WASHINGTON (Gray DC) – The soaring cost of housing is at the forefront of worries for many American voters this fall, and both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have been talking about how they plan to address the problem.
But their approaches to solving housing affordability are very different.
“As president, I will work in partnership with industry to build the housing we need both to rent and to buy,” said Vice President Harris at a campaign event in Raleigh, N.C. in August.
According to the Harris campaign’s platform, her potential future administration plans to put forward a plan to build three million more rental units and more homes that are affordable in her first term. Other plans include giving first-time home buyers $25,000 to help with down payments, cutting red tape to build faster, penalizing firms that hoard homes and passing legislation to outlaw forms of price fixing by corporate landlords.
“As soon as I get to office, we will make housing much more affordable,” said former President Trump at a campaign event in New York last month.
A spokesperson for the Republican National Committee said Trump’s housing plans include cutting back on inflation, reducing the mortgage rate down to three percent, securing the border and banning mortgages for illegal immigrants (who they say drive up the cost of housing), opening limited portions of federal land for new home construction and eliminating federal regulations that drive up the cost of housing.
But experts say addressing the housing crises will not come easy for either candidate.
“This is a problem that has been decades in the making. It’s not a problem that we are going to solve very quickly,” said Francis Torres, Associate Director for Housing and Infrastructure at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Torres also said both state and local governments play a big role in addressing the housing crisis and will have to work with the president, but so will others.
“Whichever candidate wins, it’s very likely they are going to have to reach across the aisle and find solutions that have support on the other side as well,” he said. “And this particular idea of how do you make it such that the federal government incentivizes state and local governments to make it easier to build housing in their states, particularly in states that have a significant undersupply of homes, is probably where that’s going to go.”
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