The issue neither party can ignore

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Tonight’s debate—if it doesn’t devolve fully into personal attacks—presents an opportunity for the moderators to ask Kamala Harris and Donald Trump about policy proposals, including on the urgent problem of housing. The U.S. is experiencing a housing shortage of at least 4 million homes, and many Americans can’t find or afford a place to live. I spoke with my colleague Jerusalem Demsas, whose new Atlantic Editions book, On the Housing Crisis, was published last week, about how housing became a problem too big for national politicians to avoid.

Impossible to Hide From

Lora Kelley: How have you seen the national discussion around housing change since you started covering this topic?

Jerusalem Demsas: The classic thing people say is that housing politics is local. But lately, we have been seeing more federal and national engagement. Housing really divides people within the parties—it’s not a classic left-right issue—and that’s part of why the national parties have largely avoided it in the past.

The pandemic shifted the conversation. It’s not that there wasn’t a housing problem before the pandemic, but it felt to some Americans like an issue that was contained to coastal, rich cities and states. People thought: This is a California problem, a New York problem, a Massachusetts problem, a Washington State problem. But when more people started working remotely and moved to second- and third-tier housing markets, it suddenly became clear that a lot of other places in the country are going to have to build more housing in order to accommodate growth.

Lora: Is that why national politicians now seem to find the housing crisis impossible to avoid?

Jerusalem: Inflation is obviously the No. 1 story for the Biden administration, and a major part of why he has been so unpopular. It became very clear that shelter—both rent and homeownership—was a large component of what was making inflation so painful for people.

Housing even 10 years ago wasn’t something that could be a central political message. But recently, the housing problem has gotten so bad that it doesn’t matter that it’s very difficult to deal with the thorny politics of it. Politicians understand that they have to engage on this or they’re going to face real problems at the ballot box.

Lora: How much power does the federal government actually have to deal with this problem?

Jerusalem: National politicians have been hiding for a really long time behind the idea that housing is a local issue. But there’s actually a lot the federal government can do—so much goes into housing, including interest rates, regulations, tariffs. We’re finally approaching a moment where the federal government is accepting that it has a role here.

The federal government and state government’s job is not to say, This is exactly where you should build your housing and where you shouldn’t build your housing. But their role can be to make it much easier to build housing and to set standards of what’s allowable. They don’t need to be prescribing to every neighborhood exactly what to do and where. They just need to set clear standards, like we do in every other part of the economy.

Lora: As you noted, housing is not a classic left-right issue. Does the Democrats’ focus on housing in this election risk making the issue more politically polarized?

Jerusalem: A lot of people who work on policy are very worried about being caught in the polarization vortex. And I understand why people are afraid of this. Every major pro-housing bill has been passed with bipartisan support, and there’s good reason to believe that some politicians would no longer want to do that if they feel like it becomes a Democratic issue.

But there are a couple of reasons I’m not too worried about that. First, I think that Democratic areas are the places where this problem is most acute. If Democrats work on making housing more affordable, that actually helps the entire country. Making San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles much more accessible means that there’s not as much downstream pressure on secondary and tertiary housing markets. If someone is priced out of California, they might buy a house in Arizona, which pushes up prices there too.

And although there’s some concern that Republicans will react negatively to Democrats saying they’re trying to deal with housing affordability, it’s really hard to imagine that they would just flip on a dime in states like Florida and Texas and decide they are suddenly antidevelopment. In these states, Republicans’ political power is based on the fact that these places are accessible for people to buy cheap homes in and therefore are seeing quick population growth. It’s no surprise that Republicans have been amenable to passing pro-housing policy.

Lora: What will you be watching for in the debate tonight in terms of housing?

Jerusalem: On the Republican side, I’m looking to see whether their message on housing remains focused on their anti-immigration framing. A lot of what J. D. Vance and Donald Trump have been talking about when it comes to housing is reducing the demand pressure from immigrants. But they are wildly overstating that pressure: New immigrants often stay with family and friends—it’s not like most of them are taking units that other people would be renting on the free market.

They are ignoring that most of the demand pressure is coming from Americans moving around. The majority of the pandemic price inflation is happening because of a remote-work-induced shift in the market. My hope is that there’s some sort of discussion from the Republican ticket about increasing supply.

On the Democratic side, it’s going to be interesting to see what Harris chooses to emphasize. There are parts of her proposals that have been focused on increasing the supply of housing, and parts of her proposals have been focused on the demand side. She wants to send payment assistance to some first-time homebuyers—but if you do that in a market that’s extremely supply-constrained, that leads to inflation. Democrats like to talk about giving people money. They have trouble talking about how to increase supply, so hearing how she talks about it will be really important. Although, of course, I’m not even sure that they will talk much about policy—they may well just yell at each other.

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