Vice President Kamala Harris announced on August 16 her presidential campaign’s plans to lower costs for American families, including housing costs. The first component of the agenda, “Build the American Dream: Lowering the Costs of Renting and Owning a Home,” calls for the construction of 3 million new housing units in the next four years, outlines actions for creating a fairer rental market, and proposes $25,000 in downpayment support for first-time homeowners.
To address the housing shortage and bring down prices for renters and homeowners alike, the Harris campaign’s plan calls for a historic expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and the first-ever tax incentive for homebuilders who build starter homes sold to first-time homebuyers. Building upon the Biden-Harris administration’s proposed $20 billion innovation fund, the campaign proposes a $40 billion fund that would support local innovations in housing supply solutions, catalyze innovative methods of construction financing, and empower developers and homebuilders to design and build affordable homes. To cut red tape and bring down housing costs, the plan calls for streamlining permitting processes and reviews, including for transit-oriented development and conversions. The agenda also proposes making certain federal lands eligible to be repurposed for affordable housing development. Collectively, these policy proposals seek to create 3 million homes in the next four years.
The campaign plan cites the Biden-Harris administration’s ongoing actions to support the lowest-income renters, including its actions to expand rental assistance for veterans and other low-income renters, increase housing supply for people experiencing homelessness, enforce fair housing laws, and hold corporate landlords accountable. Building upon these commitments, the Harris agenda calls upon Congress to pass the “Stop Predatory Investing Act,” which would remove key tax benefits for major investors who acquire large numbers of single-family rental homes (see Memo, 7/17/23), and the “Preventing the Algorithmic Facilitation of Rental Housing Cartels Act,” which would crack down on algorithmic rent-setting software that enables price-fixing among corporate landlords.
To make homeownership attainable, Vice President Harris’s proposal would provide up to $25,000 in downpayment assistance for first-time homebuyers who have paid their rent on time for two years. First-generation homeowners – those whose parents did not own homes – would receive more generous assistance.
Vice President Harris’s economic agenda also includes proposals to lower grocery costs, lower the costs of prescription drugs and relieve medical debt, and cut taxes for workers and families with children. The plan would restore the American Rescue Plan’s expanded Child Tax Credit, which provided up to $3,600 per child for low- and middle-income families for one year before it expired in 2022, and would enact a new $6,000 tax credit for families in the first year after their child is born. These measures to reduce expenses and boost household income would also improve housing security for low-income families, who often face impossible tradeoffs between paying rent and affording food, medical care, and other basic needs.
Housing affordability is a top-priority issue for voters of all political leanings in the 2024 elections, and candidates of both major parties are addressing housing on the campaign trail. During a campaign event in Asheville, NC, on August 14, former president Donald Trump highlighted a pillar of his campaign’s housing agenda: “To further address the housing affordability crisis, we will work with states […] to open up large tracts of federal land for housing constructions.” Drawing a parallel with the Opportunity Zones program, which he signed into law in 2017 as part of the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” the former president called for these areas to “have low taxes, low regulations, to stimulate rapid economic growth, maximum affordability, and a return of a thing called […] the American Dream.”
Both the Republican National Committee (RNC) and Democratic National Committee (DNC) discuss housing affordability and homelessness in their 2024 party platforms. To read a summary of the housing and homelessness provisions of each platform, see Memo, 7/22. Prior to the release of the party platforms, NLIHC sent identical, nonpartisan letters to the DNC and RNC leadership on June 13, calling on each party to make the housing needs of the lowest-income renters a central pillar of its 2024 party platform. The letters provide background information on the nation’s affordable housing and homelessness crisis and urge each party to adopt a 2024 policy platform that commits to bridging the gap between incomes and housing costs, expanding and preserving the supply of deeply affordable rental homes, providing emergency rental assistance to stabilize families in crisis, strengthening and enforcing renter protections, advancing evidence-based solutions to homelessness, and fixing our country’s broken disaster recovery system. The nonpartisan letters can be found here and here.
To learn more about the Our Homes, Our Votes campaign and its ongoing efforts to raise the profile of low-income housing as an election issue, visit: www.ourhomes-ourvotes.org/candidate-engagement