“Today I’m excited to introduce the Homes for All Act,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar on Thursday, “which will fulfill the promise of a homes guarantee by building 12 million new public housing and private, permanently affordable rental units — vastly expanding the available affordable housing stock, driving down costs throughout the market, and creating a new vision of what public housing looks like in the United States.”

When Linda Armitage watched Omar’s video announcement on Twitter, she cried. Armitage is a seventy-seven-year-old public housing resident and member of the housing committee of the Jane Addams Senior Caucus, a grassroots senior organization in Chicago. “This is what we dreamed of and worked hard for,” she says, “and here is a big piece of it in black and white.”

Omar’s ten-year plan would devote $1.2 trillion to end the housing crisis in the United States. $800 billion would go to building 9.5 million new public housing units, $200 billion would go to the Housing Trust Fund to build private units that are permanently affordable, and $200 billion would go toward establishing a Community Control and Anti-Displacement Fund at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).