Housing affordability is among the top issues for voters in the U.S. as the Nov. 5 election creeps closer. For the first time in modern memory, housing is mentioned in the same breath as issues like the economy, abortion and immigration, marking a shift in focus for candidates seeking the nation’s highest office.
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Roughly one-quarter of Americans surveyed by Redfin in a study published earlier this week said housing affordability is a top-three issue for them, along with the economy, inflation and healthcare. Both major presidential candidates have discussed their ideas for easing the rising cost of housing, but in reality, presidential power over housing is relatively limited and uncertain.
“The president alone really doesn’t have a lot of control over what goes on in the housing market, and congressional action is probably needed,” University of Michigan Assistant Professor of Business Law Brian Connolly said.
“Congress is controlling the purse strings,” he said.
Housing prices have been a concern in select cities for more than a decade, but a nationwide spike after the pandemic brought the issue to the forefront for a growing number of voters. The median price of a home has increased by roughly $125K to $428K since September 2019, according to Redfin. And while wages have climbed as well, they haven’t kept pace with the cost of a home.
“The economy in general is doing really well right now, so that makes the housing market stand out even more,” Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather said. “People are realizing, ‘I’m earning the amount of money that I wanted to earn and yet I still can’t afford a house – something is broken.’”
Both candidates are leaning heavily on supply-side answers. Former President Donald Trump, for his part, has spoken about addressing housing affordability by reducing regulations and utilizing some federal land for development. The Republican platform mentions the use of tax incentives to promote homeownership.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ platform includes tax incentives, too, both for the rehabilitation of existing owner-occupied homes and for first-time buyers. She has also advocated for creating more affordable housing units through tax credits, including the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, and proposed a special fund to encourage local governments to support innovations that could expand the housing supply. Harris has also looked at tapping into federal land to build additional housing.
But with the possible exception of using federal land to create more housing, those interventions all require additional approvals. For instance, any tax credit for homebuyers or incentives for home builders would require Congressional support.
A president’s powers might better be viewed as the ability to set the tone and agenda in the effort to combat housing unaffordability, said Benjamin Preis, the director of the National Housing Crisis Task Force and a senior research fellow at the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University.
The president can use the “bully pulpit,” find new ways that government entities can get involved and ensure existing programs intended to encourage housing construction or promote housing affordability are working correctly, Preis said.
For example, two loan programs offered through the Department of Transportation originally intended to fund transit infrastructure can also be used to fund transit-oriented development. But actually using this method to fund projects has proven tricky, Pries said.
“What a lot of developers are finding is that the loans don’t seem to work well in practice when you are trying to do housing development,” Preis said. “Can the next president go to the Secretary of Transportation and say, ‘You need to figure out how to make this happen?’”
And because presidents have such a large purview, other policy priorities may run counter to their housing efforts. For example, Trump’s idea of undertaking a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants in the country would reduce the number of construction workers in the U.S., worsening an existing labor shortage that has weighed on home building.
No matter the plan or the president, one big hurdle has grown into a nearly insurmountable roadblock: politics.
Polls show the presidential election is incredibly close, but the makeup of the Congress is also up in the air. Whoever wins the election in November will likely need to work in a bipartisan way to get anything done. Congressional gridlock could serve as the largest challenge to any efforts to address the nation’s housing affordability issues.
“The plan that [Harris] proposed, on paper, is a really well-thought-out plan that hits the housing market from all angles, but I’m getting nervous about whether it’s even feasible because of how much polarization there is in Congress,” Fairweather said.
If Harris were to win, for instance, and face a Republican-dominant Congress, “are they going to try to get as many policy wins as possible and come to the table and put forth a housing bill that’s going to be meaningful?” Fairweather said.
“Are they going to dig their heels in and wait until they’re in power to do what they want, the way they want to do it?” she said. “I have no idea.”
There’s another political reality to consider. Promises made on the campaign and promises kept once a candidate is in office can vary greatly.
“There’s a real difference between a candidate saying housing is going to be important in my administration and a president-elect or a president, in their first 100 days, saying housing is my number one priority,” Pries said. The president then needs to introduce legislation in that time, direct all agencies to focus on housing and get all the right people together to work on the issue.
That kind of laser-focus on an issue “is so often necessary in a difficult political environment to make sure that at least one thing gets over the line,” he said.