As the 2024 Presidential Election closes in, voters feel that candidates should do more work on housing issues, according to a new article from the Urban Institute. Specifically, voters are looking for one key thing: permanently affordable housing (housing that is insulated from the private, speculative market).
Urban Institute’s article states that more than 40 million Americans—both renters and homeowners—are struggling to afford housing costs (as JCHS data demonstrates). Referring to a recent Politico poll, registered voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada and Pennsylvania reported that addressing housing costs would improve their personal situations.
Addressing housing costs is also in favor of both political parties, with the referenced Politico poll stating that permanently affordable housing is in favor for Democrats and for 60% of Republicans.
Urban Institute points to the following three proposals for politicians to pave the way to permanently affordable housing:
- Build new, permanently affordable housing
- Provide funding for state and local actors to develop permanently affordable housing
- Build capacity for democratic community control of housing
For building, article authors Samantha Atherton and Samantha Fu said that “creating new permanently affordable housing units is the most direct way for the federal government to support decommodification.”
They point to the creation of a federal Green Social Housing Development Authority. Essentially, creating this authority would allow the government to acquire properties not in use and rebuild them into permanently affordable housing, which the authors state could “build and preserve between 1 and 1.8 million units of permanently affordable housing over 10 years with an estimated $30 billion annual federal investment.”
In terms of funding for state and local actors, this is the alternative to a federal agency by leaving the responsibility of developing permanently affordable housing up to the states and their counties. This would involve providing grants to these agencies in order to build permanently affordable housing within their sectors.
The authors give Montgomery County, Maryland as an example, which created a $100 million revolving loan fund in 2021 to build new mixed-income, mixed-use developments. They also state that Biden proposed something similar recently, requesting $20 billion in his 2025 budget for increasing the housing supply—which included grants to state and local governments.
For the build capacity for democratic community control of housing, the authors state that “advocates argue that decommodification entails not just removing housing from the private, speculative market but also empowering residents to have a say in where and how they live.”
“As a result, many proposals for permanently affordable housing incorporate aspects of democratic community control, such as tenant leadership boards,” the authors continue. “The federal government could help build residents’ and communities’ capacities to engage in these models by providing technical assistance and funding initiatives to drive community engagement and organizing.”
The example for this proposal is the National Homes Guarantee, which requested federal grants for assistance to support organizing tenant cooperatives in new social housing as well as existing public and subsidized housing.
No matter the path, presidential candidates have many options when it comes to addressing affordability issues within the housing market, and voters are looking to see what they pursue.
To learn more about Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s housing policies, read our recent article Election 2024: Comparing Trump and Harris Housing Priorities.
