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.
Let’s ban corporations from owning residential property. It makes zero sense.
Start with outlawing institutional investing in homes
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 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’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.___
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
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.
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…
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?
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
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.
Sure, people sharing housing, but 36 million people live alone. How many more would live alone if they could?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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 can’t understand how someone wouldn’t want to live in a sardine can?
Some people like having space.
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.
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.
