The real estate industry-dominated press is busy claiming that Vice President Kamala Harris has fully embraced the industry’s front group (aka Yimbys) position and that that position has swept the entire Democratic Party (for example, see The Atlantic). The argument goes that since Harris has laid out a housing position and since that position makes the common-sense claim that we need to build more affordable housing, it is a Yimby position.
But when we look at the details of the Harris (actually Biden) position on housing, it differs in fundamental ways from the classic Yimby position, at least as practiced in the Yimbys adopted hometown, San Francisco—and is most different from the policies of the Yimby’s San Francisco favorite, London Breed.
In fact, the Harris program, as outlined on her web page and press releases, far more resembles the program of her kindergarten schoolmate Sup. Aaron Peskin than the “build housing at all income levels” mantra of Breed.
The Yimby program, as has been long argued in these pages, is not really a housing program—and certainly not an affordable housing program—at all. It is, instead, a real estate development scheme aimed to be used by real estate investors and speculators as investment opportunities, and not by hardworking families seeking an affordable home in which to actually live.
The Yimby catchphrase “building housing for all income levels” is meant to sound all inclusive. But the problem with the phrase is that the Yimby program relies on for-profit developers and the “market” as the providers of that housing and the for-profit market does NOT build housing for all income levels. If it did there would be no housing problem, as the “market” would have solved it.
The reality is that the for-profit housing market only provides housing that returns a profit (that’s what “for-profit” means), and simply ignores the rest of the of us—meaning it provides housing only for the income levels that guarantee them a profit. The Yimby plan is to build housing that is affordable to only the wealthy and to remove any requirements (“regulations”) that compel for-profit developers to provide housing for anyone else.
Is that the Harris housing program? Not if you actually read it.
The details of the Harris (Biden) program can be found here ( Harris Walz Housing Plan), here (Harris market controls ) and here (Lower Housing Costs). These are the most detailed housing proposals made by a national party since Harry Truman’s proposals in the 1948 election. They commit some $40 billion in new federal funding for affordable housing development—in stark contrast to the Obama Administration, which simply failed to appropriate new federal funding after the housing crash in 2008, choosing to bail out banks and Wall Street instead, allowing the banks to foreclose on tens of thousands of homeowners.
These bank-friendly bailouts in large part fueled the nearly two decades of crisis in housing and drove much of the “populist” opposition to “elitist” Democrats, literally setting the stage for Trump.
The Harris-Walz housing proposal can be seen as a corrective to the Obama “bail out the top, ignore the bottom” policy that ignited the political reaction that she is confronting in Trump. It seeks to stress building “affordable housing” and must be seen as a continuation of what Biden liked to call “building from the middle out and the bottom up” (perhaps the most cumbersome and confusing slogans ever used to rally support for a public policy).
The Harris-Walz program seeks to expand “affordable” housing production by the now-standard stance of “cutting red tape,” streamlining permitting processes and reviews, including for transit-oriented development and conversions—which forms the heart of the Yimby program—but it also recognizes the need to control the market, a subject that never passes the lips of a Yimby.
For example, while it offers government subsidies to first-time home buyers it, also recognizes the need to control the various and clever market manipulations used by market players that would tend to undermine the effect of these loans.
The Harris program would seek to “penalize firms that hoard available homes to drive up prices for local homebuyers” and would remove key tax benefits for major investors who acquire large numbers of single-family rental homes while promising that she “will sign legislation to outlaw new forms of price fixing by corporate landlords” (a straight “steal” from Peskin’s local legislation banning price fixing software, the first in the nation).
These controls are necessary if the public subsidies for first time homeownership are to have maximum benefit to families seeking homes—and not speculators seeking more profits.
Peskin’s housing program bears a strong resemblance to the Harris-Walz program, not only in ending landlord price-fixing software and speeding up city approvals but also providing both public subsidies for affordable housing ownership and expanded rent control. Peskin, like Harris, would provide government assistance and market controls to create more housing opportunities for seniors, working and middle-income folks, the very folks left out in the cold by market-rate housing developers.
Donald Trump, Breed, Mark Farrell and Daniel Lurie mouth meaningless sound bites about providing “housing for all income groups” while Harris and Peskin lay out the specifics of how they propose to actually do it. Check it out.
