Yesterday, Bernie Sanders released his plan for housing justice in America. Drawing on the ideas of tenants’ rights groups on the ground, it’s the most ambitious housing plan put forward by any presidential candidate in living memory. And it’s set to become the new benchmark for progressive housing politics. Anything less is a concession.

In the United States today, 18 million households pay more than half of their income for a roof over their head. Half a million people sleep on the streets. The median rental price for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is $3,700, but the problem extends far beyond expensive urban centers. As CityLab reports, a forty-hour-a-week minimum-wage job covers a one-bedroom apartment in only twenty-eight of the country’s 3,007 counties. This isn’t just a housing crisis. It’s a housing catastrophe.

Sanders’s solution comes as no surprise: he wants to tax the rich to pay for public investment in housing. In particular, he wants to invest $1.48 trillion over ten years to build, rehabilitate, and maintain 7.4 million affordable homes for low-income renters. He wants to build 2 million mixed-income social housing units, to build and preserve affordable housing in rural areas and Indian Country, to repair and modernize our current public housing stock, to fully fund the Section 8 housing voucher program, and to invest $26 billion in building permanent supportive housing for the homeless.