When I talk to constituents around Nevada’s 1st Congressional District, the issue I hear most about is housing. The lack of affordable and safe housing is a critical issue facing all of Southern Nevada, where housing prices and rents have skyrocketed in recent years. We must do more to reduce housing costs.

According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, our state is short more than 78,000 affordable rental homes for lower-income renters. In addition, UNLV Lied Center Director Shawn McCoy estimates that 15% of all single-family homes in Clark County are owned by investors, shrinking the housing supply and driving up the price of homes on the market.

As a co-sponsor of the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act, I am working in Congress to lower the cost of housing for Southern Nevadans. The act would require hedge funds to divest of homes over a period of 10 years and impose an excise tax on homes they purchase, with proceeds going toward grants for down payment assistance to taxpayers purchasing a single-family residence.

I also introduced the Housing Vouchers Fairness Act with Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., which would increase the number of housing vouchers allocated to fast-growing metropolitan areas like Southern Nevada. Despite having roughly the same population as Chicago, Southern Nevada receives 12,500 housing vouchers for residents compared with 47,000 for Chicago residents. The Housing Vouchers Fairness Act corrects this disparity by authorizing an additional $2 billion in funding for the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Housing Choice Voucher program to ensure public housing authorities that represent the nation’s fastest-growing areas can meet the needs of their population.

I have also cosponsored the Accelerating Appraisals and Conservation Efforts (AACE) Act to more efficiently approve public lands transactions for housing. This legislation would accelerate the process for constructing housing on federally owned public lands designated for affordable housing.

I applaud the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to bring down the cost of housing and reduce homelessness. The administration’s budget request this year includes an expansion of the low-income housing tax credit; a new Neighborhood Homes Tax Credit; funding for a new Innovation Fund for Housing Expansion; and $1.3 billion for the HOME Investment Partnerships Program to contract and rehabilitate affordable rental housing. This year alone, millions of dollars have flowed to Nevada for affordable housing. This includes $9.4 million in grants from the Federal Home Loan Bank’s Nevada Targeted Fund that I advocated for. I’ve also supported increased funding for a wide variety of HUD programs, many of which have already directly benefited Nevada.

Republicans in Congress have gone in the opposite direction. Their budget would reduce funding for affordable rental and housing construction by 60% and eliminate the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative program. The Southern Nevada Regional Housing Authority just received $50 million from this program. Congressional Republicans also removed from their budget the Yes, In My Backyard program which helps mayors and governors fund land-use solutions to expand affordable housing.

A report by Applied Analysis indicates that Southern Nevada could run out of room for development by 2032. A key reason for this is that more than 80% of land in Nevada is owned by the federal government, most of which is controlled by the Bureau of Land Management. This includes much of the land surrounding the Las Vegas Valley.

The Biden-Harris administration has given us an opportunity to develop some of these public lands with affordable housing. It has implemented an initiative to repurpose surplus federal land for affordable housing through a memorandum between BLM and HUD to sell land in Clark County at below market value for affordable housing projects. This can result in thousands of new affordable housing units in Southern Nevada. Local governments can and should take advantage of this initiative to identify federal lands that are the best possible sites for affordable housing. At the same time, we must be careful to protect special places on our public lands that should be preserved for posterity.

Rather than going backwards on affordable housing, we need to go forward with a vision of how to provide affordable housing in Southern Nevada in the short term and for decades to come. Affordable housing should be a right, not a privilege. Driving hedge funds out of Southern Nevada; helping renters make their rent and reduce evictions; and creating new homes on what is now federal land will give new meaning to our motto, “Home Means Nevada.”

Rep. Dina Titus represents Nevada’s 1st Congressional District.