For the housing industry, the question is how Harris will approach housing issues should she win the election, and whether she will hold to recent proposals from the Biden campaign that rankled some housing industry professionals and policy wonks.
Most notably, Biden unveiled a proposal last week that would cap rent hikes at 5% nationally for two years, which would apply to landlords that own more than 50 units. The policy would grant exceptions to new construction and rehabilitation.
This was met with swift condemnation from the real estate industry, though it was acknowledged that the proposal has very little chance of passing through Congress.
“The recent announcement on rent caps is an example of a policy that is broadly understood to be counterproductive,” said David Dworkin, president and CEO of the National Housing Conference. “It’s a short-term solution that ultimately leads to higher housing costs in the long run. I’m hoping that the Harris campaign will put all of their policies through the filter of what’s going to result in the most affordable housing, because that’s what we need right now.”
However, much of what the Biden administration has done during its four-year term more directly addresses what industry and policy experts say is the underlying cause of soaring rents and home prices — the shortage of affordable housing.
The Biden administration massaged rules and deadlines around the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program that it believes will make it easier to build mixed-income housing. It created new grant programs administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) aimed at removing barriers to housing production. It’s taken steps to repurpose federal land for the construction of affordable housing and it’s addressed commercial-to-residential conversions.
The federal government has few levers at its disposal to directly address housing production because the policies that have the most impact are administered at the state and local level. Past initiatives tying block grant funding to local zoning changes can end up making it harder to build new housing, especially when it comes to single-family zoning.
“[The Biden administration] has been trying to think about what they can do around the housing finance side because that’s really where they have more of the levers,” said Jenny Schutz, senior fellow at Brookings Metro. “So thinking about things like the FHA mortgage insurance premium: can you bring that down and make entry into homeownership a little cheaper for marginal homebuyers? They’ve been creative about what you can do, but those are just going to be relatively small policies around the edges.”
Notably, Harris’s housing policy during the 2020 Democratic primary campaign did not include anything that addressed the housing shortage. Her policy focused primarily on boosting Black homeownership and giving tax credits to rent-burdened tenants.
Given how much housing has changed since she released that proposal — as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, high mortgage rates, and significantly higher rents and home prices — it’s unlikely her 2024 campaign proposal would look much like her 2020 campaign.