When he will watch/play/try anything you want, never thinks it’s weird you listen to the same 10 songs for 50+ days in a row, and is calm 98% of the time, 6ft, loves that you’re a little rogue and sarcastic, cleans, cooks, adores you and decided you were his and -
Anything that is actually funny doesn’t sound real. I lost my AirPod, so I set off the sound to locate. Could hear it everywhere I went. Finally, my husband exclaims, “It is you! It’s in your underwear.” He was right. Why he didn’t assume my ponytail but was right is beyond.
I am the official who runs the signings. The biggest housing bill in 30 years passed 85 to 5 and 358 to 32, and my job was the pen. This week the pen did not happen.
The bill was the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. A Republican and a Democrat wrote it together. Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren. 443 people finished it. It is the most agreement I have ever staged, and the only thing I have ever staged that I logged as did not occur. My system has no field for a bill that passed and was not signed. There is a field for the event. The event did not happen. So the housing did not happen. I marked it that way.
I had ordered the pens. A president signs a bill with many pens, one stroke each, so every lawmaker takes home a fragment of the signature. Johnson used 75 to sign the Civil Rights Act. I had 75 engraved for this one. They say June. None of them has been used, because a fragment of a signature that did not happen is just a pen, and I have 75 of them in a box.
I do not read the bills. I read the run of show. But I prepare the folder, so I see the pages.
There is a section. It is called Homes Are For People, Not Corporations. It stops a company that owns 350 houses from buying the next house. The Senate had put in a line that made those companies sell the rental homes back to a family within 7 years. The House took that line out. The home builders asked for it to come out, and then they congratulated everyone on the deal. I did not handle that. I moved the line from Provisions to Formatting. A clause in Formatting is not a clause. The photo went forward.
The cap does not touch what they already own. It only touches the next purchase. Invitation Homes owns 86,192 of these houses. The bill does not ask for one of them back. American Homes 4 Rent stopped buying houses; they build them now, 92 of every 100, and the cap only covers buying. The door for that is in the bill. I printed the door. It is on the program.
The cap is 350 houses per company. It is not 350 per owner. A company that reaches 350 can open another company. I am not authorized to call that a loophole. I am authorized to call it a separate entity.
The bill is about who owns the houses. It is not about who sets the rent. The rent is set by software. The Justice Department says competing landlords took the same program's price 80 to 90% of the time. At 90% it is one company in a thousand buildings wearing a thousand names. The case settled. The company paid $0 and admitted nothing. The fix is that the software now has to use rent data at least a year old and may not look closer than the state line. We made the price-fixing engine a year blurrier and we logged it resolved. The renters paid about $800 a year for the part the bill does not mention. I filed that under a different desk.
Greystar manages 950,000 apartments. It settled the pricing matter for $7 million across 9 states. That is $7.37 a unit. I have rented a riser that cost more. I logged the $7.37 under venue and closed the ticket.
The trade groups were in the folder too. The National Multifamily Housing Council. The National Apartment Association. They are listed as the groups that worked on the part about building rentals. The companies the section is named against are the companies that helped write the section. I filed it under Homes Are For People, Not Corporations, because that is the title, and the title is what goes on the easel.
The bill spends nothing. $0 in new money. Goldman says it might add 2.5 million homes over 10 years against a shortage of 4 million. I do not log the 1.5 million that are still short. There is no event for a house that is not built. The home builders put out a statement. They are afraid it will fizzle. I do not handle fizzle. I handle the desk.
And then he did not sign it.
He said he will sign it after Congress passes a different bill. The different bill is the SAVE Act. One bill is about where people live. The other is about who is allowed to register to vote. It files about 21 million eligible Americans under documentation pending, which is more people than live in the state of New York. We are doing that one first. I was told to call the housing one a scheduling matter. So I logged it as a scheduling matter.
771,480 people slept outside on the night we counted them. Up 18%. 22.7 million households pay half their income in rent. None of that has a field in my system. Those are tickets on a different desk. I closed mine on schedule.
Counsel told me that if he does nothing for 10 days while Congress sits, the bill becomes law on its own. No pen. No desk. No me. He is not doing nothing. He is holding it. To hold a thing you have to choose it, every day, over the 10 days where it would pass without you. I logged that under decisions, and there is only one in the file.
I have put the pens back in the box. The pens say June. If the signing moves to July the pens are wrong, and I will have to order pens with no date, because I can no longer promise the date. That is the only line item I have reopened. Everything else about this is closed.
I do not house people. I house the signing. The signing did not happen. So as far as my office is concerned, nothing did.
The desk is not ours either. It was built in 1880 from the timbers of a British ship and given to us by a queen. My props inventory lists it as a fixed asset, owner of record: the Crown. I have staged the signing of Homes Are For People, Not Corporations on the one surface in the building no American family will ever be allowed to buy.
I have the pens. I know exactly where the bill is. It is on the desk, in the closet, waiting for the room next door. The easel is still up. The card on it still says Homes Are For People, Not Corporations.
The title is the only part of this that is finished.