Currently on the campaign trail, Kamala Harris is proposing to provide subsidies to young home buyers who are being shut out of the housing market because of her support for mass immigration, both legal and illegal.
“She creates a problem and then proposes to solve it … like a company that sells both cigarettes and cancer drugs,” responded Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies.
In contrast, Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, have an alternative plan: reduce immigration to make room for Americans to buy homes at manageable market rates.
“Kamala Harris wants to give illegal immigrants $25,000 to buy a home in America,” Vance said. Tweet from August 16thhe added.
This will only make our nation’s housing shortage worse. It’s a shame. We should be making housing easier and more affordable for Americans.
.SourceOne of the biggest concerns I hear is, ‘Why is housing so expensive?’ There are two reasons.
1. We have 20 million illegal immigrants here who shouldn’t be here in the first place, competing with Americans for scarce housing.
2. Kamala supports higher interest rates and says mortgages are completely… pic.twitter.com/ccab7qtiLm
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 7, 2024
“Housing costs are skyrocketing. They’re really skyrocketing because we have 15 million new immigrants,” Trump said in a June speech in Arizona. “There’s no place to put them. And their numbers are growing, and there’s just no place for them to live.”
Harris Plan
Numerous studies have shown that while government subsidies for young homebuyers act as a temporary perk for older homeowners, they actually serve as a permanent perk for real estate investors and progressive regulations that seek to exploit and control Americans’ suburbs, towns, and cities.
Her Residential specifications“It’s a very big deal,” Harris said Friday about her proposed progressive partnership with the real estate industry.
I will work with industry to build the housing we need, both for renters and for buyers. I will remove barriers and cut red tape, including at the state and local levels. And by the end of my first term, we will build 3 million new homes and rental units that are affordable for the middle class to end America’s housing shortage. And we will do it together, making sure that those homes actually go to working-class and middle-class Americans, not just to investors.
As you know, some corporate landlords are buying dozens, or even hundreds, of houses and apartments and renting them out at sky-high prices, potentially making it impossible for ordinary people to buy or rent a home.
Some entrepreneurs conspire to set artificially high rents using algorithms and price-fixing software, which is anti-competitive and drives up costs. I will fight for laws to crack down on this practice.
We also know that as home prices rise, down payment sizes are also increasing. Potential homebuyers save for years and often it’s still not enough. That’s why, while we work to close the housing shortage, my Administration will provide first-time homebuyers with $25,000 to put toward a down payment on a new home.
CNN.com Reported August 16:
Additionally, Harris wants to establish a new $40 billion Innovation Fund to spur innovative housing construction — double the size of the proposed fund previously announced by the Biden Administration. The fund aims to empower local governments, developers and builders to build more affordable housing and support new ways to finance construction.
Does it work?
Harris’ combination of increased immigration and higher subsidies would likely fail to lower prices as more immigrants compete with younger Americans for homes owned by aging baby boomers and investors.
If the Harris plan were adopted, the price per square foot would rise because government subsidies would allow homebuilders to raise prices by the same dollar amount, especially as more immigrants compete for new housing. For example, a 2023 study found that: German Housing Subsidies “Instead of making home buying more affordable for families, the subsidy system led to higher house prices, primarily benefiting property sellers,” the report showed.
Home sellers would still have to purchase a replacement home at a higher price, and would therefore not be able to benefit from the subsidy.
But real estate investors stand to gain because they can convert the Harris grant into more land and profits.
“By proposing new subsidies as a solution to the housing shortage, we are exacerbating the underlying problem in the first place,” Camarota said.
This is simple logic that the Left fails to understand: when people have more money to spend on something, whether that be through a higher salary, a second income, or government assistance, the price of that thing goes up.
— Definitely not a Russian agent (@nopingout03) August 15, 2024
But Harris continues to support the establishment’s economic policy of growing national economies by accepting more immigrants from poorer countries.
Since 2021, Biden’s pro-immigration border commissioner, Alejandro Mayorkas, has successfully imported more than 10 million legal, illegal and semi-legal immigrant workers, renters and consumers as part of an economic strategy to inflate Wall Street investment in the consumer economy.
“According to CBO estimates, [Biden-Harris] The surge in immigrants is 8.7 million [by 2026]That’s roughly three people per household. That’s the equivalent of about 3 million homes. … If she wins, we can expect more immigration and higher home prices,” Camarota said.
It’s not clear that Harris will be able to build 3 million homes during her first term. In Canada, for example, plans to build more housing for the huge numbers of Canadians who have been locked out of their homes and real estate assets by the government’s immigration policies have been completely derailed.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said young Canadians “don’t necessarily have access to the same kinds of home buying options that people a generation ago had when it comes to saving for retirement.”
Progressive Strings
Harris’ proposal to provide taxpayer-funded homebuyers comes with progressive political strings attached.
For example, the Democrats’ “Affirmatively Promoting Fair Housing (AFFH)” regulations require cities and local governments seeking federal aid to implement lobbyist-influenced, progressive-tinged federal construction policies.
In effect, the 2015 policy is forcing small towns to embrace the progressive priorities of big cities. For example, the town of Ferguson, Missouri, welcomed African-Americans displaced by Chicago developers who demolished lakefront high-rises to build luxury housing for Chicago’s higher-income residents. Nationwide, suburbs are under pressure to accommodate more urban migrants by allowing the construction of small apartment buildings that increase suburban density, land taxes, traffic, and school-age populations.
Trump’s Housing Secretary Ben Carson repealed the AFFH rule in July 2020. “Washington does not have the authority to dictate what is best to meet communities’ unique needs,” he said.
“Home values will fall and crime rates will skyrocket,” Trump said when Governor Carson repealed the AFFH restrictions. “People have worked their whole lives to get into their communities and now they’re just watching their communities fall apart. And that’s not going to happen while I’m here.”
But Biden reinstated the AFFH program. In January 2023, he said:
Fifty-five years after it was passed and signed, we are still working to fulfill the promise of the Fair Housing Act to end the legacy and perpetuation of discrimination and inequality in our housing system…This bill revives and builds on the work we did during the Obama-Biden Administration to fully implement the Fair Housing Act. And it sends a clear message to communities across the country that it is not enough to declare that you will not discriminate. Communities must actively combat and take action to end racism in our housing system.
Biden’s political strategists have delayed announcing any final regulations until after the 2024 election. Reported:
“At the White House, advisers are playing politics, dangling the possibility of rules being enacted as soon as January 2025.” [unnamed] The official said: “The administration has made a promise, and now it’s time to deliver. Black and brown communities have waited long enough.”
Alternatives
The Trump team wants to reduce immigration and help lower home prices without increasing government intervention in the real estate industry.
“We have 20 million illegal immigrants who should not be in America, and they are competing with Americans for scarce housing,” Vance told Fox News on Aug. 6. “These policies are hurting ordinary citizens… She is putting the interests of illegal immigrants above the interests of the American people.”
According to author Matt Stoller, the main ways real estate investors increase home prices are: Buy up land until the price rises due to population growth:
The centralized structure of the building industry is a new phenomenon in America. Homebuilding used to be decentralized, with hundreds of thousands of contractors. And to some extent it still is. You can hire contractors to build a house. But small developers are increasingly struggling because it’s harder to get loans from banks to start or expand a development. And so is access to land. So, over the past 30 years, the heart of the industry – building the first homes that millions of people need – has been concentrated in the hands of a few players.
” Net Effect “Homebuilder consolidation is significant and is estimated to prevent the construction of 150,000 new homes each year, translating to roughly $100 billion in construction costs,” Stohler wrote.
The politics of Harris’ immigration and housing policies are well known, Camarota said.
“It displaces low-income people, creates a housing shortage, and expands the welfare state and the administrative state,” Camarota said. “That’s the long-standing problem with immigration: it changes societies, it displaces low-income people, and it increases government spending.”
