Last week’s Democratic National Convention saw Vice President Harris and party leaders bringing housing policy back into the national conversation in a way not seen since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society era in the 1960s. The new mantra within the Democratic Party now sounds a lot like “Build, baby, build.”
“There is a serious housing shortage. In many places, it’s too difficult to build and it’s driving prices up,” Harris said at a North Carolina rally on Friday. “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 the state and local levels.”
Harris’s embrace of an ambitious plan to expand the housing supply while supporting first-time homeowners with a $25,000 mortgage credit caught the pundit class by surprise. But it’s just the latest example of her embrace of the populist attitude sweeping the nation.
It also brings Democrats back a core party value they seemed to have forgotten in recent years: ensuring America’s working class can enjoy the benefits of home ownership.
Democrats’ new boldness on housing is a winning message in a country where the median home price now tops $400,000, and where 40 million potential homebuyers now find themselves priced out. After years battling its NIMBY fringe, Democrats are ready to get building again.
It’s about time.
“America is not a museum,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said at last week’s Democratic convention in Chicago. That might as well be the party’s new rallying call as it tries to build its way out of an unaffordable housing crisis. “We build museums for preservation purposes...but cities are valuable because of their people, and in order to serve and protect those people, and to make sure they have a safe affordable place to call home, all roads lead to housing.”
Unlike many of Donald Trump’s light-on-the-details proposals, Harris’s team came to the table with actual blueprints for increasing the total supply of housing. Those include making it easier for localities to zone and plan for multi-family residences and providing federal incentives for building more deeply affordable housing.
Harris’s big plans to put new foundations in the ground should help address her critics’ sharpest attack — that subsidizing homeownership will only lead to higher prices for existing real estate.
For millions of young Americans, Harris’s call for more housing touches on an issue they feel on a daily basis. Over seven in 10 Americans between the ages of 23 and 40 want to buy a home but say they’re priced out of their local market. Housing affordability is also causing more young Americans to live with their parents: a Bloomberg-Harris poll released late last year found that roughly half of people ages 18 to 29 still live at home.
That isn’t just emotionally stressful for young adults who are ready to start independent lives — it also creates a pronounced economic drag effect, as millions of potential homebuyers drop out of the market. Those young would-be buyers are also delaying starting families, which provide huge economic boosts to local communities. Both parties have known about this double crisis for decades, but Democrats are now claiming a first-mover advantage by putting forward serious proposals to address the core problem.
It’s also a message that likely cuts across party lines. An increase in affordable housing is one of the few housing infrastructure issues with broad support from both Democratic and Republican voters, according to new research from the nonpartisan Urban Institute. Red states have already embarked on local-level efforts to reduce zoning red tape and spur construction. Harris’s pledge to increase federal support for those efforts could end up creating an unlikely alliance between pro-housing Republican lawmakers and a federal government that is finally eager to help.
In an era of increasing political polarization, voters are eager to embrace big ideas that provide benefits to both red states and blue states alike. Vastly expanding the construction of new housing — and making that new housing more affordable to young people and renters — achieves that goal while remaining true to the bipartisan solution-seeking that defined the Biden administration. Harris now has the opportunity to continue that legacy with an issue uniquely her own.
By championing a generational rethinking of our housing infrastructure, Kamala Harris has started a much-needed conversation that tens of millions of Americans have been demanding for decades. Done correctly, Harris could reshape yet another political debate while providing a long-term solution to one of the nation’s most intractable problems.
This is what leadership looks like.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.
