Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have made some promises that have no chance of being kept. But no promise is as fanciful as Harris’s pledge to build 3 million new homes.
“By the end of my first term,” Harris said during her Democratic National Convention presidential nomination acceptance speech, “we will end America’s housing shortage by building 3 million new homes and rentals that are affordable for the middle class.”
Harris has identified a real problem and a solution. Buying a home has been far too costly for decades and has been made much more difficult recently by inflation caused by the Biden-Harris administration. Real estate prices have worsened, and rent has risen at a record rate. According to Harvard University’s annual housing affordability report, the percentage of renters who spend more than 30% of their income on housing has never been higher.
When faced with rising prices, Democrats usually propose the worst policy option: rent control. President Joe Biden came up with a national ban on corporate landlords raising rent prices, and Harris eagerly embraced it. It is a terrible policy that would discourage investment in apartment buildings, drive down supply, and ignite rent increases.
The only good solution to high rents and the shortage of homes is to build more houses and apartments.
“We will take down barriers and cut red tape, including at the state and local levels,” Harris has said.
It would be excellent if that were true. But it almost certainly isn’t.
Harris did not say which red tape she’d cut. The biggest federal barrier to construction, which is the biggest of all kinds of barriers, is the National Environmental Policy Act. For 50 years, NEPA has given environmental activists the power to stop any federally related building project. Harris did not mention doing anything to change this, although getting rid of added costs and delays caused by NEPA would be the best first step in building her 3 million homes. Harris is beholden to the Democratic Party blob, and so can be guaranteed not to reform a law that gives radical environmentalists the power to bring everybody to a standstill.
Instead, Harris proposed a $40 billion fund to bribe local governments into reforming their zoning laws to make it easier to build smaller single- and multi-family homes in residential neighborhoods. This might be a welcome idea if Harris intended to pay for results by sending the money to states that built the most homes. But, of course, that is not what she intends to do. She wants to give the money to local governments that pass new laws she likes. Democrats don’t cut regulations. It’s in their DNA to create new ones.
Just look at Seattle. The city recently passed a law ending some zoning regulations in various residential neighborhoods, but it required any developer who built on that land to reserve a certain percentage of “affordable housing.” The result, according to a recently released study, is new construction declined rather than increased in those neighborhoods where Democrat zoning reform was imposed.
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If voters want 3 million homes built in the next four years, they should not vote for Harris and the Democrats. Their policies raise prices and stop construction. The states that build the most homes every year are Texas, Florida, and Utah, and it is no coincidence that they are all controlled by Republicans. The states that build the fewest homes per capita are all controlled by Democrats.
The party that knows how to build things is not Harris’s Democratic Party.