If the Trump-Vance ticket wins in November, it is safe to assume that Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) will be an influential player in the Administration’s policymaking. During his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC), Sen. Vance’s views on private equity and housing could have easily been mistaken for those of his progressive colleague from Ohio, Sen. Sherrod Brown. “The absurd cost of housing is the result of so many failures. And it reveals so much about what’s broken in Washington,” Sen. Vance said. “Wall Street barons crashed the economy and American builders went out of business. As tradesmen scrambled for jobs, houses stopped being built. The lack of good jobs, of course, led to stagnant wages.”
Sen. Vance 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.” During his campaign in 2021, he blamed institutional housing investors for hurting the middle class and keeping home buying out of the reach of potential first-time homebuyers. “When these hedge funds take special government privileges and go and buy up all the single-family homes, what they’re doing is destroying wealth in this country.”
At a hearing last year, Sen. Vance expressed his skepticism over the Housing First strategy for reducing homelessness, questioning its effectiveness rather than its objective. “I worry that what Housing First has done is taken a lot of people who are very much struggling and very much deserving of our compassion, though I think how we provide that compassion is up for debate,” he said, “but it also introduces people with serious drug problems, with serious mental illness problems, into communities with kids who are already in a very unstable situation. And now they’re having things like drug use normalized around them.” Privately, many NHC members have expressed this concern as well, raising the question as to whether Housing First makes sense in every case. This is a debate in which we can expect Sen. Vance to remain engaged.
In his memoir, The New York Times bestseller, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” Sen. Vance directly addresses the challenges over broader support for programs like Section 8 Housing Choice vouchers. He recalls his grandmother’s conflicted views on the program when a neighbor could not rent his property until he qualified the home for Section 8 voucher recipients. His grandmother, who he calls Mamaw, initially saw the neighbor’s decision “as a betrayal, ensuring that ‘bad’ people would move into the neighborhood and drive down property values. Despite our efforts to draw bright lines between the working and nonworking poor, Mamaw and I recognized that we shared a lot in common with those whom we thought gave our people a bad name. Those Section 8 recipients looked a lot like us. …But the drugs and the late-night fighting revealed troubles that too many hillbilly transplants knew too well.”
Sen. Vance expressed the deep divisions within poor rural and exurban communities over federal assistance programs, sometimes shared by the same person. “Confronted with such a realization of her own family’s struggle, Mamaw grew frustrated and angry…If she blasted the government for doing too much one day, she’d blast it for doing too little the next…Mamaw’s sentiments occupied wildly different parts of the political spectrum,” he wrote. “Depending on her mood, Mamaw was a radical conservative or a European-style social Democrat. Because of this, I initially assumed that Mamaw was an unreformed simpleton and that as soon as she opened her mouth about policy or politics, I might as well close my ears. Yet I quickly realized that in Mamaw’s contradictions lay great wisdom. I had spent so long just surviving my world, but now that I had a little space to observe it, I began to see the world as Mamaw did. I was scared, confused, angry, and heartbroken. I’d blame large businesses for closing up shop and moving overseas, and then I’d wonder if I might have done the same thing. I’d curse our government for not helping enough, and then I’d wonder if, in its attempts to help, it actually made the problem worse.”
As a member of the U.S. Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, Sen. Vance has supported deep cuts in the HUD budget, telling the Business Insider that a large share of the budget could be “cut in a way that preserves housing assistance for needy families.” He said, “It’s being positioned as congressional Republicans are heartless because they want to pass these spending cuts. Well, I think the more heartless thing to do would be to do nothing, to allow the inflation to continue to spiral out of control, higher interest rates, higher rent payments, higher mortgage payments for American families.”
Sen. Vance’s opposition to illegal immigration, a position widely supported by most Republicans and increasingly by Democrats in cities that have struggled to accommodate new residents, is also rooted in housing. Sen. Vance recently said that “it’s very hard to talk about the housing crisis in Ohio or across the country without talking about the immigration problem. When you let, let’s say, 10 million or 15 million people into the country illegally, those people all need homes.”
His views are driven in part by the experience of Springfield, Ohio, where Haitian immigrants granted Temporary Protective Status at the Mexican border have overwhelmed city services. The city says the number could be 15,000 to 20,000 new residents among a population that had numbered just under 60,000 before the influx. Vance raised the issue with Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell at a hearing on July 9. “In my conversations with folks in Springfield, it’s not just housing,” Sen. Vance said. “They’re trying to build 5,000 new housing units, which is a very Herculean task in a town of about 55,000 people, but it’s also hospital services, it’s school services. There are a whole host of ways in which this immigration problem, I think, is having very real human consequences.”
Sen. Vance led all Republican members of the Senate Banking Committee in sending a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and CFPB Director Rohit Chopra urging them to reconsider their October 12 joint statement on lending discrimination against “noncitizen borrowers.” The letter says that “While the CFPB and DOJ note that financial institutions are permitted to consider immigration status under the ECOA, they claim that unnecessary or overbroad reliance on immigration status ‘may run afoul of the law,’ and that all borrowers, regardless of immigration status, are protected from discrimination. Specifically, your agencies claim that if a creditor has a “blanket policy” on immigration status, then they risk violating fair lending laws. The joint statement also suggests that as long as an applicant for credit has a good credit score and other “credit qualifications,” then his or her immigration status should not matter.” The letter went on to say that “While the CFPB and DOJ’s joint statement conflicts with decades of immigration status-related guidance from the CFPB and the Fed, it also poses serious risks to financial stability— encouraging financial institutions to ignore critical dispositive factors in their calculation of risk. Additionally, the fact that your agencies moved forward with this guidance outside of the APA rulemaking process, and without any advanced communication or feedback from industry, raises even more concerns.”
Vice Presidents in recent history have held a wide range of influence, with Richard Cheney at one end of the spectrum and Dan Quayle at the other. While the November election and time will tell how influential Sen. J.D. Vance may be, today he is the voice of the next generation of the conservative movement, and given his personal history growing up in the heart of the party’s base, is likely to remain so.