The Housing Election That Won’t Fix the Housing Crisis
Happy Tuesday and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This is of course not just any Tuesday but Election Day, where the country will decide who should control Congress, the White House, and innumerable state and local offices, and vote on a huge number of ballot initiatives.
My initial thought for the newsletter was to do some aggressive counterprogramming and not mention the presidential race at all. But since Donald Trump vs. Kamala Harris is what everyone is thinking about regardless, I’m not sure I could quite get away with that.
So instead, I offer readers some thoughts on why victory in the fight for cheaper housing, a more liberal land-use regime, and greater property rights won’t come from the White House.
The Housing Election That Won’t Fix the Housing Crisis
Presidential elections rarely revolve around housing policy. That might be changing in 2024.
Polls repeatedly show that high and rising housing costs are an increasingly salient issue for voters. That’s true for the electorate at large and for large subdemographics of voters, from Gen Z to Catholics.
High and rising housing costs are fueling voter disquiet in both swingy Sunbelt states and the teetering Midwestern “blue wall.”
Even if the effects of the housing crisis don’t ultimately affect how people vote, they could still determine the election by influencing where people vote.
The highest-cost, highest-regulation blue states have been bleeding people and electoral votes to more pro-growth purple and red states in the country’s south and west. New York’s failure to address its housing crisis means megabuilding Texas has marginally more influence on the national election outcomes. That could matter in an election that appears to be incredibly close.
Democrats would have won with this map in 2020 but would lose with it in 2024 because NY and CA didn’t build housing pic.twitter.com/m9WXVvXlh5
— Open New York (@OpenNYForAll) October 30, 2024
The “housing theory of everything” strikes again.
Harris and Trump have both responded to the rising salience of housing costs by talking a lot more about how they’ll bring those costs down. So have their running mates.
Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein wryly noted on the night of the vice presidential debate between Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) that the past few V.P. debates contained zero references to housing. But Walz and Vance mentioned the issue dozens of times.
In an extremely policy-lite election, both major-party campaigns have released modestly fleshed-out housing policy platforms detailing how they’ll bring costs down.
Harris has embraced YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) rhetoric about the need to cut the state and local red tape that chokes off housing construction. Additionally, she’s promised to give down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers, tax credits to homebuilders, and bring down rents with a mix of rent control and crackdowns on corporate speculators and rent-recommendation software.
Trump has paired NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) rhetoric with calls to open up federal lands for housing development, slash federal environmental regulations on homebuilding, and deport millions of shelter-consuming immigrants.
Of the two, Harris certainly talks a better game about the need for mor
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