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In a campaign speech in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris unveiled a housing agenda to assist first-generation homebuyers, provide additional federal funding for local affordable housing projects, and crack down on companies and institutional investors hiking up housing costs.
“The housing market can be complicated, but, look, I’m not new to this issue,” she said. “… I know how to fight for people who are being exploited in the housing market, and I know what homeownership means,” she added. “It’s more than a financial transaction. It’s so much more than that. It’s more than a house. Homeownership and what that means — it’s a symbol of the pride that comes with hard work.”
“It’s financial security,” she added. “It represents what you will be able to do for your children.”
Harris called attention to the Preventing the Algorithmic Facilitation of Rental Housing Cartels Act and the Stop Predatory Investing Act, two bills that were introduced to Congress in 2023 to crack down on institutional investors and landlords.
Senator Ron Wyden [D-OR] introduced the Preventing Algorithmic Facilitation of Rental Housing Cartels Act in January 2023. The Act targets rent management platforms that use algorithms to set rental prices and would prevent landlords from using those platforms to determine rents, among several measures to increase housing choice and access for renters. Wyden called out RealPage and Yardi as the biggest examples of the issue, saying both companies coordinate rent hikes that the average American can’t afford.
“Indeed, Realpage boasts that they increase rents for client landlords between 5 percent and 12 percent in every market in which they are coordinating prices,” Wyden said in a bill summary last year. “When rent prices spike in a market, more people become unhoused.”
Sen. Sherrod Brown [D-OH] introduced the Stop Predatory Investing Act in July 2023 to stop investors who acquire 50 or more new single-family rental homes from deducting interest or depreciation on those properties unless they sell one of those properties to a homebuyer or qualified nonprofit. If they sell to a homebuyer or qualified nonprofit, they’ll be able to deduct the interest and depreciation for the year in which the property is sold.
Harris said those bills, if passed, would help “take down barriers and cut red tape” for millions of Americans who struggle to afford housing.
“By the end of my first term, we will end America’s housing shortage by building three million new homes and rentals that are affordable for the middle class, and we will do that together. We will do that together,” she said. “And we will make sure those homes actually go to working- and middle-class Americans — not just investors.”
“Because, you know, some corporate landlords — some of them buy dozens, if not hundreds, of houses and apartments,” she added. “Then they turn them around and rent them out at extremely high prices, and it can make it impossible, then, for regular people to be able to buy or even rent a home.”
“Some corporate landlords collude with each other to set artificially high rental prices, often using algorithms and price-fixing software to do it. It’s anti-competitive, and it drives up costs. I will fight for a law that cracks down on these practices.”
In addition to pushing for the passage of both Acts, Harris proposed $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-generation homebuyers and a $10,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers. Both measures, she said, would open the door to homeownership for more than 1 million Americans.
“We can do this,” she said to applause from the crowd. “We can do this, all to help more Americans experience the pride of homeownership and the financial security that it represents and brings.”
If elected president in November, Harris said she’d carry over the Biden-Harris innovation fund and double it from $20 billion to $40 billion. The fund would give local governments the dollars they need to build more affordable housing and support homebuilders using “innovative methods” to construct developments. The innovation fund also supports reallocating unused federal lands for housing development.
“Harris will work in partnership with workers and the private sector to build the housing the country needs, both to rent and to buy, and take down barriers that stand in the way of building new housing, including at the state and local level,” a campaign representative told ABC on Friday. “This will make rents and mortgages cheaper.”
