For Americans hoping to buy their first home, one bullet point on Vice President Kamala Harris’ recently-announced economic strategy might be particularly alluring: her promise to build 3 million homes.
Of course, Harris would have to be elected first. If she does win the November election, is it possible for her to pull this promise off during a four-year term?
Experts who weighed in on the proposal say it is, but they also warned that it comes with challenges.
“It’s not impossible to construct 750,000 extra homes a year – housing starts, which were about 1.2 million last year, hit 2.2 million at the peak of the housing bubble,” said right leaning columnist Megan McArdle in a piece for The Washington Post. “But ramping up production to that level would take years, and might never happen, because the only real way to get there is via the one promise Harris will find hardest to keep – that is, to make it much easier for builders to build.”
According to the American Bankruptcy Institute, home ownership in the U.S. is currently at its lowest level since 1965. Real estate marketplace Zillow released a report this summer that found the U.S housing shortage grew to 4.5 million homes in 2022. That’s even as a pandemic construction boom brought new homes.
“This deepening housing deficit is the root cause of the housing affordability crisis,” said Zillow.
New York Magazine’s Intelligencer noted that this housing crisis will be the inheritance of whoever wins the presidential election – whether it’s Harris or former President Donald Trump, the GOP candidate. Along with the housing shortage, years of interest rate hikes have made it difficult for people to afford buying a home, as well as reluctant sellers who didn’t want to give up their low monthly payments from before the hikes.
“What Harris needs to do is spur more people to sell, and that is not only out of her hands but where the real risk is – especially if too many people want to sell at once or the economy implodes out of nowhere,” Intelligencer said.
In March, President Joe Biden has put forth a proposal similar to Harris’ that calls for 2 million homes to be built. This July, he announced “new actions to repurpose federal land to build tens of thousands of affordable homes.” And denounced Senate Republicans for “blocking a bill that passed the House with overwhelming bipartisan support that would help build 200,000 affordable homes.”
Specifically, Biden said that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced actions to create thousands of affordable housing units on BLM land in Nevada.
“BLM is opening a public comment period on a sale of 20 acres of public land to Clark County, Nevada for below market value at just $100 per acre – the largest-ever sale for affordable housing under the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act program, which the county estimates will enable the development of nearly 150 affordable homes for households making less than 80% of area median income,” said the president. “BLM will also soon announce the proposed below-market sale of an additional 18 acres to the City of Henderson, which the City estimates will provide nearly 300 affordable housing units for rent.”
Biden also referenced other plans to support the building of up to 15,000 or more affordable rental and homeownership units for Nevadans.
On a larger scale, POLITICO’s Victoria Guida said that state and local zoning regulations are poised to make plans to build millions of houses over the upcoming years challenging.
“The federal government cannot simply override those municipal regulations,” she said. Guida noted that, even though he praised Harris’ plan, former President Barack Obama also mentioned these limitations.
In her column, McArdle seemed skeptical about Harris’ promise to reduce “obstacles to construction” and said forsaking things like inspections, reviews, environmental standards and building codes would likely not go over well with voters. Removing red tape is more complicated than it sounds, McArdle argued.
Even with these concerns, there is substantial support and excitement about the proposal. As the lack of affordable housing grows to impact middle-class Americans away from coastal cities, there’s recently been more interest in new housing policies, said Guida.
“Activists I talked to saw it as a watershed moment that lack of housing supply was cited by both the former president and the current president as a central issue,” said Guida of Harris’ proposal.
According to Intelligencer, the plan has “so far gotten pretty good reviews from economists.” At the same time, the outlet said “there’s still a lot to be determined about how Harris’s plans would work,” and that all those homes might still not turn the growing shortage around.