Last week, we broke down how your vote for president could impact Nevada's housing crisis.

And we're bringing you the rest of that conversation now.

In it, Nevada State Treasurer Zack Conine talks about a tenant protection from last legislative session that he thought should have continued.

The discussion starts, though, with Brandon Roberts thoughts on rent control.

He's the president of Nevada Realtors.

on paper.

It sounds like a good thing, you know, cap on rents, but we have, we have mom and pop owners that own properties that are saving for college education, saving for retirement.

We've got the elderly.

They can't work anymore that rely on that income coming in from those, those, rental properties to survive.

And when you look at it and you start saying, if you cap rents at a certain portion, you're guaranteeing increases every single year on rent because nobody wants to fall behind because they can't catch up.

What are you looking forward to this next legislative session?

What will you be pursuing?

well, we're in the process of analyzing what's going to come out, but we anticipate that affordable housing is going to be a big issue on there.

We look forward to sitting down with all parties interested to try to find the right plan or the right direction for our state and our cities to to be able to move forward and solve this crisis.

If you could name one issue you'd like to go after first, within the affordable housing issue, what would you say supply.

Supply is such a complicated goal?

It's actually not.

And that's the sort of the the the neat thing about housing from a policy perspective, if we build more housing, any housing prices will fall.

More people will be able to afford it.

That's it.

Simple supply and demand.

It's I mean it really this is one of those things where like there are the solutions could be complicated, but the actual work is deeply, deeply simple.

Are there any of the tenant protections that were vetoed last session by the governor that you wish had gotten through?

You know, we're really like I said, we're focused on supply, right?

The supply is a bipartisan issue.

Governor Lombardo is committed to building more housing.

We're committed in the Treasury to building more housing.

Legislative leadership in both houses is committed to building more housing.

And so our focus is on making sure we provide the tools from a financial perspective, right, to make sure that that can be done as well as possible.

So you don't want to say if there was one.

It look, I think there are.

The governor vetoed things he thought should be vetoed.

I probably would not have made all of those vetoes, but they don't let us veto over in the Treasury.

Pick one, though, that you wish had gotten through.

I think that there's a there was a way to.

I think there was a way to extend the process that we have to try and make sure that people can take advantage of rental assistance during the eviction process.

Right.

There are dollars available, and there was a goal to extend a pandemic era process, right, which would have extended the amount of time that folks could basically stay in eviction while they're getting those dollars.

Now, that process did not work super well at the beginning, and with the help of the Realtors and the Apartment Association and others, over time it really got better.

It got to the place where, at least in our opinion, it was working.

And so to the extent that there are dollars available to keep people in their homes, it is just more it's more expensive on everybody.

It's more expensive on the landlord to have to evict someone.

It's more expensive on the tenant to find new housing if they can.

It's more expensive on the community, which then has to support that individual as they look for more housing, especially if they're disabled, especially if they're elderly.

I think we can take a look at making that a little bit less draconian.

I don't know if that bill was the perfect way to do it, but that's probably one I wouldn't have touched.

And what was the Nevada realtor stance on that one?

Well, I agree with him on, the rental assistance.

I think that was a big, help for homeowners and tenants in, in our market after Covid and keeping people in properties.

yeah, it started off rocky and it got a lot better.

what work was that if you were in the eviction process, but you already had a rental application in for assistance, then that would be postponed in.

But that's correct.

And by the by, one of the reasons it got better is because the Biden-Harris administration, their HUD department, leaned in and changed the rules for Nevada so that we could get dollars out the door more quickly because they were responsive.

Yeah, there was there was change to where it allowed the the property owner to actually make application, which was huge, instead of waiting just for the tenant to do it.

That's it.

Right.

To see part one of our affordable housing discussion, go to Vegas pbs.org/nevada Week