The Housing Election That Won't Fix the Housing Crisis

Victory in the fight for cheaper housing, a more liberal land-use regime, and greater property rights won't come from the White House.

Happy Tuesday and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This is of course not just any Tuesday but Election Day, where the country will decide who should control Congress, the White House, and innumerable state and local offices, and vote on a huge number of ballot initiatives.

My initial thought for the newsletter was to do some aggressive counterprogramming and not mention the presidential race at all. But since Donald Trump vs. Kamala Harris is what everyone is thinking about regardless, I'm not sure I could quite get away with that.

So instead, I offer readers some thoughts on why victory in the fight for cheaper housing, a more liberal land-use regime, and greater property rights won't come from the White House.

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The Housing Election That Won't Fix the Housing Crisis

Presidential elections rarely revolve around housing policy. That might be changing in 2024.

Polls repeatedly show that high and rising housing costs are an increasingly salient issue for voters. That's true for the electorate at large and for large subdemographics of voters, from Gen Z to Catholics.

High and rising housing costs are fueling voter disquiet in both swingy Sunbelt states and the teetering Midwestern "blue wall."

Even if the effects of the housing crisis don't ultimately affect how people vote, they could still determine the election by influencing where people vote.

The highest-cost, highest-regulation blue states have been bleeding people and electoral votes to more pro-growth purple and red states in the country's south and west. New York's failure to address its housing crisis means megabuilding Texas has marginally more influence on the national election outcomes. That could matter in an election that appears to be incredibly close.

Democrats would have won with this map in 2020 but would lose with it in 2024 because NY and CA didn't build housing pic.twitter.com/m9WXVvXlh5

— Open New York (@OpenNYForAll) October 30, 2024

The "housing theory of everything" strikes again.

Harris and Trump have both responded to the rising salience of housing costs by talking a lot more about how they'll bring those costs down. So have their running mates.

Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein wryly noted on the night of the vice presidential debate between Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) that the past few V.P. debates contained zero references to housing. But Walz and Vance mentioned the issue dozens of times.

In an extremely policy-lite election, both major-party campaigns have released modestly fleshed-out housing policy platforms detailing how they'll bring costs down.

Harris has embraced YIMBY ("yes in my backyard") rhetoric about the need to cut the state and local red tape that chokes off housing construction. Additionally, she's promised to give down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers, tax credits to homebuilders, and bring down rents with a mix of rent control and crackdowns on corporate speculators and rent-recommendation software.

Trump has paired NIMBY ("not in my backyard") rhetoric with calls to open up federal lands for housing development, slash federal environmental regulations on homebuilding, and deport millions of shelter-consuming immigrants.

Of the two, Harris certainly talks a better game about the need for more housing supply. But state and local red tape is what she'll have the least influence over as president.

The Biden administration's efforts to use the carrot of federal grants to spur local zoning deregulation have been a flop. There's little indication Harris will pursue more aggressive federal fiscal interventions that could actually spur local land-use liberalization.

Meanwhile, the parts of Harris' housing plan that could increase prices (homebuyer and homebuilder subsidies) and reduce supply (rent control and corporate investment crackdowns) would be much easier to implement on the federal level.

On the flip side, Trump's NIMBY comments can't stop local and state governments from pursuing their own forms of deregulation.

The pro-supply parts of his agenda (environmental deregulation and opening federal lands for development) are things the federal government could easily do. But so are his plans for the mass deportation of immigrants who build housing and tariff hikes on imported building materials.

In short, the net impact of the next White House occupant's impact on homebuilding rates and housing costs is ambiguous and probably negative regardless of who wins.

More broadly, presidential elections offer a very weak opportunity for people who do really care about ending the country's housing shortage to impact this issue.

The call to build more housing is one of the last transpartisan issues in an increasingly polarized country. Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, and libertarians are all part of the YIMBY coalition.

But an unfortunate corollary to there being YIMBYs (and NIMBYs) in both major parties is that even the most ardent housing activists aren't basing their partisan affiliation and presidential picks on who is best on housing policy.

This is the "dark side of housing bipartisanship" I wrote about back in March 2024 on the heels of Democratic Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoing a sensible starter homes bill that would have peeled back regulations on the construction of smaller, single-family homes.

Coalitions on either side of that bill were weirdly bipartisan, with progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans voting yes, and an equally strange mix of Rs and Ds voting no.

YIMBY Democrats were naturally incensed with Hobbs' veto. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of her veto, one former Arizona Democratic lawmaker and YIMBY activist told The Atlantic's Jerusalem Demsas, "If [Hobbs] ended up being the biggest NIMBY in our state, I'd still vote for her reelection because zoning, even though I'm one of the biggest zoning-reform advocates in the state…still doesn't rise high enough for me to flip my vote."

Likewise, I doubt any of Arizona's NIMBY Republicans will decide to vote for Hobbs as a thank you for that veto either.

The lesson is that if a governor with immense influence over housing policy can stab single-issue housing activists in the back and still count on their votes, the electoral incentives for a president with minimal influence over housing policy to get this issue right are basically nonexistent.

Consider this thought experiment. Pretend for a moment that your chosen presidential candidate has the worst housing policy platform you could possibly imagine but is otherwise in total, sincere alignment with all your other federal policy views. Would you vote against them? (Be honest.)

Housing is an increasingly salient issue, and for good reason.

The last half-century of land-use policy has been a disaster. Restrictive zoning laws, laborious environmental review requirements, discretionary approval processes, and lengthy, excessive permitting regimes have driven up the costs of housing to unsustainable levels while choking off choice, economic opportunity, and growth.

The good news is that the past decade has spawned a concerted movement to address these disastrous results and the policies that produced them.

That fight has thus far taken place in city halls, state legislatures, and state and local courtrooms. That's where real, productive change can happen. That will continue to be true regardless of who wins the White House.

This year's presidential race might be the housing election, but it won't fix the housing crisis.

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Quick Links

• Numerous local property initiatives are on the ballot this year. The Tax Foundation's Jared Walczak has a long report on why property taxes are the least bad tax and the reforms that could blunt their worst impacts.
• Perhaps one way the housing crisis could be solved in Washington is if the next president appoints a bunch of Supreme Court judges who declare zoning unconstitutional. Law professors Ilya Somin and Josh Braver provide the intellectual ammunition the justices would need with the finalized version of their article, "The Constitutional Case Against Exclusionary Zoning."
• New York City council members have released a counterproposal to Mayor Eric Adams' City of Yes for Housing Opportunity called "City for All." It appears to mostly be an unproductive mix of additional housing spending and vamped-up affordability mandates.
• New Jersey municipalities are suing to overturn a longstanding state affordable housing framework that's actually forced Garden State localities to allow more housing construction.
• On the flip side, California is suing one of its municipalities for banning new homeless shelters.