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.
thatd take actual political will instead
Keep repeating it and see what happens.
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
Both. Supply is a real issue, building homes and preventing corporate uptake are both needed to solve this crisis.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
as long as corporations and land horders are allowed to keep buying home and lands to keep the market scarce and rent and sell prices high, it doesnt matter how many homes you build.
and if you issue an immediate ban on mass home hording, and issue massive monthly fines for exceeding the limit, fines that are multiples of the profit that they make, not fractions, enough homes will immediately flood the market and will bring prices and rent down
This does nothing to address the root cause of housing price increases. Black rock will buy 2.5 million of these homes.
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?
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
Building more homes and offering subsidies will only put more money into the builders’ pockets. We already have too many homes. The issue is companies owning hundreds or even thousands of homes, only to refuse to sell or rent 75% of them so they can charge 400% more for the 25% they do sell or rent. It’s blatant market manipulation.
Begin a vacant property tax, (based on having more than 30 days in the calendar year with the property empty) which ratchets up as you own more vacant properties. So people can have a summer and winter home if they want, without their tax increasing too much. After all, it’s only one vacant home. But when you own a dozen vacant properties, you’re gonna get fucked hard by the IRS.
It will incentivize companies to actually rent or sell their vacant properties, instead of letting them sit vacant for years at a time. And that 30 days of vacancy should be any 30 days, so people who rent are incentivized to offer longer lease terms and change tenants less than once a year. Meaning short term rentals (AirBnB) will also be less attractive, because they typically only operate at ~50% occupied, as they’ll typically have a few days between rentals. Since short term rentals have been cannibalizing the long term rental markets recently, (lots of landlords have moved towards having properties be full time AirBnBs, which means there are fewer places left for actual tenants,) it will also help correct the rental markets which are overvalued.
Begin a vacant property tax, (based on having more than 30 days in the calendar year with the property empty) which ratchets up as you own more vacant properties.
Property tax should already ratchet up based on how many properties owned, regardless of if they are occupied or not.
This proposal is basically “infrastructure week”.
We need more than just that. I’m continuing to email the Biden administration monthly about implementing a vacancy tax for private owners with 3 or more single family dwellings. I’ll continue to do so under the Harris administration.
My only shot at every being able to afford a house is if the billionaires and real estate corporations get taken out of the equation. Taxing them for sitting on empty properties is much better than building more for them to snap up because they won’t be priced fairly to begin with due to market manipulation.
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.
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.
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ironically the quickest way to curb the housing crisis would be to hike the capital gains taxes
This is what we need. Build housing!!!
