Kamala Harris Offers Housing Subsidies Plus More Migration and Regulation

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at an announcement event regarding investments in broa
White House Photo / Adam Schultz
Neil Munro

Campaign-trail Kamala Harris is now offering to subsidize the young homebuyers who are being hammered out of the housing market by her current support for massive legal and illegal migration.

“She is creating a problem and then offering to fix it … like a company that sells both cigarettes and anti-cancer drugs,” responded Steven Camarota, at the Center for Immigration Studies.

In contrast, Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance have an alternative: Reduce migration to make room for Americans to buy their homes at manageable market rates.

“Kamala Harris wants to give $25,000 to illegal aliens to buy American homes,” Vance said in an August 16 tweet, adding:

This will only further exacerbate the housing shortage in our country. It’s a disgrace. We should be making it easier and more affordable for American citizens to buy homes.

“Housing costs are skyrocketing, absolutely skyrocketing because we have 15 million new migrants,” Trump said in an Arizona speech in June. “We have no place to put them, and that number is growing so that we have absolutely no place.”

The Harris Plan

Numerous studies show government subsidies for young homebuyers act as temporary giveaways to older homeowners — but do serve as permanent giveaways to real estate investors and the progressive regulations that want to exploit and govern Americans’ suburbs, towns, and cities.

In her housing speech on Friday, Harris described her proposed progressive partnership with the real estate industry:

I will work in partnership with industry to build the housing we need, both to rent and to buy. We will take down barriers and cut red tape, including at state and local levels, and by the end of my first term, we will end America’s housing shortage by building 3 million new homes and rentals that are affordable for the middle class, and we will do that together and we will make sure those home actually go to working and middle-class Americans, not just investors.

So you know some corporate landlords, some of them, buy dozens, if not hundreds, of houses and apartments then they turn around and rent them out at extremely high prices, and it can make it impossible, then for regular people to be able to buy or even rent a home.

Some corporate landlords collude with each other to set artificially high rental prices, often using algorithms and price-fixing software to do it. It’s anticompetitive and it drives up costs. I will fight for a law that cracks down on these practices.

We also know that as the price of housing has gone up, the size of down payments have gone up as well. Even the aspiring homeowners save for years, it often still is not enough. So in addition, while we work on the housing shortage, my administration will provide first-time home buyers with $25,000 to help with the downpayment on a new home.

CNN.com reported August 16:

In addition, Harris wants to create a new $40 billion innovation fund to spur innovative housing construction – twice the size of a proposed fund previously announced by the Biden administration. The fund would look to empower local governments, developers and builders to construct more housing that’s affordable and to support new methods of construction financing.

Will It work?

Harris’s combination of more migraiton and more subsidies will likely fail to reduce prices as more migrants compete compete against young Americans for the housing owned by older baby boomers and investors.

Prices per square foot will rise if the Harris plan is adopted because the government subsidies will allow homebuilders to raise their prices by the same dollar value — especially if more emigrants arrive to compete for new housing. For example, a 2023 study into housing subsidies in Germany showed “that instead of making house purchases more affordable for families, the subsidy scheme led to a rise in house prices and mainly benefited sellers of properties.”

Home-sellers do not gain from the subsidy because they must buy a replacement home, also at higher prices.

However, the real estate investors will gain because they can convert the Harris subsidy into more land and more profits.

“When they propose a solution to a housing shortage by offering a new subsidy, they are contributing to the underlying problem in the first place,” Camarota said.

However, Harris continues to support the establishment economic policy of growing the nation’s economy by extracting more migrants from poor countries.

Since 2021, Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, has successfully imported more than 10 million legal, illegal, and quasi-legal migrant workers, renters, and consumers as part of an economic strategy to inflate Wall Street’s investments in the consumer economy.

“CBO estimates suggest that the [Biden-Harris] migrant surge will be 8.7 million people [by 2026], at roughly three people per household. that’s three million housing units … If she wins, we can expect a lot more immigration” and higher housing prices, said Camarota.

It is not clear Harris could build three million houses in her first term. For example, in Canada, the government’s immigration policies have completely overwhelmed plans to build more houses for the huge number of Canadians locked out of homes and real estate wealth.

Young Canadians, said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “are not going to get the same kind of homebuyers’ plan, necessarily, that people a generation ago did in terms of what the retirement nest egg would be.”

Progressive Strings

Harris’s offer of taxpayer funds for taxpaying home-buyers comes with progressive political strings.

For example, the Democrats’ Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation requires city and local governments that wants federal grants to implement lobbyist-influenced, progressive-flavored federal construction policies.

In practice, those 2015 policies force small towns to accept the progressive priorities of big cities. For example, the town of Ferguson, Mo., accepted the African Americans evicted by the Chicago developers who demolished lakeside tower blocks to build high-value housing for upper-income Chicagoans. Nationwide, suburbs are being pressured to absorb more urban migrants by allowing the construction of small apartments that raise suburban density, land taxes, traffic, and school populations.

In July 2020, Trump’s housing secretary, Ben Carson, shut down the AFFH rule. “Washington has no business dictating what is best to meet your local community’s unique needs,” he said.

“Your home will go down in value and crime rates will rapidly rise,” Trump said as Carson ended the AFFH regulation. “People have worked all their lives to get into a community, and now they’re going to watch it go to hell. Not going to happen, not while I’m here.”

But Biden has reanimated the AFFH program. In January 2023, he said:

Fifty-five years after its passage and signing, we are still working to realize the Fair Housing Act’s promise to end the legacy and persistence of discrimination and inequities in our housing system … It restores and builds upon our work during the Obama-Biden Administration to fully implement the Fair Housing Act. And, it sends a clear message to communities across the country that just saying they won’t discriminate isn’t enough. Communities must take action to aggressively combat and end racial discrimination in our housing system.

Biden’s political strategists delayed releasing the final regulation until after the 2024 election. In April, the HuffPost.com reported:

“It’s sitting at the White House while advisors play politics and now dangle the possibility of a rule in January 2025,” the [unnamed] official said. “The administration made a promise, and now it’s time to make good. Black and brown communities have waited long enough.”

Alternatives

Trump’s team wants to reduce immigration and so help reduce house prices without extra government intrusion into the real estate sector

“There are 20 million illegal aliens who shouldn’t be here and who are competing with Americans for scarce homes,” Vance told Fox News on August 6. “These policies make ordinary people suffer … she’s putting the interests of illegal aliens above American citizens.”

Author Matt Stller also argues that the primary way in which real-estate investors raise housing prices is by hoarding land tracts until rising populations pay higher prices:

A centralized industrial structure for building 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 a contractor to build a house. However, smaller developers increasingly struggle, as going to a bank to borrow and start or grow a development is difficult. So is access to land. And that means that over the past three decades, the center of the industry, the construction of the starter home that millions of people need, has been centralized in the hands of a small number of players

“The net effect of consolidation of homebuilders is significant, estimated at keeping 150,000 new homes from being built every year, which is roughly $100 billion of construction,” Stoller wrote.

The politics of Harris’s migration and housing programs are familiar, said Camarota.

“You bring in low-income people, create a housing shortage, and then you expand the welfare state and expand the administrative state,” said Camarota. “This has been a long-standing problem of immigration — it transforms societies in ways that lead to more government expenditure by bringing in more low-income people.”

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.