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The Harris-Walz housing plan – detailed, serious, and impactful

The presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris has doubled down hard on housing affordability, releasing a highly detailed policy agenda, emphasizing housing costs in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, and last week, releasing her first major 60 second ad on economic policy. The ad is about housing, particularly first-time homeownership.

Neither Vice President Harris nor Minnesota Governor Tim Walz are new to housing policy. Each have extensive records in California, Minnesota, and the U.S. Congress. The two candidates are also among the strongest supporters of affordable housing in the nation, as demonstrated by their records and their campaign’s unprecedented emphasis on housing. Vice President Harris’s economic plan says, “building up the middle class will be a defining goal of her presidency.” Housing is the primary feature of this goal, committing to “build the American Dream, lowering the costs of renting and owning a home.”

While NHC does not endorse candidates, the plan focuses on policies we have long advocated, is serious, and highly detailed for a campaign position paper prepared only a few weeks into her candidacy, that if passed, would have significant impact on the housing crisis. Let’s take a look at their housing plan, and a look back at some of their past statements on housing affordability.

Bipartisan Supply Solutions

The plan relies heavily on increasing the supply of multifamily and single family housing, calling for the construction of 3 million new housing units, working “in partnership with industry to build the housing we need, both to rent and to buy, and to take down barriers that stand in the way of building new housing, including at the state and local levels.”

The plan formally endorses the Neighborhood Homes Investment Act, supported by the Biden Administration in its Housing Supply Action Plan, and cosponsored by dozens of Republicans in the House and Senate. It also calls for a “historic expansion of the existing tax incentive for businesses that build rental housing that is affordable,” a reference to the Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act (AHCIA). Like Neighborhood Homes, AHCIA is strongly supported by NHC.

Innovation and regulatory reform

The plan also would double the Biden Administration’s proposal for a $20 billion housing innovation fund “to support innovative methods of construction financing, and empower developers and homebuilders to design and build rental and housing solutions that are affordable.” It would “make certain federal lands eligible to be repurposed for new housing developments that families can afford.” A similar proposal was included in the Trump platform, although the details would likely be significantly different. The Harris-Walz plan also calls for “streamlining permitting processes and reviews, including for transit-oriented and conversion development, so builders can get homes on the market sooner and bring down costs.”

Investor-owned single family rentals

Unlike President Biden’s housing proposal, the plan does not embrace rent caps. Rent control is widely recognized as ineffective at reducing housing costs, and is a significant disincentive to new housing construction. Instead, the Harris-Walz plan focusses on stopping Wall Street investors from “buying up and marking up homes in bulk.” While neither candidate would like to admit it, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) is an outspoken critic of institutional investors in single family rental housing, saying that “they completely crowd out the availability for homes for people who want to just buy a piece of their community.”

Rent price fixing

The Harris-Walz plan also focuses on “corporate landlords using private equity backed price-setting tools to collude with each other to jack up rents dramatically in communities across the country.” Last month, the Biden-Harris Justice Department sued RealPage for algorithmic rent pricing that it alleges violates antitrust laws. “By feeding sensitive data into a sophisticated algorithm powered by artificial intelligence, RealPage has found a modern way to violate a century-old law through systematic coordination of rental housing prices — undermining competition and fairness for consumers in the process,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said. “Training a machine to break the law is still breaking the law. Today’s action makes clear that we will use all our legal tools to ensure accountability for technology-fueled anticompetitive conduct.”

Down Payment Assistance 

The plan also calls for a significant expansion of President Biden’s downpayment assistance (DPA) proposal. As long as the program is targeted and well distributed, it is unlikely to inflate housing prices. First time homebuyers make up only one third of the market today, and that figure will decrease significantly as interest rates fall. Targeted downpayment assistance, therefore, is not likely to have an inflationary impact on housing prices, especially if it is limited to first-generation homebuyers who earn less than 140 percent of the area median income. By administering the program through the state, state housing agencies can scale or augment existing programs, which often run out of money before year-end. Structured as a tax credit, however, the benefit would have to be administered directly by the Internal Revenue Service with an advance payment to the taxpayer/homebuyer that could be signed over to the home seller at the closing table. Otherwise, it can’t be applied to the actual downpayment.

All things considered, the plan is a detailed, serious, and impactful strategy for addressing the affordable housing crisis. The housing plan balances the needs of renters and homebuyers, while including many bipartisan proposals that could be enacted in the first 100 days of a new Administration.

Long history of housing leadership

Both Vice President Harris and Governor Walz have a long history of housing leadership. Vice President Harris has emphasized her contribution negotiating a $25 billion multi-state settlement to provide relief to homeowners affected by wrongful foreclosures and fraud. California’s portion of the settlement was $18 billion. The agreement included $12 billion in mortgage loan principal forgiveness and $3.5 billion in relief to 32,000 homeowners for unpaid balances remaining when their homes were foreclosed.

Then Attorney General Harris also introduced six bills in the California legislature to protect homeowners and renters, while investing in blight prevention in communities with vacant and abandoned homes. At the February 29, 2012 press conference announcing the package, she emphasized the importance of protecting homeowners and building new affordable housing where shortages continued, highly unusual when most policymakers were running away from housing production support. Her comments then could just as easily have been made this year. “I know what homeownership means,” she said. “It’s more than a financial transaction; it’s so much more than that — it’s more than a house. Homeownership and what that means, it’s a symbol of the pride that comes with hard work, it’s financial security, it represents what you will be able to do for your children… And sadly, right now, it is out of reach for far too many American families. There’s a serious housing shortage in many places. It’s too difficult to build, and it’s driving prices up.”

As a U.S. Senator in 2019, Harris and Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) introduced the Housing is Infrastructure Act. The Hill reported on November 21, 2019, that the bill would commit$45 billion to clearing up the backlog of repairs and upgrades to federal subsidized housing and apply $25 billion “toward grants for affordable housing construction and maintenance in low-income communities, Native American reservations, blighted rural areas and for vulnerable groups such as senior citizens and disabled individuals.” The bill was endorsed by NHC, the National Association of Home Builders, and the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

As governor, Walz signed legislation representing the largest investment in housing in Minnesota’s history, with over $1 billion allocated to expand affordable housing availability. The bill allocated $45 million to the Family Homeless Prevention and Assistance Program, providing emergency rental and utility assistance. It also included $200 million dedicated to housing infrastructure investments, aimed at expanding affordable housing options across the state. The legislation created a permanent funding source for housing needs across Minnesota, ensuring long-term support for housing programs, paid for with an increase in the sales tax by 0.25% in the Twin Cities metropolitan area to create a stable funding source for housing programs. It also included:

  • $350 million investment to preserve and build over 4,700 affordable housing units, including single-family, multifamily, and manufactured homes,
  • $95 million specifically for workforce housing, addressing the need for affordable housing options for middle-income earners near their workplaces, and
  • $150 million for downpayment assistance specifically targeting first-generation homebuyers, helping around 4,500 individuals purchase their first homes.

Governor Walz has also been active in reducing regulatory barriers to housing construction, aiming to make housing more affordable by speeding up permitting processes. He supported building code reforms to modernize and potentially legalize single-stair buildings, which could reduce construction costs and increase housing supply.

Governor Walz also signed a comprehensive update to Minnesota’s landlord-tenant laws, the first of its kind in the state, including “requiring landlords to provide two weeks’ notice before eviction filings and expunging eviction records after three years.” Walz has also been a proponent of the “Yes In My Backyard” (YIMBY) movement, advocating for new housing developments to tackle affordability challenges.

Taken together, the two candidates can rightfully be called the first presidential ticket led by two bonafide housing advocates. Their plan is detailed, serious, and impactful, with many elements boasting bipartisan support.

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