It’s increasingly hard for first-time homebuyers to afford that major purchase, and an Illinois Congressman wants to fix that.
U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), who represents the 8th Congressional District in the Chicago area, discussed his proposed First Home Affordability Act on Wednesday at a roundtable in Moline Township Hall.
The act would create a refundable tax credit up to $25,000 for these first-time homebuyers, delivered over the first five years of ownership for up to 10% of the purchase price of a home. The new law would:
- Provide assistance equal to 10 percent of the home’s purchase price up to $25,000.
- Target middle-class families, with the credit phased down based on local Area Median Income.
- Applies only to buyers purchasing a home as their primary residence, promoting long-term ownership.
- Offer additional support for first responders, K-12 teachers, and childcare workers, who may access the full $25,000 credit in the first year.
- Require the profession to be the buyer’s primary occupation at the time of purchase.
“This has been a long running problem, but I think it's gotten worse,” Krishnamoorthi said of housing prices nationwide. “This Trump administration, for various reasons, one of the biggest reasons are the tariffs. And the tariffs have been levied on everything from everywhere, leading to higher prices on everything for everyone, including homes. Because as you can tell when you go to a builder and say what's driving the cost of these rising home prices?
“They say various things, but one of them is like, all my home building materials have gone up,” the Congressman said. “And so that is something that is a man made problem and that we can fix it if we would just kind of get back to sanity with regard to trade policy and once again allow people to be able to buy standard products from other countries at more normal prices.”
A second problem is just the rising costs of buying a home, and the amounts bank charge for downpayments (often up to 20%), he said.
“A 20% downpayment is pretty significant, right? It's very high,” Krishnamoorthi said. “Especially if you're a young person coming out of college or a few years out, or coming out of trade or technical school in a union, whatever. It's not easy to muster that kind of cash.”
The average single-family home price in the Quad Cities was $276,970 in December, according to Ruhl&Ruhl Realtors.
The government has offered a federal first-time homebuyer tax credit before, after the 2008 financial crisis, under President Obama.
“President Obama actually had this in place when he was president and it helped put 2 to 3 million people in their first homes during his time in office,” Krishnamoorthi said, noting it was phased out in 2010, after offering an $8,000 tax credit. “But now it's time to bring it back because it worked. So let's try something that's worked in the past.”
“This is such an important topic,” he said of home affordability. “I hear about it all the time. It's maybe the number-one issue on the agenda in terms of the affordability crisis, which by the way, is not a hoax. It's for real, contrary to what the president says. And I think that, because it's such a staple of the American dream, we have to tackle it right now.”
Krishnamoorthi wants to work with home builders and project developers, to make it easier to build homes, cutting through any red tape.
“But I got to tell you, the one thing that these home builders keep telling me is these tariffs are killing people,” he said. “When Donald Trump says that other countries are paying the tariffs, no, it's us, we're paying the tariffs. It's those builders that are paying the tariffs. And when they pay those tariffs, they have to pass on a lot of those costs.
“And so if we could rein that under control, especially the tariffs on Canadian products, because Canadian lumber, for instance, is a big part of our home building industry and it affects us directly in the upper Midwest where we rely on a lot of Canadian lumber,” the Congressman said. “It would help if we can kind of get that under control, bring some sanity there.”
Highest average age of first-time buyers
The typical first-time homebuyer in the U.S. is now 40 years old, a record high, as affordability struggles price many younger families out of the market, according to Realtor.com.
The median age of first-time buyers rose to 40 in 2025 from 38 the year before, and is up sharply from 33 just five years ago, according the annual profile of homebuyers and home sellers released by the National Association of Realtors this past November.
The share of all home purchases that were made by first-time buyers fell to 21% this year, the lowest on records dating to 1981.
According to a Bankrate report, more than 75% of homes are unaffordable for first-time buyers.
“That's been a big focus for us here in the city,” Moline Ald. James Patrick Schmidt said Wednesday of affordable housing. “We're gonna try to get more homes built in the homelessness crash, which is all kind of parts of that same piece of the puzzle. So that's a really big topic for us. We're really happy that he's come here today to join with us and have that conversation with municipal leaders.”
Rock Island County treasurer Nick Camlin supported Krishnamoorthi’s tax-credit plan.
“I think the front-end ideas are very nice for affordability, getting people into their homes,” he said. “But what I see too, especially during tax payment time, is that so many people are one missed paycheck, one medical bill away from losing it all. They need more time.”
“A huge majority of Americans do not have $1,000 nested away for an emergency. So that's wonderful if we do these things at the front end. But there's got to be something ongoing because there are a lot of people with a lot of anxieties over that situation,” Camlin said.
Schmidt said the city of Moline has a “Level Up” partnership with Project NOW, to provide assistance (either ongoing or one-time) to residents of Moline. Households receive assistance for things like rent, utilities, driver’s license fees, emergency housing maintenance, and other emergency needs.
“We've changed a lot of zoning laws. We continue to, because we need to build more houses,” the alderman said. “It's great to be able to have the money available, but we need to have the housing stock. I think we're kind of at this point where we've started putting all these tools in the toolbox, but we're having a hard time getting people to pick them up and start building the houses.”
“One of the biggest challenges we run into too, which comes into federal side of that is just this never knowing are we going to have our Community Development Block Grants continuing into the next year?” Schmidt said. “Because we, our citizens, rely on that and that's always been a question.”
The city recently partnered with Project NOW to open a temporary emergency winter shelter, north of River Drive off 19th Street. That is serving a capacity of 60 unhoused individuals on a first-come, first-served basis, operated by Project NOW through April 15.
Cooperating with Republicans on affordability
Krishnamoorthi is unsure of prospects for his bill in a GOP-controlled Congress, which is facing another government shutdown deadline this Friday.
“We have to get people of good faith on the other side to buy into the idea that it's time to tackle the affordable housing crisis in different ways, including with this type of tax credit,” he said Wednesday. “I have supported Republican efforts with regard to the Affordable Housing Tax Credit on the Ways and Means Committee. And that was a bipartisan effort, quite frankly.
“And so I think there is a will on the other side. We just have to kind of identify the right people to kind of work with and kind of move this forward,” he said.
Last year, Congress (with strong bipartisan support) passed the Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act, which included increasing tax credit authority by 50%, enabling states to finance hundreds of thousands of additional affordable rental homes over the next decade.
It is a tax credit for developers to help build affordable housing, and was co-sponsored by Illinois Congressman Darin LaHood, a Republican.
From housing to lifesaving prescription drugs, the cost of everyday essentials continues to rise as the chaos of the Trump economy squeezes hardworking families across Illinois. On Tuesday, Congressman Krishnamoorthi highlighted this crisis, visiting an East St. Louis pharmacy to discuss the rising cost of healthcare and prescription drugs, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to highlight the impact of federal funding cuts on cutting-edge agricultural science, and an elementary school in Normal to discuss the importance of federally funded afterschool programs at Community Schools.
On Wednesday, Krishnamoorthi hosted the Moline event on housing before heading to Rockford’s Northern Illinois Food Bank to discuss the impact of Trump’s SNAP cuts on working families.
“In each place, one of the unfortunate themes is certain funding streams, grant programs are just getting put on hold almost arbitrarily,” he said in Moline. “And sometimes it feels like it's like politically motivated or ideologically motivated and people can't plan and people are getting hurt.”
“And this type of stuff is just, it's unnecessary,” Krishnamoorthi said of funding cuts of vital services, like Medicaid and food assistance. “We have enough challenges as it is. Just brainstorming how are we going to get our arms around some of these intractable challenges like housing but then to have these random freezes out of nowhere, it just really sets us back and it hurts everybody.
“It's not just one community or another, it's really everybody,” he added. “So that is something we can avoid. I'm going to kind of try to work with our Republican friends to try to bring a little stability on that front in the next round of appropriations as well that we don't need this nonsense.”
The full text of the tax-credit bill is available here.
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