Why Kamala Harris will be a YIMBY president

In 1970, when Kamala Harris was growing up in Berkeley, California, a typical house there cost around $27,000, or about 2.7 times the annual household income at the time. Now a home costs nearly $1.4 million, or around 13 times as much as a typical Berkeley household earns in a year.

In her presidential campaign, Harris has talked about how her mother struggled to save enough to buy a house. Now, the challenge is obviously even harder—or impossible, for many people. The soaring prices aren’t limited to the ultra-expensive Bay Area. Homeownership is now unaffordable in around 80% of counties across the country. Millions of low-wage workers also can’t afford to rent a modest apartment even while working full-time.

The housing crisis is a supply problem

Harris has proposed a detailed housing policy agenda that focuses on one key part of the problem: There aren’t enough homes. “There are three reasons why we have a housing crisis,” says David Dworkin, president and CEO of the nonprofit National Housing Conference. “Supply, supply, and supply.”

Estimates vary, but experts say that the U.S. has a shortage of between 4 to 7 million homes. Restrictive zoning laws in many cities have made it impossible to build enough to keep up with demand. The housing market crash in 2008 also meant that “we have lost millions of housing units, and we have lost the capacity to build homes as well,” Dworkin says. “Home builders went out of business.” The pandemic pushed construction costs higher, making it even harder to build.

Harris wants to help build 3 million new homes over four years

Harris’s plan calls for building 3 million housing units over the next four years. Accomplishing that would be a massive challenge. When Gavin Newsom was campaigning for governor of California six years ago, he said he wanted to build 3.5 million homes by 2025. That isn’t on track to happen. (In 2022, Newsom revised the goal downward to 2.5 million by 2030.)

The state has passed multiple laws to make it easier to build housing. But development still isn’t happening as quickly as it needs to because local governments are fighting it. “Cities are openly flaunting state law to prohibit home building,” says Matthew Lewis, communications director at California YIMBY. (The YIMBY, or “yes in my backyard” movement has been quickly growing in the state over the last decade, though NIMBY homeowners still commonly object to more density in their own neighborhoods.)

New carrots and sticks for development

The federal government also has limited control over local development. Harris has proposed a new tax credit for homebuilders who build starter homes for first-time homebuyers. That type of incentive could help—but only to a certain extent, say Dworkin and Lewis, since zoning restrictions are a bigger stumbling block.

Harris’s plan also calls for a new innovation fund focused on financing affordable housing; Biden had proposed the same idea, but Harris wants to double the funding to $40 billion. She also wants to cut “needless bureaucracy” and streamline permitting processes and reviews. (On the homebuyer side, she’s proposing new $25,000 tax credits for first-time buyers to help with down payments.)

The plan doesn’t yet include it, but she could go farther by making transportation funding conditional on how well cities are making progress on new housing. “I think there’s an increasing understanding of the need to say, ‘If you’re going to restrict affordable housing in your community, then we are not going to pay to repair your highways,'” says Dworkin. “Because people who can’t afford to live where they work spend hours a day wearing down your highway.” Sticks, rather than just carrots, might be necessary to get some communities to change.

Harris has also proposed using some federal land for new development; Trump wants to do the same thing. The idea isn’t new, says Lewis, and it may be unlikely to happen. “Most public lands are in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “The federal government does own a massive amount of land—most of it is stunningly beautiful, I’m a big camper and hiker myself—but I don’t think new housing in Wyoming is going to do much for people in New York.”

Cheaper rent

Harris’s housing proposal also takes on the problem of rent prices. The increase in rent has been slowing nationally—thanks to more apartment building construction—but rents spiked during the pandemic. A recent Harvard study found that in 2022, more than a quarter of renters were paying half of their income, or more, toward rent each month.

The plan from Harris calls for Congress to pass the Stop Predatory Investing Act, a bill that would take tax benefits away from major investors who buy large numbers of single-family homes and jack up the rent. In the last quarter of 2023, investors bought 26% of the country’s most affordable homes. In some cities and neighborhoods, the rate is even higher. Harris also wants to stop corporate landlords from using price-fixing algorithms to raise rents. That’s a problem the Biden-Harris administration is already tackling; last month, the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against RealPage, a company that it argues helps landlords collude on rent prices.

Pushing housing policy further

Harris wouldn’t be the first president to embrace YIMBY ideas. Barack Obama put out a similar plan before he left office in 2016. Biden has also pushed for more housing. But Harris is bringing housing to the forefront of her campaign in a new way. “One of the things that I think is significant is the fact that housing became a central focus of the actual nominating convention,” says Lewis. “It wasn’t just Vice President Harris who put stake in the ground around building lots of homes. We had people like Maxine Waters saying we’re going to end the era of ‘not in my backyard.’ And that’s just not something we’ve seen the party do in the past.”

Harris “is leaning into it much more,” says Dworkin. “Biden really began a process that she has doubled down on. But even more important is the bully pulpit. She’s using the power of being a presidential candidate to raise the level of discourse. And because we’re going to have to sell people on this, just talking about it has not been enough. The fact that she’s out there with ads promoting affordable housing, that she’s talking about it, and that she’s issued a pretty detailed policy proposal, which is also unusual in a presidential campaign, I think is really valuable.”

There’s widespread bipartisan support for boosting home construction, in part because the problem is now also widespread. “West Coast cities have struggled with housing affordability, but now we’re seeing these kinds of problems in Boise, Idaho; Little Rock, Arkansas and Charlotte, North Carolina,” Dworkin says. “And that’s really a game changer. The bottom line is if you don’t want affordable housing in your backyard, you’re going to end up with homeless people in your front yard. And you don’t have to go far today to see what that looks like.”