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Kamala Harris has a new advertising push to draw attention to her plan to build 3 million new homes over four years, a move designed to contain inflationary pressures that also draws a sharp contrast to Republican Donald Trump’s approach.

Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, highlights her plan in a new minute-long ad that uses her personal experience, growing up in rental housing while her mother had saved for a decade before she could buy a home. The ad targets voters in the swing states including Arizona and Nevada. Campaign surrogates are also holding 20 events this week focused on housing issues.

In addition to increasing home construction, Harris is proposing the government provide as much as $25,000 in assistance to first-time buyers. That message carries weight at this moment as housing costs have kept upward pressure on the consumer price index. Shelter costs are up 5.1% over the past 12 months, compared to overall inflation being 2.9%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Vice President Harris knows we need to do more to address our housing crisis, that’s why she has a plan to end the housing shortage” and will crack down on “corporate landlords and Wall Street banks hiking up rents and housing costs,” said Dan Kanninen, the campaign’s battleground states director.

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[-] Olhonestjim@lemmy.world 119 points 4 months ago

Let's ban corporations from owning residential property. It makes zero sense.

[-] umbrella@lemmy.ml 26 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

thatd take actual political will instead

[-] aniki@lemmy.zip 7 points 4 months ago

best we can do is neoiberal handouts to rich people...

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[-] HootinNHollerin@lemmy.world 91 points 4 months ago

Start with outlawing institutional investing in homes

[-] distantsounds@lemmy.world 45 points 4 months ago

It will not fix anything. There are plenty of homes already. Corporate greed is the cause of the housing crisis. There needs to be legislation that makes it unprofitable to own and hold unused properties

[-] KRAW@linux.community 25 points 4 months ago

There are plenty of homes already.

Plenty of homes where? In my city, which is a major job center, there are hardly any houses for sale. It doesn't really matter if there are plenty of houses 1+ hours away from my job.

[-] Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 4 months ago

Hardly any houses for sale doesn't mean there aren't plenty of empty houses available. They're just fucking bought up by corpos to sit on as investments or for rentals.

[-] distantsounds@lemmy.world 11 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

How many of the 3 million houses will be built in your area and what impact do you think they will have?

The problems that are causing the crisis are corporate greed and Airbnb-esque rentals.

Are you looking to fight the symptoms or the cause?

Edit: I live in a major city and there is plenty of housing, just not affordable

[-] Blackmist@feddit.uk 8 points 4 months ago

"Affordable" doesn't exist in a constrained market.

The price will rise to whatever the richest person without a home can afford to pay.

[-] KRAW@linux.community 6 points 4 months ago

I'd be curious to get some good numbers on this. From a cursory search I got the impression that a very small proportion of homes are AirBnB rentals, but I'm definitely open to looking at conflicting data. Corporate ownership of homes is definitely a problem, and I certainly hope that part of this plan is to prevent these homes from being sold to investors rather than residents. No one is saying we can't build more homes and address the underlying cause of the shortage at the same time. I know that 3 million homes is not a lot relative to the country's population. However I am not ready to write them off as useless, since strategically placing these homes in the right areas may still have a significant impact.___

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[-] ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 5 points 4 months ago

In my city, there's hundreds of empty homes for sale, valued at 250k-500k more than what they were a decade ago.

The houses an hour away in the burbs are all in the middle of nowhere, supported by stripmalls and a single big box store. Those houses are also the same price.

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[-] ted@sh.itjust.works 11 points 4 months ago

Both. Supply is a real issue, building homes and preventing corporate uptake are both needed to solve this crisis.

[-] criticon@lemmy.ca 9 points 4 months ago

Where? In my area as soon as they announce a new development a few weeks later they have a sign that says "lasts houses left" and a few after that they remove the sale sign

These are giant ranch houses too, we need lots of small and medium houses

[-] chaogomu@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago

Are those houses then listed as corporate rentals? Because that's super common.

[-] zeekaran@sopuli.xyz 5 points 4 months ago

Supply is absolutely an issue! Many cities have growing populations. Empty homes in the sticks aren't doing us any favors.

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[-] TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world 37 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

It's such a complex problem, it's going to take a long time to fix. Part of the problem is people don't really understand what the real problem is. They think the problem is that there aren't enough detached, single family homes being built. I get why people would focus on single family homes because that's what Americans want. The "American Dream" is to own your own home in the suburbs, and if you think that everyone who wants a single family home should be able to buy one, then, yeah, you're going to see the problem as one of not enough single family homes being built. However, I would argue that the American dream itself is the problem.

Suburbs are expensive, and inefficient, bad for the environment, and bad for our physical and mental health. Suburbs necessitate car dependence, and cars themselves require a lot of expensive infrastructure. I know a lot of Americans don't like to hear it, but we really do need to be living in higher density urban areas. Higher density, mixed use urban areas allow people to walk and bike more, which is better for our health. It's also less expensive. The farther apart everything is, the more you'll need to drive, and that means owning your own car, which is expensive.

I don't think people even necessarily know why they want a single family home. I think Americans want single family homes because we're told from day one that is what we should want. It's our culture. You grow up, get married, buy a home in the suburbs, and start a family. You own at least two cars, you drive everywhere, that's the American dream. I think we need to start questioning if this is really what's best, and if we should really want it. I know I have, and I've decided it isn't best. I think I would be happier and healthier living in a mixed use urban area, where I could walk or bike to a lot of places, or take public transportation, and if I needed to drive somewhere, maybe I'd take a taxi or rent a car or use some car sharing service.

Very few places like these exist in the US, and that's because too many people still want to live in a single family home in the suburbs, and many of those people, also have most of their personal wealth in their home, so they push for restrictive zoning laws and other regulations, limiting how much higher density housing and mixed development can be built, thus making such areas relatively rare and thus expensive. There's a battle going on between people who want single family homes and people who want higher density, mixed use areas.

I know people don't want to talk about that, because they don't want to make it an us vs them thing, but it just is. Our desires are mutually exclusive, due to the finite nature of land. A given piece of land cannot be both a low density, single family suburb and a higher density, mixed use area, simultaneously. It must be one or the other. How we "fix" the housing crisis depends on which we choose to prioritize. We either find ways to build more and more suburbs, or we eliminate single family zoning and invest in building many more, higher density, mixed use urban areas. I know which one I choose.

[-] aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com 23 points 4 months ago

living in a city with a lot of housing demand, people definitely don’t all want a single-family house. The big push is for zoning changes that allow higher density development: townhomes and small multifamily construction on what were single family lots with setbacks, accessory dwelling units, mixed use apartment buildings with less parking, etc.

[-] GBU_28@lemm.ee 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Meh my suburb definitely helps my health. I border open space, have a great trail that goes all the way to the city center, and to a state park in the other direction. I either ride my bike or use a convenient bus line to get around, unless I have explicit cause to drive. Many of my friends live within a mile or so of me and we regularly meet at the neighborhood fenced off leash dog park, or walk over to the nearby brewery or coffee shop. My grocery store is easy biking distance.

It's not all suburbs, many are just built shitty. I love where I live and I am definitely enriched by my neighborhood.

That said, it's not for everyone, and to your point lots of higher density housing should be made.

Probably best not to do widely generalize what all Americans want, or suffer from. Edit the larger problem is corporate gobbling of houses as investments when homes should be a wellness, social stability thing.

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[-] ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world 27 points 4 months ago

Cripple the speculative housing bubble by making corporate property ownership of single family or multifamily dwellings limited to maaaybe 100 properties. Probably less, like 50.

Give them 5 years to unload assets that are in excess of this legislation and get it passed.

Doesn't affect business. Doesn't affect developers, doesn't affect anyone but vulture venture capitalists.

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[-] Pacattack57@lemmy.world 17 points 4 months ago

This does nothing to address the root cause of housing price increases. Black rock will buy 2.5 million of these homes.

[-] Wogi@lemmy.world 11 points 4 months ago

The way you address that is build 3 million homes, and rent them out at rates 60% lower than market rate, rather than sell them.

This does not increase ownership, no. But it does force landlords to compete. Why rent from slumlord Paladino, when I could rent a new unit from the US government at half the price?

[-] Mirshe@lemmy.world 9 points 4 months ago

Exactly this. We already have enough empty dwellings between homes, apartments, condos, etc to house our unhoused population. The issue is affordability, not amount.

[-] AA5B@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago
  1. No, there are not enough places to live, where people want to live
  2. Supply and demand drive pricing. Whether we should have enough or not, a larger supply should reduce prices
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[-] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

as long as corporations and land horders are allowed to keep buying home and lands to keep the market scarce and rent and sell prices high, it doesnt matter how many homes you build.

and if you issue an immediate ban on mass home hording, and issue massive monthly fines for exceeding the limit, fines that are multiples of the profit that they make, not fractions, enough homes will immediately flood the market and will bring prices and rent down

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[-] plz1@lemmy.world 14 points 4 months ago

This proposal is basically "infrastructure week".

[-] PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 13 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Building more homes and offering subsidies will only put more money into the builders’ pockets. We already have too many homes. The issue is companies owning hundreds or even thousands of homes, only to refuse to sell or rent 75% of them so they can charge 400% more for the 25% they do sell or rent. It’s blatant market manipulation.

Begin a vacant property tax, (based on having more than 30 days in the calendar year with the property empty) which ratchets up as you own more vacant properties. So people can have a summer and winter home if they want, without their tax increasing too much. After all, it’s only one vacant home. But when you own a dozen vacant properties, you’re gonna get fucked hard by the IRS.

It will incentivize companies to actually rent or sell their vacant properties, instead of letting them sit vacant for years at a time. And that 30 days of vacancy should be any 30 days, so people who rent are incentivized to offer longer lease terms and change tenants less than once a year. Meaning short term rentals (AirBnB) will also be less attractive, because they typically only operate at ~50% occupied, as they’ll typically have a few days between rentals. Since short term rentals have been cannibalizing the long term rental markets recently, (lots of landlords have moved towards having properties be full time AirBnBs, which means there are fewer places left for actual tenants,) it will also help correct the rental markets which are overvalued.

[-] Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago

Begin a vacant property tax, (based on having more than 30 days in the calendar year with the property empty) which ratchets up as you own more vacant properties.

Property tax should already ratchet up based on how many properties owned, regardless of if they are occupied or not.

[-] odelik@lemmy.today 5 points 4 months ago

All the data I've seen in the last 5-10 years suggests that we don't have enough homes. Even with vacant homes accounted for and how much burden that would relieve.

That's one of the reasons why there's a growing push to bring back the missing middle housing and businesses into our population centers by removing zoning laws that got rid of them in the first place.

That's not to say that we shouldn't also be doing away with corporate ownership of housing and taxing individuals with 3/4+ homes, especially if they're vacant.

We need a multi-pronged attack on resolving the housing issue, including the 3m planned homes from a Harris admin.

[-] Furbag@lemmy.world 9 points 4 months ago

We need more than just that. I'm continuing to email the Biden administration monthly about implementing a vacancy tax for private owners with 3 or more single family dwellings. I'll continue to do so under the Harris administration.

My only shot at every being able to afford a house is if the billionaires and real estate corporations get taken out of the equation. Taxing them for sitting on empty properties is much better than building more for them to snap up because they won't be priced fairly to begin with due to market manipulation.

[-] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago

No anti-monopoly action promised again.

"Build a fuckload of subsidized homes" and "lower prices" (that's what she says, just in smarter words, cause building a lot with budget means will actually increase inflation in all of economy).

If I were American, I'd think I'm being disrespected with such non-sophisticated promises.

"See, if it's not me, it's that delusional anti-vaxxer fascist over the street, nobody else needs you and I love you." - Something like that.

I mean, yeah, if that's your only other choice.

[-] Fisherman75@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago

We need to look at this thing called 'adapting in place'. I think this is just such a complicated situation that people just need to figure out what's going on around them, at least for the time being. Radical simplification - corporate greed, yes, but it's still complicated as to what exactly we do about it.

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this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
433 points (96.8% liked)

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