants, PHAs (Public Housing Agencies) must guarantee resident engagement, and support strong labor standards (buy American, prevailing wages, protect labor agreements, no arbitration clauses, employees not contractors, and collective bargaining) and American manufacturing.”
The new legislation comes at a time when even Democrats are suggesting that Biden downsize his infrastructure plan to make it more palatable to Republicans who might be persuaded to back a more reasonable bill.
That bi-partisan support might be little more than a pipedream, however, as Republicans have been quick to link anything called “Green New Deal” to the absurd bill forwarded by Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in February of 2019. That budget-busting plan was estimated to have cost $93 trillion.
“Republicans are not going to partner with Democrats on the Green New Deal or raising taxes to pay for it,” Senator John Barrasso (R-Wy.) bluntly stated last month.
Give Sanders and AOC some credit. At least their bill — over-funded and unfeasible as it is — has something to do with the traditional meaning of the word infrastructure. Much of Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan doesn’t — at least as most people currently understand the word. Biden’s plan addresses pay for caregivers, union incentives, and undoing “historic inequities. That’s not infrastructure — that’s payouts to voting groups.
