Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks, Saturday, July 3, 2021, at the Carpenters International Training Center in Las Vegas. Photo by Cameron Smith | Official White House photo / File
In a campaign that has been light on policy specifics and clear goals, Kamala Harris laid down an audacious marker in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.
“We will end America’s housing shortage,” she declared.
Harris has gone further than that feel-good platitude and put a number on her housing vow, saying her administration would build 3 million additional housing units over four years.
While the run-up in prices and ongoing shortage of supply has catapulted housing onto the national agenda to a degree not usually seen in presidential contests, the issue has been front and center for years in Massachusetts. The state has among the highest housing costs in the country, and everyone from business leaders to left-leaning housing advocates say the situation is making the state unliveable.
That has people focused on housing in Massachusetts paying particular attention to the ideas getting floated in the presidential race. Do those folks think Harris’s plans could make a difference?
It all depends, say housing experts here. At the heart of that uncertainty is the basic law of supply and demand.
Harris is proposing to make available $25,000 in downpayment support for first-time homebuyers, a program her campaign says could help 4 million new buyers over four years. That would be welcome news to households now struggling at the margins and locked out of the market. But on its own, pushing more buyers into the housing market runs the risk of only driving prices higher, as more people compete for a limited pool of homes.
“If it were just giving buyers incentives on the demand side, the danger is you’re just inflating a market that’s undersupplied and overheated,” said Clark Ziegler, executive director of the Massachusetts Housing Partnership, a statewide affordable housing organization.
But Harris’s plan couples funding for first-time buyers with incentives for more housing production. The plan includes a proposal for what the Harris campaign calls a “first-ever” tax incentive for builders of homes sold to first-time buyers, and it calls for a $40 billion “innovation fund” to spur affordable housing development at the local level.
“It’s really good because it’s not just on the demand side,” Ziegler said of the proposal. “That, I think, is the secret sauce to make things work.”
Striking the right balance of supply and demand incentives will be key, said Andrew Mikula, senior housing fellow at the Pioneer Institute.
“It’s tricky,” he said.
Mikula said it’s easier at the federal level to goose the demand side with things like the proposed first-time-buyer subsidy than to ensure more supply, since construction decisions ultimately are made at the local level.
Rachel Heller, CEO of the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, a statewide housing nonprofit, said it’s very encouraging to see housing get more attention at the national level. If Massachusetts has the unenviable distinction of being one of the places with the most severe crisis of housing affordability and supply, she said, we have also been in the lead when it comes to policies aimed at addressing the problem.
Harris’s plan “mirrors a lot of the steps that we’re taking here in Massachusetts,” said Heller. She said the state has also set a firm production goal – calling for 200,000 new units to be built by 2030 to meet demand. Meanwhile, the MBTA Communities Act calls for local zoning to allow for more multi-family housing, while the state also has a downpayment assistance program, offering $30,000 to $50,000 to eligible first-time home buyers.
Former president Donald Trump has sent decidedly mixed messages on housing. He’s talked about opening up federal land for housing construction, and early in his first term in office, his housing and urban development secretary, Ben Carson, said local communities could get more federal grants by easing restrictions on apartment construction.
By 2020, according to free-market-oriented Reason magazine, Trump made a 180-degree turn, vowing on the campaign trail to block any moves to end single-family-only zoning that might threaten the “suburban lifestyle dream” with lots of apartment construction.
“I keep the suburbs safe,” Trump said in a rally this month in Michigan, adding that his policies would “keep illegal aliens out of suburbs.”
In describing Trump’s reversal of course, Reason’s Christian Britschgi invoked the “YIMBY” acronym, which stands for “Yes, In My Backyard,” adopted by pro-housing advocates to counter the NIMBY resistance to new development.
“During his first term,” writes Britschgi, our first developer president went from proposing solid YIMBY-inflected policies to running for re-election as the nation’s NIMBY-in-chief.”
This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
