The next president of the United States will inherit, among other pressing issues, a housing crisis that has seen average rents increase by 19% since 2019, leaving tens of millions of Americans paying more than 30% of their income towards rent and many others homeless. Vice President Kamala Harris, seeking the mantle of a sober problem-solver in comparison to former President Donald Trump, has released an extensive plan to reduce the costs of housing, largely by building more of it.
Harris' proposed effort to add 3 million new housing units, part of "A New Way Forward for the Middle Class," centers on providing a lot of incentives — expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) to help developers build affordable rental housing, creating a new Neighborhood Homes Tax Credit to support the construction and rehabilitation of owner-occupied homes in low-income communities, introducing a tax cut for homebuilders building houses for first-time homebuyers and providing an additional $40 billion for state and local governments to expand the housing supply. Additionally, Harris wants to provide $25,000 in down-payment assistance for first-time homebuyers.
In an analysis published in the Washington Post, Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody's Analytics, and Jim Parrott, a fellow at the Urban Institute, described the plan as “the most aggressive supply-side push since the national investment in housing that followed World War II.” Other experts who are less sanguine about the possibility of reaching the 3 million mark still acknowledge that substantial growth is possible.
The premise of Harris' plan, of course, is that an increase in the housing supply will drive down costs. While that logic is largely agreed upon by economists, some progressives have stressed that the plan will only be effective if a Harris administration invests primarily in low-cost housing built for low-income renters and detached from the speculative market. In that respect, argues policy analyst Matt Bruenig in Jacobin, the Harris plan falls short by by funneling public money into the for-profit housing market, offering only temporary affordability to working and middle-class Americans.
"To meaningfully address the housing crisis, Democrats need to move beyond just the public-private paradigm and invest directly in housing as a public good," he wrote, while also acknowledging that Harris' plans include meaningful policies to curb exploitation by private-sector landlords.
The willpower to build more housing often falters in the face of apparently prohibitive costs, political opposition and self-serving incentives, a reality that is playing out on the state and local level. Perhaps that's why Harris is relying on grants to spur growth rather than trying to impose housing target requirements on states. Efforts by governors to require low-density towns and suburbs to pull their weight faced intense pushback from local governments and suburban lawmakers who didn't want to be forced to do anything, or heard from constituents who wanted to maintain their high-value, pristine neighborhoods. While California and Massachusetts Democrats reached a deal in their respective states, Gov. Kathy Hochul, D-N.Y., was forced to scrap her housing proposal despite working with large Democratic majorities in the legislature.
Progressives at the time cast some of the blame on Hochul for opposing the inclusion of "good cause" eviction, which would give tenants the ability to challenge rent hikes in court, and missing a chance to form a broader coalition around her proposal. While sudden and unfair evictions have always been an unfortunate reality, tenants' rights groups warn that landlords have become even more audacious in their attempts to maximize profits and exploit renters since the chaos and desperation of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In August 2024, the Department of Justice sued RealPage, a real estate company they accused of price-fixing to drive up rents. DOJ officials alleged that the company's algorithmic pricing helped landlords collude and set rents above market rate, which "deprives renters of the benefits of competition on apartment leasing terms and harms millions of Americans.” The effects of RealPage's scheme was far-reaching; at least half of the country's landlords reportedly ate from the trough, calculating that even if rent hikes resulted in vacancies, they would still make larger profits.
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Harris, citing unscrupulous behavior by those landlords, proposes in her housing plan to pass the Preventing the Algorithmic Facilitation of Rental Housing Cartels Act in Congress, which would make price-fixing illegal under antitrust laws. While some conservative economists have warned that the proposal would discourage development and worsen the housing shortage, others have argued that the conventional neoliberal antipathy to rent controls is misguided — in many places where strong rent controls are in place, such as New Jersey, the housing supply has actually increased.
Landlords have also been accused of hoarding low-cost housing units and selling them for an exorbitant price, knowing that the desperation of some renters would more than offset any wasted space. In some cases, they are reportedly keeping some units off-market on purpose. In New York City, for example, while the vacancy rate of on-market units is hovering at 1.4% — the lowest since 1968 — no one knows just how many units that should be open are not included in official figures. Local lawmakers have proposed legislation to find out by requiring landlords to disclose all vacant units, and may soon find an ally in the White House.
"Some corporate landlords — some of them buy dozens, if not hundreds, of houses and apartments. Then they turn them around and rent them out at extremely high prices, and it can make it impossible, then, for regular people to be able to buy or even rent a home," Harris said in a speech focused on costs-of-living issues. To address this, Harris is proposing a second piece of housing legislation — the Predatory Investing Act — which would strike tax benefits for investors buying up large numbers of single-family rental homes.
In order to pass either piece of legislation designed to curtail unfair landlord practices, Harris will need the buy-in of Congress and certainly prefers her fellow Democrats as governing partners. GOP positions on housing this election cycle have largely ranged from oppositional, in the case of Project 2025 proposals to scale back federal affordable housing programs and weaken tenant protections, to ambivalent, in the case of the Trump campaign's promises to reduce costs by defeating inflation and stopping "the unsustainable invasion of illegal aliens which is driving up housing costs." Critics of Trump's economic policies have argued that his plans to raise tariffs across the board are likely to drive up inflation, not ease it.
Harris, jumping on a string of chilling remarks by Trump, has spent the closing days of the campaign focusing mainly on her rival's dictatorial and vengeful fantasies. There's evidence, however, that more time comparing her housing plan to Trump's apparently missing homework or Project 2025's wish list would be effective — many Americans have fallen victim to the housing crisis, and now look to their president not only for relief in the broadest sense of the word, but also, according to polling data, policies like rent control and the expansion of affordable housing.
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