The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) commended U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) yesterday for introducing the Ending Homelessness Act of 2017 last month. In a statement the group called the bill “a comprehensive plan to ensure the lowest income people and families America have safe, decent and affordable homes.

The lack of affordable housing has reached crisis proportions in the U.S. according to  NLIHC’s report, The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Housing, The report found there is a shortage of 7.4 million affordable and available rental homes for America’s 11.4 million extremely low-income (ELI) households, those with incomes less than 30 percent of their area median income or the poverty guideline.

If enacted, the bill would invest $13.27 billion over five years to address shortage of the affordable housing and to combat homelessness. It would provide $1 billion annually to the national Housing Trust Fund (HTF) and $50 million each year for rental assistance to be used in conjunction with HTF housing. The bill would provide 410,000 units of new affordable housing for the lowest income households.

In addition to providing more affordable housing, the bill would fund outreach and case management to ensure homeless people are connected to the services they need and would help states and local jurisdictions better align their healthcare and housing interventions. It would also permanently authorize the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness—both of which are essential to ensuring homeless people have access to emergency shelter and services, transitional housing, job training, primary health care and education.