2021

Vice President Kamala Harris is pledging to increase the housing supply and make it more affordable, especially for first-time home buyers.

She’s preaching to the choir of voters who rank housing affordability as a top-three issue in the election — about 25%, according to the results of a survey by Ipsos and Redfin, released on Oct. 15. Unsurprisingly, more renters (31.6%) rank housing affordability as a priority issue compared to already existing homeowners (17.1%).

The current housing affordability crisis is the result of the construction industry’s sluggish return to form following the 2007-2008 housing collapse and the basic laws of supply and demand. As is, there isn’t enough housing available for the number of buyers: The housing deficit grew to 4.5 million in 2022 up from 4.3 million in 2021, according to Zillow, a real estate website.

Housing shortages push up prices and keep them high. When a lack of available housing is combined with years of persistently elevated mortgage rates, it becomes even harder for would-be first-time homebuyers to break into the market.

Then, as fewer people trade renting for home ownership, it puts pressure on the rental market, keeping those prices high, too. As a result, shelter, which includes both home buying and renting, has remained the greatest factor in core inflation growth for years.

The only way to effectively combat a lack of affordable homes is by building more housing. Harris’ housing plans are ambitious — and possibly unrealistic, experts say.

Harris has outlined policies aimed at creating 3 million new housing units over the next four years — a 50% increase over the current rate of home building, according to the nonprofit Urban Institute.

In an Aug. 21 Washington Post editorial, Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, and Jim Parrott, a housing expert at the Urban Institute, called her plans “the most aggressive supply-side push since the national investment in housing that followed World War II.”

To achieve her end goal, Harris wants to provide several tax incentives to kickstart construction:

• A new Neighborhood Homes Tax Credit to construct or rehabilitate 400,000 homes in lower income communities. The homes must be owner-occupied. The incentive would operate similarly to the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) in that states would receive an allocation of credits for specific projects based on local need.  

• A tax cut for builders that construct affordable starter homes. 

• A $40 billion innovation fund to incentivize state and local governments, as well as private developers and homebuilders, to find new strategies to expand the housing supply, primarily through regulatory reform and cutting red tape. 

• Open up certain federal lands for new housing developments. Her campaign has not specified which federal lands.

An analysis of Harris’ proposal by the Urban Institute says Harris’ plans to increase new housing are not out of line with historic standards. But 50% growth is still a daunting task, and would rely on a number of factors outside a president’s direct control. “What she’s proposed will probably only go sort of halfway or part of the way in achieving that, because achieving a 50% increase in housing production is gigantic,” says Yonah Freemark, a principal research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute and the research director of the Land Use Lab at Urban.

Other observers see the 50% target as unrealistic. “For anyone who has any knowledge of commercial real estate and the housing industry, that seems like an unachievable number,” says Brian Connolly, assistant professor of business law at the University of Michigan. “But good for her for trying to get there.”

However, her proposals could help spur more construction even if they don’t reach the target, says Connolly. He adds that if the government supports homebuilding through new tax incentives that make it more profitable to build new housing and attract skilled labor, then it could make a meaningful impact on the housing supply.

Harris would need Congress to enact much of what she pledges to do. Of the innovation fund, for example, Connolly says, “She couldn’t just sort of pluck $40 billion out of thin air to deliver to the local government; that would be something that would presumably require congressional authorization.”

What there is bipartisan appetite in Congress for, says Freemark, is reducing regulatory restraints on construction. He says there may also be support for expanding the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, which goes toward acquiring, rehabilitating or constructing rental housing for lower-income households. The Democratic National Committee includes expanding LIHTC in its platform.

A cornerstone of Harris’ housing plans aims to make home ownership — the most traditional vehicle for wealth-building in America — more accessible to first-time buyers. She pledges to provide up to $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time home buyers and an unspecified, greater amount of assistance for first-generation homebuyers.

Starter-home buyers could use the help since those homes are much more expensive than they were before the pandemic — 51.1% higher than August 2019, according to a Redfin report released on Sept. 30. But there is one recent positive sign for buyers: Starter homes are less expensive now than a year ago for the first time since August 2020. Homebuyers currently need to earn $76,995 annually to afford a home at the median price of $250,000.

There are already places in the U.S. that provide down payment assistance, so Harris’ proposal isn’t new per se, but its size and scope is, says Freemark. “I think that it has the potential to be quite impactful in terms of expanding access to home-purchasing for a large segment of the population that currently, simply, doesn’t have the ability to assemble enough funds,” he adds.

But when it comes to how assistance is delivered, the devil is in the details. “It will take a lot of thought and, potentially, some experimentation on the part of agencies and others that would be implementing this strategy,” Freemark adds. “Also, this is a potentially very expensive program, so I’m not sure I’ve heard broad enough support in Congress.”

It’s much easier to increase demand than it is to increase supply, says Ed Pinto, a senior fellow and co-director of the AEI Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and Harris’ down payment assistance plan would serve to add buyers to what is now a strong seller’s market. “Unless that were to change, any efforts along the lines of demand increases would lead to substantial increases in prices,” says Pinto.

Connolly agrees. “If we’re not building those housing units and we’re providing people with $25,000 in credits to go out and buy within a stock of housing that is not sufficient, that’s going to result in bidding up housing prices,” he says.

Still, providing credits to first-time homebuyers could be something that both sides of the aisle support, says Connolly. “I tend to be a little more of an optimist about the bipartisan nature of this problem,” he says.

About two-thirds of all homes are owned by the people who live in them, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The other third are occupied by renters and Harris has plans to make their lives less expensive, too. The natural outcome to her plan to make home ownership more accessible would be freed-up rental housing. But she also wants to target corporate landlords in two ways:

• End rental price-fixing practices by landlords of large multi-family units that raise rents based on algorithms. She is calling on Congress to pass the Preventing the Algorithmic Facilitation of Rental Housing Cartels Act. 

• Remove tax benefits for large corporate landlords that own single-family rental homes. She is calling on Congress to pass the Stop Predatory Investing Act. 

Freemark says that generally, there hasn’t been much support from Republicans in Congress to fund housing affordability policies for renters. If Democrats gained control in both houses, then there is some potential to expand funding for those purposes, he says.

But there has been some bipartisan interest in stopping large private investors from purchasing a large share of homes in communities throughout the country, says Freemark. “Getting that policy right is not obvious,” he says. “Just because you don’t like private investors doesn’t mean they’re not playing an important role in the overall housing market. And, you know, you’re playing with a very large industry when you start talking about sort of critiquing the ownership of large corporations. So I don’t know. I’m a little skeptical”

Meanwhile, Connolly isn’t so sure that focusing on price-fixing will be impactful in alleviating high rent prices. “I’m a bit skeptical that, you know, going after representing algorithms is really going to result in decreases in rent or slowed appreciation of rent,” he says. “But to the extent that there’s any impact on the rental market at the margins, that might be possible.”

Experts agree that reducing regulatory burdens to building new housing is necessary and has bipartisan support. Both candidates have, at least, nodded to that need — Republicans in their party platform and Harris with her $40 billion innovation fund.

“Republicans tend to be more pro-business; they tend to provide tax breaks to businesses,” says Connolly. “And Democrats want to see more housing supply and housing affordability. So that looks like a good way to kind of, you know, marry those two sides of the aisle.”

Still, authority over housing regulations is concentrated at the local level, so there may be limits to what Congress can achieve on the issue.

In the past former President Donald Trump has floated a vision of 10 “freedom cities” on undeveloped federal lands (his utopian vision for these cities also includes flying cars). Harris has also said she supports opening up federal lands to build housing, but hasn’t provided details.

The Federal Government is the largest landholder in the country (the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, manages one in every 10 acres in the U.S.) so there’s an inventory of possible land available for development. But there’s a key difficulty with the proposal, says Freemark: “A lot of federal land is not land you would want to build housing on.”

Connolly agrees: “When you look at the map of U.S. federal lands, a lot of them are in very lightly populated areas across the western U.S. where there’s not going to be any demand for housing. There may be federal properties that are underutilized in larger cities that would be appropriate places to build housing … but at this point, I think that proposal, you know, from both sides of the aisle is really unclear in terms of its scope and where that would occur.”

The majority of government-owned land is in the West, and there is precedent for opening it to home building. In July, the Bureau of Land Management announced actions that it said would create thousands of affordable housing units on federal land in Nevada.

Pinto is optimistic about the possibilities. “In areas where there’s plenty of land, you could build an entirely new city,” he says. “Let’s take Utah … the federal government owns [the majority] of land in Utah. Half of that land we’ll call ‘Smokey the Bear’ — national parks, national forests, national monuments, things like that. The other half is just owned by the Bureau of Land Management.”

Housing hasn’t been the focus of Trump’s campaign, but the cornerstone promise of his campaign — deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants — could have a direct impact on the housing market.

Trump has claimed that his deportation plans would free up housing, but experts say it would actually worsen the housing crisis since the construction workforce is largely reliant on immigrant labor.

Immigration has not been at the root of the U.S. housing crisis, says Connolly. “To the extent that you have migrants who are, generally speaking, low income or very low income people entering into the market … they’re facing much more dire circumstances than people who are trying to buy their first home or something like that,” he says.

But what Trump’s deportation plans could do is exacerbate a shortage of construction workers.

“I would suspect it is causing some concern for home builders and people in the building industry, because immigrant labor has long been a source of labor for the building industry and not just immigrants from Central and South America, but going back across really our entire history,” says Connolly. “Think of Italian bricklayers, Irish laborers in the 1800s and early 1900s. We have always relied on immigrant labor for work in our building industry. And yeah, the idea that we’re going to go deport a bunch of immigrants, you know, particularly in a time period when we need to be building housing is particularly bad policy.”

Freemark says, “Trump deporting millions of people would be horribly destructive for the housing market. It would make it very difficult to build homes throughout much of the country and it would increase the cost of homes.”

(Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images News via Getty Images)