If you were hoping that one of President Joe Biden ’s worst ideas , instituting a national rent-control policy for corporate-owned housing, died along with his presidential campaign, we have some bad news for you. It has been resurrected by Vice President Kamala Harris .
At her first major economic address on Friday in North Carolina, Harris unveiled proposals on everything from grocery prices, which we covered on Friday , to child tax credits, which we covered on Wednesday , to housing. At every turn, the only way Harris diverges from Biden’s failed economic plans is to make them worse.
In addition to reviving his rent-control plan, which would discourage new housing construction and thus push housing prices higher, Harris doubled Biden’s proposed $20 billion grant program to “help local governments develop innovative solutions to the lack of housing supply.”
Local governments don’t need Biden’s $20 billion or Harris’s $40 billion to “develop innovative solutions” to bring down housing prices. The solution is simple: remove regulations that make building new homes more expensive. That is what Texas has done, and housing construction is booming. All $40 billion will do is enrich Democratically aligned nonprofit groups, part of the point, which will waste the money on consultants and executive pay without helping anyone afford a new home.
Finally, Harris will take a $10,000 tax credit for “first-time homebuyers,” first proposed by Biden, and more than double it to $25,000. Leaving aside the inequity of giving the credit only to “first-time homebuyers,” the policy does nothing to induce the construction of new homes. All it does is subsidize demand for existing homes. Under Biden’s proposal, all existing homeowners would see the value of their homes increase by $10,000, which would make them much more unaffordable. Harris’s policy would more than double that inflation to $25,000. It’s the economic illiteracy of Biden on steroids.
What consumers need is supply-side reforms that make it easier and cheaper to build homes. As former President Donald Trump said in an interview last month, this means eliminating zoning and permitting restrictions that can eat up half of a home's final cost. At the national level, this means reforming or repealing the National Environmental Policy Act, which gives activists the weapons to stop any construction project in federal court if they can convince a judge a more environmentally friendly version of the project was not considered.
At the local level, this means eliminating many environmental mandates popular in Democratic-controlled states such as Harris’s California and Gov. Tim Walz’s Minnesota. California’s residential building mandates may reduce residential energy use by half by 2030 but at a steep price. If you want cheaper housing, states should be denied federal housing funds until their environmental mandates are repealed.
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It doesn’t help that the Biden-Harris administration is letting over a million illegal immigrants into the country each year, on top of more than a million legal immigrants, while also only building a million new homes. If you are letting in more immigrants than you are building homes, of course, the price of housing is going to go up.
Those hoping for a bold new direction from Harris that differentiates her from Biden must be sorely disappointed. There is no growth here, only a doubling down in many cases of Biden’s existing failed policies. She is trying hard to suggest she represents a new start, but her policies are tired, fanciful, innumerate failures.
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