Until recently, we didn’t know much about Kamala Harris’ housing policy. We knew that when she was California’s attorney general, she fought and won with Jamie Dimon to get a homeowners’ settlement after the Great Financial Crisis; and we knew that when she was a senator, she proposed the Rent Relief Act, which was very Californian of her. And then there’s Donald Trump, a scion of the real estate industry who, one might assume, was for deregulation, but his position on housing isn’t entirely clear either.
In an election year, the economy is important. But on paper, things are going well, and yet people feel like they aren’t. The reason for this could be the housing market: people can’t afford houses. Home prices are high, mortgage rates are high, and everything in between. So even if political decisions range from governors to mayors to wealthy neighborhoods, the presidency can affect everything.
Kamala Harris on housing
On Friday, Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Harris unveiled her plan for housing. From calling for 3 million homes to be built through tax incentives for developers who build entry-level homes and affordable rentals to a $40 billion federal housing fund to rezoning some federal lands and cutting red tape, it’s all that and more. 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 same 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 restrictions.” Still, details are scarce on how she plans to bring local governments on board or how she will address policies that have made housing so difficult in certain parts of the country for decades.
Not to mention, California alone needs to build two and a half million homes by the end of this decade, according to Governor Gavin Newsom’s office. So 3 million homes across the country by the end of her first term (near the end of the decade) might not be enough, but Lens called her priorities “obvious and appropriate.”
While Harris’ proposals can be understood as supply-enhancing mechanisms, they are not the sole basis of her plan. For one thing, she wants to take on corporate landlords, something she has said she will do at previous campaign rallies. The point is, Wall Street cannot be blamed solely 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 said her interest in corporate landlords is less evidence-based and should not necessarily be her biggest concern. Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University and author of Building, Baby, Building: Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation, was not a fan of scapegoating company owners, calling it “very bad.”
On another front, Harris proposed a down payment of up to $25,000 for first-time buyers, but opinions on the idea seem divided. Jenny Schuetz, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro whose research focuses on improving housing and land-use policy, said that “addressing the housing shortage is essential to lowering prices and rents, but increasing supply takes time. In the meantime, supporting first-time buyers can be helpful.” Caplan, on the other hand, said “the policies to increase demand are counterproductive,” but there is agreement that their attention to supply is critical.
Donald Trump on housing
Four years ago, Trump and Ben Carson, his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, wrote a commentary in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “We Will Protect America’s Suburbs.” In it, the two condemned the elimination of single-family zoning and the development of high-density housing in residential areas. Trump was called a NIMBY (a member of the “not-in-my-backyard” faction) then and is still called that. At a campaign rally in May of this year, while still running against President Joe Biden, Trump said he would stop Biden’s “sinister plan to abolish the suburbs.” But in an interview with Bloomberg, Trump called 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 appears to be undecided on housing. Republican politicians are typically the ones who push for deregulation; Republican states generally build more housing than Republican ones, and housing crises are rarely as severe, if ever. Trump may not be entirely anti-development, but his rhetoric about protecting neighborhoods suggests he will use the same tools that have been used to that end for years, Lens pointed out.
“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.)
What put Trump ahead of Harris in Caplan’s eyes are these kinds of new cities built by billionaires. Caplan called them “far off,” but still thinks they’re more likely if Trump were to build them. Still, in the same Bloomberg 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, the federal government will have to address housing, even if it can’t solve everything at once: Mortgage rates have soared from their pandemic-era lows in a very short period of time; housing prices have hit record highs while incomes have failed to keep up – and there is a shortage of millions of homes. That’s a problem.
