The following is the full transcript of a panel with Mayors Eileen Higgins, David Holt, Quinton Lucas and Mark Freeman, a portion of which aired on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on Feb. 1, 2026.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Welcome back to Face The Nation. We’re joined now by a bipartisan group of mayors from across the country. Republican David Holt of Oklahoma City, Democrat Eileen Higgins of Miami, Democrat Quinton Lucas of Kansas City, and Republican Mark Freeman of Mesa, Arizona. And it’s good to have you all here in town at the table together, speaking in a bipartisan way. There are so many things that you see on the ground operating your cities, and what we see in our polling, again and again, is the number one issue for people when they say it’s the economy, what they really mean is the cost of living, and the biggest contributor to that really is housing, shelter costs right now really burdening people. And I want to start with you, Mayor Higgins, Miami, we looked it up, it’s the least affordable rental market of any major city. Median price for condos and single family homes up more than 80% since COVID, so many people moved in there around that period of time. You’ve been trying to make government land available to develop on. Is that working? Are you going to make a dent in prices?
MAYOR EILEEN HIGGINS: Well, what I can tell you is the largest landowners in many communities are municipal governments. And prior to becoming mayor, I served on our county commission for eight years, and during that time by activating county owned land, particularly land around transit stations, I was able to, in a short period of time, build or rehabilitate 4,000 units of affordable and workforce housing, and we have about 3,000 more in the pipeline. So that is a big contributor, and it can be used better, and certainly I intend to do so at the city. When you’re building stuff, costs are high, right? Cost of land, cost of concrete, cost of steel, cost of labor. So if cost of land can be taken out of that equation, it makes it easier to build affordable and workforce housing. And the other thing that’s really important that government can do is make it faster to build it, and one of the initiatives I undertook at the county was to completely revamp how we permit affordable housing, and at that- at our point in time, we could permit a 12-story building in less than four months. Now, part of the reason I was elected mayor of the city of Miami was people trusted me on building housing that is affordable for our workers, and to do it in record time. So my top priority at the city is to fix a broken permitting system, where, right now, it can take two to three years before you can even break ground on affordable housing project. So very important that cities pay attention to their bureaucracy, make it as small as possible, because every day you’re waiting and permitting is the day the costs go up…