The presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is expected to come down to an extremely narrow margin and could depend on how their platforms sway voters on any one issue. Though the cost of groceries and other sources of inflation are typically considered the biggest economic drivers this election cycle, the Harris and Trump campaigns are recently turning their attention toward housing shortages, specifically, in their remarks.

While the speakers at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago have not touched heavily on policy so far, a consistent theme from keynote addresses is that Harris plans to devote a significant portion of her agenda to building more housing. On the Republican side, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) is blaming the housing affordability crisis on the same group he blames for wage stagnation — illegal immigrants.

Mark Calabria, former director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency under the Trump administration, told the Washington Examiner that housing is becoming such a focal point as it is the one area of price growth that has not moderated. The inflation rate has been generally declining since peaking in June 2022, and annual inflation is now clocking in at 2.9%, according to the consumer price index.

“I think there’s a degree to which Harris almost has no choice but to talk about it,” Calabria said. “For Trump, it’s probably a little bit more or less a necessity, but more an opportunity.”

Harris campaign makes housing a focal point of presidential platform

Harris unveiled her economic and affordability plan last week amid a severe housing shortage in the United States that relates to a decadeslong undersupply. 

Building off of President Joe Biden’s previous calls for the construction of 2 million new homes, Harris’s plan would push for the construction of 3 million new housing units and a tax incentive for builders who construct homes for first-time buyers, as well as a $40 billion fund to help local governments find solutions to the problem of supply.

Though Democrats have danced around another part of her economic plan, price caps directed at price-gouging, they have praised the housing platform, with Obama asserting at the Democratic National Convention that the issue is a “priority” for the vice president.

Harris knows “if we want to make it easier for more young people to buy a home, we need to build more units and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that made it harder to build homes for working people in this country,” Obama said in his keynote address on Tuesday. “That’s a priority, and she’s put out a bold new plan to do just that.”

A concern among Democratic affordable housing advocates, however, is that building more homes will not solve the shortages if people are unable to purchase one. 

“When I go into LA every weekend, I drive by all of the new units that are being built that are supposed to be affordable for rentals,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) told activists at a housing event sponsored by the Center for Popular Democracy in Chicago, per Politico. “Nobody’s there.”

While she said she was encouraged by both Biden and Harris’s proposals, Waters added that she’s been “basically opposed to tax incentives because I think that all it does is give rich people, the builders and the developers, more money than they should have when they claim that they’re building affordable housing.”

The housing concerns come amid a series of surveys and polls finding that a majority of voters under 30 find it harder to buy a house, raise a family, and get a good job compared to previous generations. In June, a CBS News poll found 82% of registered voters believe it is more difficult to purchase a home than it was for previous generations. 

“So the affordability challenges, of course, are most challenging, more difficult for younger people, younger families, because they’re the earliest in their career and life trajectories,” Bankrate Senior Economic Analyst Mark Hamrick told the Washington Examiner. “And those who are more senior have had the benefit of time to build savings, possibly to own a home previously, or perhaps in some cases, have higher income.”

With existing home prices 3.2% higher than a year ago, and mortgage rates near their highest rate since the turn of the century, housing is becoming a key problem for the middle class — especially in smaller cities, which are starting to see an influx of people moving out of major cities and looking to settle in suburban areas.

“It certainly has real-world ramifications,” Calabria said of the housing shortage. “It’s a big component of cost to living, and it certainly limits your choices of where you want to live and, you know, the life you want to live and the career you want to have.”

Calabria said there has been a “record acceleration in unaffordability over such a few number of years” but argued that the housing market is not suffering due to a lack of government subsidies. Instead, he said, government subsidies increase demand as people will have more money to spend on homes, but if supply does not increase, prices will only rise.

Though Harris is talking about increasing the supply of homes, if she were elected, Calabria thinks her plan would actually increase demand — particularly when it comes to tax incentives.

A large component of the housing shortage comes from the inability to build housing on federal or public land due to environmental concerns and pushback from groups like the Sierra Club. Calabria said Harris is not likely to go toe-to-toe with environmental organizations over zoning issues and protecting wildlife preservations — something that has prevented states like California from building additional housing thanks to laws that allow for environmental lawsuits.

“If what you’re proposing doesn’t really get at the land issue, then you’re not going to make a dime’s worth of the difference in terms of affordability,” Calabria said.

Calabria noted that there is very little federal land on the East Coast available to turn into plots for housing compared to the West. 

With what land is available, home builders are forced to “feed at the same trough” as developers looking to utiitize the land for commercial or industrial purposes, Hamrick said.

“They’re not making any new land,” Hamrick joked. “There are impediments to home building that have to do with regulations at the state and local levels. There’s competition for available land … if you drive, for example, around the suburbs of Washington, D.C., you see all of those alternative utilizations of land that could otherwise be used in housing.”

Other roadblocks to Harris’s plan include the difficulty in getting construction loans from community banks and a shortage of skilled labor, as people may go to college with the potential for forgiven loans rather than join the trades.

Ultimately, Calabria said, Harris’s plan to build 3 million homes is an “empty promise” if it doesn’t address labor, land, and loan issues. 

“Harris has put far more of her focus and conversation on climate issues, and at the end of the day, a lot of the hardcore environmental movement just doesn’t want to see any more housing built,” the former administrator added. “They don’t want more people. They don’t want more housing.”

To put her plan into action, Harris would likely need bipartisan support from Congress. Currently, Democrats hold the Senate and White House and Republicans hold the House. With the distinct possibility that the GOP controls one or both chambers of Congress next year, it is likely her plan of action to create 3 million homes would need to undergo some significant revisions.

“Neither candidate talks about that at length because they don’t want to talk about sort of the structural — from a government standpoint, the structural impediments toward delivering on promises,” Hamrick said.

“That’s one reason why it would fall into the category of ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,” Hamrick added, referring to Harris’s proposal.

Republicans blame housing on Biden administration’s lack of attention to southern border

As housing affordability continues to worry voters, Vance is taking the opportunity to blame the shortage of homes on Harris. In an interview with TMJ4 last week, he argued the vice president is responsible for high housing costs due to her administration’s border policies and tiebreaking votes in the Senate.

“Kamala Harris let in 20 million illegal aliens to compete with Americans for scarce homes,” Vance said.

“Second of all, [Harris] cast multiple votes, tie-breaking votes, that raised interest rates, which of course makes mortgages totally unaffordable for American families,” the Ohio senator continued, stating that Trump would build more housing and “kick out the illegal aliens who are competing with Americans for homes.”

Hamrick said Vance’s comments were a “lot of blame-shifting,” arguing that the challenges to affordable housing are more complex.

“This is typical of oversimplification and vilification of a segment of society which, in some cases, doesn’t have an eloquent spokesperson to or doesn’t have sufficient voice in the conversation to say it’s more complicated than that, and we aren’t the creator of all the world’s problems,” Hamrick said.

Hamrick noted that Trump’s promise of “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country” if elected could also have a negative impact on the housing shortage because it would “deplete labor across the board, particularly in the construction industry.”

According to the 2024 Republican Party platform, under a Trump administration, Republicans will reduce mortgage rates by “slashing Inflation, open limited portions of Federal Lands to allow for new home construction, promote homeownership through Tax Incentives and support for first-time buyers, and cut unnecessary Regulations that raise housing costs.” The former president’s campaign has also said he would lower housing costs by encouraging construction of housing on the “periphery of cities and suburban areas” where land is cheapest.

In some cases, Trump has changed his tune on what is limiting affordable housing. His past support for zoning to protect single-family housing appeared to go by the wayside in July after he blasted the costs associated with zoning restrictions in a Bloomberg interview, calling them “a killer.”

“Your permits, your permitting process. Your zoning, if — and I went through years of zoning. Zoning is like … it’s a killer,” Trump said, according to a transcript of the interview. “But we’ll be doing that, and we’ll be bringing the price of housing down.”

The National Association of Home Builders found in a 2021 study that regulations imposed by the government at all levels account for 23.8% of the final price of a new single-family home built for sale. At the time of the study, the average price of a new home was $394,300, meaning the regulation accounted for $93,870 of the final house price.

Trump did not offer an explicit pathway for the executive branch to loosen regulations, but Republicans have long pushed back against restrictions and red tape as roadblocks to housing construction and affordability.

Calabria, who worked in Trump’s first administration and under Biden until June 2021, said a second Trump administration would likely support a federal land transferring system such as the one used in Nevada, where local governments select specific plots of public land that could be converted into private use and later for affordable housing. 

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The former administrator added that Trump would have a strong argument if he campaigned aggresively on affordable housing numbers during his administration before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Certainly from his perspective, if you go back and compare pre-pandemic housing affordability, it looks dramatically different than what you have today,” Calabria said. “So, if part of his argument is, you know, ‘make America affordable again,’ you’ve got a really big comparison there between how the housing market performed under Biden versus how it performed under Trump.”