Kamala Harris has a new advertising push to draw attention to her plan to build 3 million new homes over four years, a move designed to contain inflationary pressures that also draws a sharp contrast to Republican Donald Trump’s approach.
Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, highlights her plan in a new minute-long ad that uses her personal experience, growing up in rental housing while her mother had saved for a decade before she could buy a home. The ad targets voters in the swing states including Arizona and Nevada. Campaign surrogates are also holding 20 events this week focused on housing issues.
In addition to increasing home construction, Harris is proposing the government provide as much as $25,000 in assistance to first-time buyers. That message carries weight at this moment as housing costs have kept upward pressure on the consumer price index. Shelter costs are up 5.1% over the past 12 months, compared to overall inflation being 2.9%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“Vice President Harris knows we need to do more to address our housing crisis, that’s why she has a plan to end the housing shortage” and will crack down on “corporate landlords and Wall Street banks hiking up rents and housing costs,” said Dan Kanninen, the campaign’s battleground states director.
It’s such a complex problem, it’s going to take a long time to fix. Part of the problem is people don’t really understand what the real problem is. They think the problem is that there aren’t enough detached, single family homes being built. I get why people would focus on single family homes because that’s what Americans want. The “American Dream” is to own your own home in the suburbs, and if you think that everyone who wants a single family home should be able to buy one, then, yeah, you’re going to see the problem as one of not enough single family homes being built. However, I would argue that the American dream itself is the problem.
Suburbs are expensive, and inefficient, bad for the environment, and bad for our physical and mental health. Suburbs necessitate car dependence, and cars themselves require a lot of expensive infrastructure. I know a lot of Americans don’t like to hear it, but we really do need to be living in higher density urban areas. Higher density, mixed use urban areas allow people to walk and bike more, which is better for our health. It’s also less expensive. The farther apart everything is, the more you’ll need to drive, and that means owning your own car, which is expensive.
I don’t think people even necessarily know why they want a single family home. I think Americans want single family homes because we’re told from day one that is what we should want. It’s our culture. You grow up, get married, buy a home in the suburbs, and start a family. You own at least two cars, you drive everywhere, that’s the American dream. I think we need to start questioning if this is really what’s best, and if we should really want it. I know I have, and I’ve decided it isn’t best. I think I would be happier and healthier living in a mixed use urban area, where I could walk or bike to a lot of places, or take public transportation, and if I needed to drive somewhere, maybe I’d take a taxi or rent a car or use some car sharing service.
Very few places like these exist in the US, and that’s because too many people still want to live in a single family home in the suburbs, and many of those people, also have most of their personal wealth in their home, so they push for restrictive zoning laws and other regulations, limiting how much higher density housing and mixed development can be built, thus making such areas relatively rare and thus expensive. There’s a battle going on between people who want single family homes and people who want higher density, mixed use areas.
I know people don’t want to talk about that, because they don’t want to make it an us vs them thing, but it just is. Our desires are mutually exclusive, due to the finite nature of land. A given piece of land cannot be both a low density, single family suburb and a higher density, mixed use area, simultaneously. It must be one or the other. How we “fix” the housing crisis depends on which we choose to prioritize. We either find ways to build more and more suburbs, or we eliminate single family zoning and invest in building many more, higher density, mixed use urban areas. I know which one I choose.
Mostly agreed! But here’s my tale:
I’m exactly where I want to be, home on the edge of a suburb, countryside a mile to the north. The neighborhood was about half developed, half woods. There’s been a few dozen new home built in the past several years, and I’m not happy about it.
Know those complexes having a couple of hundred apartments? Yeah, losing my home and having to move to one is my nightmare. I hate living packed in like rats and following bullshit rules. Can’t wash your car outside! What if one of your fellow rats slips?
I understand. I don’t necessarily have a problem with relatively restrictive zoning in rural areas. But, I do think restrictive zoning becomes a significant problem, the closer you get to population centers, or the centers of towns and cities. Limiting higher density housing in city and town centers kind of necessitates people moving into suburbs and even, eventually, rural areas. If there isn’t enough suitable, affordable, relatively dense housing where the jobs and schools and shops are, the suburbs will grow and spread. So, if you want to keep your area as rural as possible, you need to make sure people have plenty of housing options in the city and town centers. Unfortunately, much of the land in many city and town centers is currently zoned exclusively for single family homes. That has to change or sprawl will continue.
You live on the edge of the developed area, with suburb on one side and countryside on the other.
And more homes went up, transforming the area that you’re in into more suburb, and cutting you off from nature.
Do you think the people who moved into those houses also wanted to live with suburb on one side and nature on the other? Conversely, how do you think the people living near the previous edge of the suburb felt when your house went up?
Do you see the problem with this kind of development?
living in a city with a lot of housing demand, people definitely don’t all want a single-family house. The big push is for zoning changes that allow higher density development: townhomes and small multifamily construction on what were single family lots with setbacks, accessory dwelling units, mixed use apartment buildings with less parking, etc.
You can’t understand how someone wouldn’t want to live in a sardine can?
Some people like having space.
They also like not living in a cacophony of fucking noise all day.
I don’t think people should have to live in sardine cans, I think people should have the opportunity to live in apartments or condos that meet their needs.
All I’m saying is that people absolutely know why they want their own house. Pretending otherwise is a little ridiculous.
If people want to live in an apartment that’s great, but it should be a choice.
There should always be suburban and country living.
All I’m saying is that people absolutely know why they want their own house. Pretending otherwise is a little ridiculous.
All I’m saying is I think people’s preferences are influenced by the prevailing culture, which certainly impresses on people that owning a home should be the ideal. We’re all influenced by culture, and we’re not necessarily always consciously aware of it.
If people want to live in an apartment that’s great, but it should be a choice.
It should be, I agree. And that’s a big part of the problem: in many cities, a large percentage, or even a majority of the land is zoned exclusively for single family development. There is no choice to build anything else. If the zoning was changed to allow any and all forms of housing to be built, I’m sure neighborhoods of detached, single family homes would still exist, but there would likely be far fewer of them, and/or they would be further from the city center.
Meh my suburb definitely helps my health. I border open space, have a great trail that goes all the way to the city center, and to a state park in the other direction. I either ride my bike or use a convenient bus line to get around, unless I have explicit cause to drive. Many of my friends live within a mile or so of me and we regularly meet at the neighborhood fenced off leash dog park, or walk over to the nearby brewery or coffee shop. My grocery store is easy biking distance.
It’s not all suburbs, many are just built shitty. I love where I live and I am definitely enriched by my neighborhood.
That said, it’s not for everyone, and to your point lots of higher density housing should be made.
Probably best not to do widely generalize what all Americans want, or suffer from. Edit the larger problem is corporate gobbling of houses as investments when homes should be a wellness, social stability thing.
Certainly some suburbs are better than others. I’m glad that your suburb does not negatively impact your mental and physical wellbeing. Indeed, I am generalizing. However, I would argue that even the best suburbs are still more expensive and worse for the environment than the best urban areas. The more concentrated human population centers are, the more wild land there can be, and that’s better for the planet.
That being said, I don’t necessarily want to outlaw detached, single family homes, or force people to leave their suburb and move into densely populated urban areas. If your suburb works for you, you should be able to stay there. I do think any tax policies that result in urban areas subsidizing the costs of suburban areas should be eliminated, though.
I think we can find shared agreement on the need to attack zoning and land use in urban areas where office space should be converted to housing.
We can also agree that rewilding open space, increasing the quantity and quality of public transit, modern energy production, polyculturing the suburban yard (from a grass monoculture) are all great things that reduce the impact of suburbs. In my area those topics are increasing popular. I’m regularly seeing people ripping out their grass, for example. But I acknowledge the current status quo of many suburbs which are just grass, detached pickup truck storage.
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No anti-monopoly action promised again.
“Build a fuckload of subsidized homes” and “lower prices” (that’s what she says, just in smarter words, cause building a lot with budget means will actually increase inflation in all of economy).
If I were American, I’d think I’m being disrespected with such non-sophisticated promises.
“See, if it’s not me, it’s that delusional anti-vaxxer fascist over the street, nobody else needs you and I love you.” - Something like that.
I mean, yeah, if that’s your only other choice.
Start with outlawing institutional investing in homes
Cripple the speculative housing bubble by making corporate property ownership of single family or multifamily dwellings limited to maaaybe 100 properties. Probably less, like 50.
Give them 5 years to unload assets that are in excess of this legislation and get it passed.
Doesn’t affect business. Doesn’t affect developers, doesn’t affect anyone but vulture venture capitalists.
Why let them own any? That will just lead to multiple holding corps being made. Just ban corporate ownership of single/multi family homes all together.
There’s gonna be some edge cases like charitable corporations that own property for homeless or something we aren’t considering. Blanket bans are rarely the answer.
Even Japan doesn’t ban guns. You need to pass tests, have a license, and be subject to storage requirements and inspections of that storage. But it is not banned.
So 3 million more abandoned homes. Got it. Can’t wait.
Let’s ban corporations from owning residential property. It makes zero sense.
thatd take actual political will instead
Keep repeating it and see what happens.
best we can do is neoiberal handouts to rich people…
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It will not fix anything. There are plenty of homes already. Corporate greed is the cause of the housing crisis. There needs to be legislation that makes it unprofitable to own and hold unused properties
There are 258 million adults and 144 million homes in the US. Even if vacant housing is reduced to 0, there’s still not enough housing.
Aren’t the homes designed for more than 1 person each?
Sure, people sharing housing, but 36 million people live alone. How many more would live alone if they could?
We live in condo, not a house.
From WordNet 3.0
house I noun
- a dwelling that serves as living quarters for one or more families (Freq. 157)
By that definition, a condo is a house
Both. Supply is a real issue, building homes and preventing corporate uptake are both needed to solve this crisis.
There are plenty of homes already.
Plenty of homes where? In my city, which is a major job center, there are hardly any houses for sale. It doesn’t really matter if there are plenty of houses 1+ hours away from my job.
How many of the 3 million houses will be built in your area and what impact do you think they will have?
The problems that are causing the crisis are corporate greed and Airbnb-esque rentals.
Are you looking to fight the symptoms or the cause?
Edit: I live in a major city and there is plenty of housing, just not affordable
I live in a small city outside a major city. I do not know what Harris plans but I have hope for a recent state law encouraging multi-family housing near transit. We do have a train station at the center of town that’s also a bus hub and a great walkable area with shops and restaurants. We already have larger condo and apartment buildings here, and more of those are our best hope to affordability. While those new places won’t be affordable, all the surrounding older three deckers should drop in price, with increased supply
Going from suburban to urban was a major quality of life upgrade for me. It still blows my mind how much safer cycling is in the city than in suburbia. I’m hoping the 15min city idea gains momentum because it’s such a better use of space. Transit and micromobility initiatives would be a great thing to hear more about from Harris.
Yeah, just this past weekend I was driving to a different town out in suburbia and got caught behind an emergency response. While I couldn’t take time to look, given all the action, it surely looked like someone hit a cyclist.
The road in question gets quite a few cyclists, especially that day and I can see how it would be a good ride. However it winds through the woods with a lot of turns and reduced visibility distance; traffic is heavy as a major route through suburbia; it has no obvious protected lane nor even a shoulder.
I’d be curious to get some good numbers on this. From a cursory search I got the impression that a very small proportion of homes are AirBnB rentals, but I’m definitely open to looking at conflicting data. Corporate ownership of homes is definitely a problem, and I certainly hope that part of this plan is to prevent these homes from being sold to investors rather than residents. No one is saying we can’t build more homes and address the underlying cause of the shortage at the same time. I know that 3 million homes is not a lot relative to the country’s population. However I am not ready to write them off as useless, since strategically placing these homes in the right areas may still have a significant impact.___
“Affordable” doesn’t exist in a constrained market.
The price will rise to whatever the richest person without a home can afford to pay.
Same here. Prices are high because so many more people want to live here than there are houses for. There’s almost no unoccupied buildings, but also no undeveloped land. So housing prices are high but no one wants to sell until interest rates come down. Average home prices are racing toward $1M …. And we’re the “affordable” town surrounded by expensive places.
Sure, I’ve seen places with empty houses …. In the Adirondacks where there are no jobs, in the upstate NY town I grew up in where there are no jobs, where my cousin lives near Buffalo where there are no jobs, etc. Do you see a pattern?
Have you checked to see how many AirBNB houses you have in your area? There are over a thousand in the area where I live. Of course, AirBNB knows how bad the real number would make them look, so they obfuscate it, but every AirBNB listing can represent a house where a couple might get started. But why sell a home at even 400k when you can rent every room in that house for $250 a night. $250 * 3 (Bedrooms) * 7 * 52 = 273k a year to START, and that number keeps going up and up and up…
Hardly any houses for sale doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of empty houses available. They’re just fucking bought up by corpos to sit on as investments or for rentals.
In my city, there’s hundreds of empty homes for sale, valued at 250k-500k more than what they were a decade ago.
The houses an hour away in the burbs are all in the middle of nowhere, supported by stripmalls and a single big box store. Those houses are also the same price.
Where? In my area as soon as they announce a new development a few weeks later they have a sign that says “lasts houses left” and a few after that they remove the sale sign
These are giant ranch houses too, we need lots of small and medium houses
Are those houses then listed as corporate rentals? Because that’s super common.
Supply is absolutely an issue! Many cities have growing populations. Empty homes in the sticks aren’t doing us any favors.
Has she given specifics about these 3 million homes? Like is the government paying for them and then selling/renting at reasonable prices to single home buyers? Or are they just being built and sold to anyone? Because the latter won’t fix anything…
This does nothing to address the root cause of housing price increases. Black rock will buy 2.5 million of these homes.
Exactly this. We already have enough empty dwellings between homes, apartments, condos, etc to house our unhoused population. The issue is affordability, not amount.
- No, there are not enough places to live, where people want to live
- Supply and demand drive pricing. Whether we should have enough or not, a larger supply should reduce prices
Man I want to live right where I’m at but everything is an air BNB
Supply and demand drive pricing. Whether we should have enough or not, a larger supply should reduce prices
this is storytelling. it is not science.
The way you address that is build 3 million homes, and rent them out at rates 60% lower than market rate, rather than sell them.
This does not increase ownership, no. But it does force landlords to compete. Why rent from slumlord Paladino, when I could rent a new unit from the US government at half the price?
3 million homes
Not happening. She’s trying to win the votes by implying she can reduce prices of homes, but she knows this won’t happen. She lies into your faces
So you’re saying that supply will not change cost?
No, I’m saying there will be no more supply than it is now. She ain’t building these homes
The government uses incentive for builders and land owners to build certain types of projects. For instance, there are incentives for them to build low cost senior housing at fixed end cost. This is no different.
Government incentives don’t decrease price of anything. If you want to buy a car with price tag of 100k and your good friend pays 30k for you so you pay just 70k, that doesn’t make car any cheaper. It still costs 100k.
Same with housing.
just like the factories that get tax breaks because they hire people does not translate to people making living wages
I think we can all agree the government subsiding essential needs is a good thing.
Many more folks would have a chance at ownership of the 70k vs the 100k and if we change the object from a car to a hypothetical essential good, that’s and essentially good thing to expand the group of people accessing it
Except this is wasteful. It just took 30k that otherwise would be spent on something else, and spent that on a car. Someone else lost 30k of sales.
So transparent. Fuck your greedy ass. You’re only worried about your own bottom line.
I have changed the topic from a car, and highlighted that the subsidy dollars should be used on more critical things. Ya know, like housing.
There’s no waste then , because people need homes, and the subsidy allows more people to access them
Actually the government does this several ways. In order to qualify for incentives, the cost and make up of the structure is set. You dont want to provide incentives for someone to build McMansions. They can also outline where these structures are built. 3 million single family units hit the market and prices will go down.
If it was so easy, it would’ve happened a long time ago.
Are you sure? Real Estate and builders have a lot of lobbying money to keep their assets at high value.
This would reduce the price of homes. Hell… even just announcing this plan might have an impact. I know I would be sweating if I were an investment organization that’s been buying up houses.
I know I would be sweating if I were an investment organization that’s been buying up houses.
It’s the exact reason why she’s going to fail. This is a metric ton of current homeowners votes to be lost, and another metric ton of political enemies to be made.
I’m a current homeowner and the idea of 3 million more new homes makes me very excited! This plus the credit for first time buyers is definitely what we need. Bolstering the middle class helps everyone.
Imagine other home owners who have 30y mortgage on them. They’ll be so happy their house drops in value.
It’s great that you own your house - but that’s your perspective.
Treating a home as an investment vehicle is a big part of the problem. It’s a place to live, not a market dice roll.
I have a 30 year mortgage. I would be happy to lose value in my home if it helps other people get their own. It’s not even a close contest.
Get the fuck outta here with your “fuck you I got mine” mentality
Get the fuck outta here with your “fuck you I got mine” mentality
Where did you get that from?
Your claim that homeowners will vote against Kamala because they don’t want new homes to be built is very FYIGM
It’s not that they don’t want new homes, but that falling prices would impact them negatively. This is more nuanced. For everyone who has mortgage, falling price of their home can be a diesaster
It’s only a disaster if your home is an investment vehicle, which housing really shouldn’t be.
So we should continue to hold 44 million renters and half a million homeless hostage to prevent some people’s investment vehicles from losing value? Womp.
Every homeowner I know is interested in more volume on the market. Most homes are way in the black on value but homeowners feel unable to sell or move due to high rates and low inventory.
3 million homes won’t make a serious dent in value but will help the market unlock so people can make changes
I’m sure you feel like you’re correct with your armchair analysis. But that’s just your feelings behind the matter, which we all can throw in the trash.
Sigh 😞
ironically the quickest way to curb the housing crisis would be to hike the capital gains taxes
We need to look at this thing called ‘adapting in place’. I think this is just such a complicated situation that people just need to figure out what’s going on around them, at least for the time being. Radical simplification - corporate greed, yes, but it’s still complicated as to what exactly we do about it.
Step one: rebel. Final step: live free.
Be nice to your neighbors and survive long enough to experience change.
