Until recently, we didn’t know much about Kamala Harris’ housing policy. We knew she was on par with Jamie Dimon about an agreement for homeowners after the Great Financial Crisis and won while serving as California’s Attorney General; and we knew that while serving as Senator she proposed the Rent Relief Act, which was very Californian of her. And then there’s Donald Trump, a former scion of the real estate industry who you might assume was for deregulation, but it’s not entirely clear where he stands on housing either.
In an election year, the economy is important. But on paper, the economy is fine, and yet People still feel that it is not soHousing construction could be the reason: people cannot afford to buy houses. It is highly Home priceshigh Mortgage interest ratesand everything in between. Even when policy decisions range from governors to mayors to wealthy neighborhoods, presidential administrations can affect everything.
Kamala Harris on housing
On Friday, Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Harris said revealed her plan for the housing world. From demand creating three million homes through tax incentives for developers who build single-family homes and affordable rental housing, a $40 billion federal housing fund, rezoning some federal lands and cutting red tape – all that and more is there. On the campaign trail, she vowed to end the country’s housing crisis, which is fueled by the housing shortage. “By the end of my first term, we will end America’s housing shortage,” Harris said in North Carolina, the day she unveiled her economic plan.
Harris’ housing plan is “very similar to what I would write as a wish list for improving housing affordability in this country,” said Michael Lens, a professor of urban planning and public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. Assets“It starts with the obvious long-term culprit: zoning and land use barriers.” Yet details are lacking on how she plans to get communities on board, or how she will work with Guidelines that have made housing construction so difficult in certain parts of our country for decades.
Not to mention that California alone needs to build two and a half million homes by the end of this decade. accordingly Office of Governor Gavin Newsom. Three million households across the country by the end of her first term (just before the end of the decade) may not be enough, but Lens called her priorities “obvious and appropriate.”
While Harris’ proposals can be understood as mechanisms to improve supply, they are not the only basis of her plan. For one thing, she wants to take on corporate landlords, something she said in previous campaign events. The thing is, Wall Street cannot be held fully responsible for the country’s housing crisis. There are, of course, metropolitan areas where the presence of institutional landlords is more pronounced and can be a problem, but Lens suggested that her interest in commercial landlords is less evidence-based and shouldn’t necessarily be her biggest concern. Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University and author of “Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation,” was not a fan of her scapegoating commercial landlords, calling it “very bad.”
Elsewhere, Harris proposed a down payment of up to $25,000 for first-time buyers, but opinions on the idea seem divided. Jenny Schuetz, senior fellow at Brookings metrowhose research focuses on improving housing and land use policies, explained that “addressing the housing shortage is essential to bring down prices and rents, but increasing supply takes time. In the meantime, supporting first-time home buyers can help.” Caplan, on the other hand, said “the policies to increase demand are counterproductive,” but there is agreement that their attention to supply is crucial.
Donald Trump on housing
Four years ago, Trump and Ben Carson, his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development a comment in the Wall Street Journal entitled: “We will protect America’s suburbs”. In it, the two condemned the abolition of single-family housing and the development of high-density housing in residential areas. He was then labelled a NIMBY (a member of the “Not in my backyard” faction) and is still called thatAt a campaign rally in May this year, when he was still running against President Joe Biden, Trump said, said he would stop Biden’s “sinister plan to abolish the suburbs.” But in an interview with BloombergTrump called the zoning “a killer.”
“It’s not entirely clear where he actually lands,” Schuetz said, adding that Trump cannot punish Democratic cities with strict regulations while protecting suburbs and allowing them to maintain their exclusionary practices. “Are you more concerned about protecting the autonomy of states and municipalities? Are you more concerned about protecting single-family housing? Because those don’t always go hand in hand.”
Both Lens and Caplan agreed with Schuetz that Trump seems to be all over the place when it comes to housing. Republican politicians are usually the ones pushing for deregulation; red states are generally build more houses than Democratic-run states and rarely, if ever, have housing crises as severe. Trump may not be entirely anti-development, but his rhetoric about protecting neighborhoods suggests he will use the same tools that have been used for years to that end, Lens stressed.
“Carson and Trump certainly seem rhetorically more on the side of a protectionist, regulatory NIMBY regime,” Lens said. And it raises the question many people asked when Trump was first elected: Why Carson? He had no experience in government or housing policy. (Carson happens to be the author of the housing chapter in Project 2025, which Trump has tried to distance himself from.)
The only thing that put Trump ahead of Harris in Caplan’s eyes is these kinds of new cities built by billionaires. Caplan called it “an unlikely success,” but still thinks it’s more likely with Trump in the fold. Still, Bloomberg In an interview, Trump said the “biggest problem in the housing market” right now is interest rates. Mortgage rates are a problem, but only temporary.
Whoever and whatever comes next will have to address the housing problem, even if it can’t solve everything at once: Mortgage rates have soared from their pandemic lows in a very short period of time, housing prices have hit record highs while incomes have failed to keep up – and we are millions of homes short. That’s a problem.