Like Richard Nixon going to China, sometimes a change in policy is sold best by an unlikely proponent. Vice President Kamala Harris leading the charge for more housing supply in the United States shows just how far her party has come. Democrats have long been skeptical about overhauling supply and regulation to make housing more affordable. Harris’ $40 billion housing agenda, released last week, is a welcome recognition that drastic changes are needed to close a national shortage of 4.5 million homes.
Harris, who hails from California, the western epicenter of the national housing crisis, wants three million new homes in four years, on top of what homebuilders were already planning. That’s a punchy target: developers completed just 1.5 million units in 2023. Her campaign aims to encourage what it calls “innovative” approaches to affordable housing, like providing grants and loans to local developers and non-profit organizations. The plan leans heavily on zoning reforms and employs language about cutting red tape usually used by Republicans. Former President Barack Obama endorsed the shift in his speech to the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night, saying his party needed to “clear away the ideas of the past” and slash outdated rules.
Nevertheless, a nationwide housing drive risks stoking homeowners’ ire in a country where the middle class derives most of its wealth from real estate and two-thirds of dwellings are occupied by their owners. Residents seek to defend property, opens new tab values at planning board meetings, for example by delaying projects so they become uneconomical. Harris’ plan would not remove local control but would use federal power to support more building.
Nevertheless, a nationwide housing drive risks stoking homeowners’ ire in a country where the middle class derives most of its wealth from real estate and two-thirds of dwellings are occupied by their owners.
That’s the thing that nobody wants to talk about. I’m constantly hearing people saying that “NIMBYs” are the cause of the housing crisis, which isn’t untrue, but it doesn’t really get to the heart of the issue. Why do NIMBYs exist? I think the prevailing assumption is that they’re just greedy, miserly boomers who love money and hate young people, but I think the problem is systemic, not simply caused by some individuals who happen to have character flaws.
It’s easy to call these property owners greedy, because it’s not your wealth. If it were your wealth, I bet many of you would be NIMBYs too. Because, again, it’s not just a matter of you having better moral character than them, it’s about the incentives, and how people with opposing financial interests have different incentives. People with wealth have an incentive to protect their wealth, and people without wealth have an incentive to try and acquire wealth.
This is why I’m a critic of capitalism, and why I want to move toward something that could be called socialism (although, not necessarily a Marxist or Marxist-Leninist conception of socialism). I think capitalism creates too many oppositional relationships. It causes people to have opposing interests. Owners and workers, companies and consumers, home buyers and home owners. I think it would be better to try and build a system around our shared interests, around the things we have in common, as opposed to one where we are constantly in opposition to one another.
We all need housing. It is a universal human need. So why have a system that incentivizes some to restrict other’s access to it? Why have a system that creates an adversarial relationship between those who have a home (and the wealth associated with it) and those who don’t?
All of these oppositional, adversarial relationships cause conflict and division.
This is why I’m a critic of capitalism, and why I want to move toward something that could be called socialism (although, not necessarily a Marxist or Marxist-Leninist conception of socialism).
Other nations like Canada, the UK and Australia operate under a social democracy, where the gov’t “seeks to reform capitalism through policies such as progressive taxation, universal healthcare, and workers’ rights, while still maintaining a market economy.” Source
While our issues (in Canada) can sometimes mirror that of America, we have programs like universal healthcare that blunt capitalism’s brute force.
That said we still face the encroachment of neo-liberalist ideologies that have warped our social structure into something more like what America is, ie: far too many former public institutions have been privatized (which happened after Reagan/Thatcher’s trickle down economic force had its way).
Imo we’re gonna need a big bonfire to move the needle back to a social-based structure, if for no other reason than the rich will absolutely stonewall any regulation or limitation on their wealth-hoarding.
Absolutely nailed it and interesting take on capitalism.
I live in a rural area and I’m sort of a NIMBY. I live in my area because there are forests and fields and nature. I didn’t build a house, I bought one built in the 1970s. I don’t think everything needs to be growing all the time, new houses are being built on every road around here and what was a nice rural area is gradually becoming the same Walmart and McDonalds suburbs as you see all across the USA. If I wanted to live in suburbs it would have been easy to move to suburbs.
The board of supervisors here is always saying “We need more jobs and we need more growth.” Ironic because the majority of them are developers, and my property taxes have gone up over 12% each of the past 3 years.
I don’t think the housing crisis is being caused by people who live in rural areas and don’t want there to be endless urban and suburban sprawl. Most people want to live in urban areas, because those areas are where the jobs, shops, and infrastructure are. Sprawl is expensive, inefficient, and bad for the environment. It should be prevented as much as possible. But, the only way to prevent it is to make housing in urban areas, the area where people want to live because it’s where everything is, more affordable, and that means building more, dense housing in those areas. The real NIMBYs are people who own low density, single family homes in urban areas and don’t want higher density housing to be built in that area because it would bring down their property values.
like thedemonbuer said many folk would love to live in the city and many live further due to cost. I live in the suburbs of a city because of cost but I would absolutely love to be in a condo in the city proper and estatic to live in a highrise downtown. Theoretically these should be some of the cheapest per square foot given the efficiency with building.
Unless there are caps on prices and restrictions on buyers and limits on flipping, none of this will do anything except provide more low quality homes for builders to sell to high paying buyers.
Single family homes should not be owned by companies. Property should only be owned by citizens. Rents of all types should have caps on increases that match cost of living.
Yes, all of that, but also the supply of new housing never recovered from 2008 (when all the hedge funds went into buying existing houses versus risking money on new builds).
We need both.
We also need smaller houses damnit! Or more duplexes of reasonable size. We need more 2-4 family properties.
Not tiny houses, not 300sqft nonsense buildings that cost more to have as standalone units…
We need more 1-2 bedroom starter options, and fewer of the 4-6 bedroom micromansions that everyone builds because it’s more worth the money from a development side. Nobody can afford those things as first time buyers.
And while we are at it, we need more apartments that can be purchased like condos or houses. Rent is all well and good for short term, but people should have long term ownership options even in big cities if they will be there for a while. It’s absurd your choices are basically rent and be at the whim of your landlord, or buy a standalone.
delaying projects so they become uneconomical
The fact that that is a problem is a problem. We need more taxpayer supported public housing options that don’t get jerked around by the whims of the markets so much.
Zoning reforms sound great.
One of my biggest issues with increasing housing is that many Americans store their wealth in their house. Home ownership is the retirement plan for many, or the generational wealth plan. So how can we build housing without devaluing existing housing?
The answer is to build more multi-family housing, which doesn’t really compete with single family housing for price. The former is mostly for rent, while the later is for owning.
Or, markets sometimes go down. They can’t all grow infinitely forever.
According to capitalism they can. /s
Housing values are extremely artificially inflated right now though. Housing prices have gone up at least 30-50% in a lot of areas since 2019, even non-updated poorly maintained houses are up that amount.
OOOORRRRR…
Go away from the monumentally stupid concept of basic human needs as an investment.
I do wish the 40 billion was straight our construction of efficient multi units sold at cost and then reinvested in doing more of that till housing cost is basically at construction cost and rental becomes less of a cherry investment. Also clamp down hard on inspection of rental properies to make sure they are up to code. oh and make hotel apps pay hotel level taxes.
there is no housing shortage causing there not to be enough homes for people
called people not being paid living wages
real simple but the Democrats just like Republicans are not out for the people just out for the MegaCorp donors that feed them
Please show your proof that there is no housing shortage.
There are roughly 28 vacant homes, for every person without one.
It’s not so much a supply issue, as a miss-allocation by the market. Housing is too expensive relative to median incomes. Back in the '70s housing averaged 3x the median income. Now it’s nearly 8x.
Stagnant incomes for 50 years, is the primary cause. It’s made worse by bad housing policy designed by NIMBYs to ensure prices rise, and corporate mass buying of homes to rent for profit, and people buying additional homes for short term AirB&B rentals. And, and, and.
The housing crisis is closely linked with another crisis: homelessness*, a persistent issue even in the world’s wealthiest societies4,5. While individual circumstances leading to homelessness are diverse, at a population level, the largest predictor is a lack of affordable housing6,7, which has been associated with a 38% increase in homelessness in the largest American cities in the past year8. The two crises are exacerbated by unforeseen circumstances such as natural disasters, humanitarian crises, and economic downturns9.
https://m3challenge.siam.org/2024-problem/#2024-data-links-temp https://books.google.com/books?id=guxcEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/ahar/2022-ahar-part-1-pit-estimates-of-homelessness-in-the-us.html https://www.usich.gov/sites/default/files/document/All_In.pdf
Ok. But how is that proving your statement that “there is no housing shortage causing there not to be enough homes for people”?
> While individual circumstances leading to homelessness are diverse, at a population level, the largest predictor is a lack of affordable housing6,7
https://books.google.com/books?id=guxcEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false (University of California Press, 2022) https://www.usich.gov/sites/default/files/document/All_In.pdf (U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness)
Excerpt from 2021 GAP Report
Even if rents at the bottom-end of the market fall during a downturn, they will not fall sufficiently to provide extremely low-income renters with an adequate supply of affordable housing. Owners have an incentive to abandon their rental properties or convert them to other uses when rental income is too low to cover basic operating costs and maintenance. They have little incentive to provide housing in the private-market at rents that are affordable to extremely low-income renters.
During periods of economic growth, the private market on its own still does not provide an adequate supply of rental housing affordable to low-income households. The rents that the lowest-income households can afford to pay typically do not cover the development costs and operating expenses of new housing. While new construction for higher-income renters encourages a chain of household moves that eventually benefits lower-income renters, new luxury units may not impact rents at the bottom of the market as much as they do rents at the top ( Jacobus, 2019).
Because the market consistently fails to provide adequate, affordable housing for these renters, the government has an essential role to play to correct for this structural failure. The construction of public housing, subsidies to private developers to construct and operate affordable housing, and deeply income targeted rental assistance to tenants renting in the private market are needed.
https://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/gap/Gap-Report_2021.pdf
and the next question is ‘Why is more affordable housing needed?’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States
which where you can scroll to the bottom and find ‘External Links’ which will provide with the GAP report link posted as well as others
And again that doesn’t answer the question.
If people were paid living wages, then they could afford housing options thus explaining how instead of a housing shortage we have a population that is under paid to the point housing is unaffordable.
How about instead of trying to fix the symptom (homelessness) we instead fix the cause (investor-owned housing AND limiting Airbnb)?
Increasing wages does sfa to help the housing crisis (but they should be increased anyway to help with food costs).
Reuters - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
Information for Reuters:
MBFC: Least Biased - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: Very High - United Kingdom
Wikipedia about this sourceSearch topics on Ground.News
https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/kamala-harris-welcome-housing-boost-is-overdue-2024-08-21/
