We're facing a housing crisis. The United States has a 4.7 million housing unit shortage, and families in East Tennessee are being priced out of their hometowns. Young people can't afford to buy their first home, seniors are losing their housing, and working families are spending more than half their income on rent.

Meanwhile, private equity firms are swooping in to buy up entire neighborhoods, treating homes like stock portfolios instead of places where families build their lives. Add to that Trump's mass deportation agenda that has decimated our construction workforce and his trade wars that have made building materials more expensive - making an already bad housing shortage even worse.

Here's how we fix the housing crisis:

• Get private equity out of the housing market by capping how many residential units corporate entities can own and closing loopholes that allow mass acquisition of single-family homes.

• Reduce bureaucratic barriers to construction by incentivizing local governments to streamline permitting and zoning processes for affordable housing projects.

• Expand the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program to build more affordable units and ensure working families have housing options they can actually afford.

• Protect family farms from corporate takeover while ensuring smart land use policies that balance agricultural preservation with housing development where it makes sense.

• Rebuild our construction workforce by supporting immigration policies that meet our labor needs and investing in trades training programs.

Housing is a human right, not a commodity for Wall Street to manipulate. When families have stable, affordable housing, entire communities thrive.