Kamala Harris has a new advertising push to draw attention to her plan to build 3 million new homes over four years, a move designed to contain inflationary pressures that also draws a sharp contrast to Republican Donald Trump’s approach.
Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, highlights her plan in a new minute-long ad that uses her personal experience, growing up in rental housing while her mother had saved for a decade before she could buy a home. The ad targets voters in the swing states including Arizona and Nevada. Campaign surrogates are also holding 20 events this week focused on housing issues.
In addition to increasing home construction, Harris is proposing the government provide as much as $25,000 in assistance to first-time buyers. That message carries weight at this moment as housing costs have kept upward pressure on the consumer price index. Shelter costs are up 5.1% over the past 12 months, compared to overall inflation being 2.9%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“Vice President Harris knows we need to do more to address our housing crisis, that’s why she has a plan to end the housing shortage” and will crack down on “corporate landlords and Wall Street banks hiking up rents and housing costs,” said Dan Kanninen, the campaign’s battleground states director.
3 million homes that will be bought by the former employers of her economic team, Black Rock.
She will never do anything that would impact the profits of her owners, the donor class
We need more than just that. I’m continuing to email the Biden administration monthly about implementing a vacancy tax for private owners with 3 or more single family dwellings. I’ll continue to do so under the Harris administration.
My only shot at every being able to afford a house is if the billionaires and real estate corporations get taken out of the equation. Taxing them for sitting on empty properties is much better than building more for them to snap up because they won’t be priced fairly to begin with due to market manipulation.
ironically the quickest way to curb the housing crisis would be to hike the capital gains taxes
Building more homes and offering subsidies will only put more money into the builders’ pockets. We already have too many homes. The issue is companies owning hundreds or even thousands of homes, only to refuse to sell or rent 75% of them so they can charge 400% more for the 25% they do sell or rent. It’s blatant market manipulation.
Begin a vacant property tax, (based on having more than 30 days in the calendar year with the property empty) which ratchets up as you own more vacant properties. So people can have a summer and winter home if they want, without their tax increasing too much. After all, it’s only one vacant home. But when you own a dozen vacant properties, you’re gonna get fucked hard by the IRS.
It will incentivize companies to actually rent or sell their vacant properties, instead of letting them sit vacant for years at a time. And that 30 days of vacancy should be any 30 days, so people who rent are incentivized to offer longer lease terms and change tenants less than once a year. Meaning short term rentals (AirBnB) will also be less attractive, because they typically only operate at ~50% occupied, as they’ll typically have a few days between rentals. Since short term rentals have been cannibalizing the long term rental markets recently, (lots of landlords have moved towards having properties be full time AirBnBs, which means there are fewer places left for actual tenants,) it will also help correct the rental markets which are overvalued.
All the data I’ve seen in the last 5-10 years suggests that we don’t have enough homes. Even with vacant homes accounted for and how much burden that would relieve.
That’s one of the reasons why there’s a growing push to bring back the missing middle housing and businesses into our population centers by removing zoning laws that got rid of them in the first place.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t also be doing away with corporate ownership of housing and taxing individuals with 3/4+ homes, especially if they’re vacant.
We need a multi-pronged attack on resolving the housing issue, including the 3m planned homes from a Harris admin.
Begin a vacant property tax, (based on having more than 30 days in the calendar year with the property empty) which ratchets up as you own more vacant properties.
Property tax should already ratchet up based on how many properties owned, regardless of if they are occupied or not.
