Vice President Kamala Harris is trying to flip the script and own an issue impacting large swaths of Americans.

At the Democratic convention, Kamala Harris built on existing momentum in both red and blue states — including Harris’ home state of California — and called for an overhaul of local zoning laws that act as barriers to new and cheaper housing. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

By Jordan Wolman and Melanie Mason

08/25/2024 07:00 AM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/25/democrats-housing-costs-00176265

CHICAGO — Democrats are trying to turn a political vulnerability, housing affordability, into a winning issue for November. The strategy carries significant risk: It’s likely to spark a host of fights across blue cities and states.

Top party leaders are leaning into what’s long been a perilous issue for the Democratic Party in response to voter outrage over the crunch of housing supply and the rising costs of homes and rents.

At the Democratic convention, leaders including Kamala Harris and Barack Obama built on existing momentum in both red and blue states — including Harris’ home state of California — and called for an overhaul of local zoning laws that act as barriers to new and cheaper housing. But the federal government has limited influence on these rules.

Instead, if the pleas work, it would send cheering mayors, city councilmembers and party chairs back to their hometowns to pick battles with Democrat-run planning boards and Legislatures in major metro areas and small towns alike in an effort to fulfill Harris’ pledge to build three million new homes.

“It was a call to action, but also calling out our local elected officials that are the ones who have the authority to make these changes and are in the trenches in their local communities,” said Washington Democratic state Rep. Jessica Bateman, who has authored new housing reform laws in Olympia and is running for state Senate on a pro-housing platform. “The reason why it’s being discussed by our national leaders in prime time television is because it’s impacting our communities in every area across the country.”

In some ways, it’s a political risk for Democrats to confront housing. The issue has proven to be a liability for them in some of the cities they control, fueled by notoriously intense, ‘Not in my backyard’ or NIMBY fights that have already gifted a potent line of attack to Republicans as former President Donald Trump seeks to exploit Democrats’ urban housing failures and raise alarm about what they could mean for suburbia.

But it’s also a sign of how hard it’s become for Democrats to ignore the growing chorus of voters who can’t find affordable housing or are priced out of buying homes. Now they want to flip the script and own an issue impacting large swaths of Americans as it becomes a centerpiece of Harris’ campaign.

Affordable housing “has to be” top of the agenda, Adrianne Todman, who leads the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, said at the CNN-POLITICO Grill at the DNC, adding that “we need to be doing everything we can to break down those barriers” that have contributed to a housing shortage in the millions.

The specific push for zoning and land use reform highlighted by Obama’s DNC call to “clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that make it harder to build homes” has been bubbling up from the state level for years.

Former President Barack Obama discussed the need to build more housing in his speech at the Democratic National Convention. | Paul Sancya/AP

California and San Francisco in particular have become the poster child for unaffordability, with expensive housing fueling waves of homelessness that burden city services and repel people and businesses. State lawmakers have responded, passing laws that streamline permits for affordable housing and banning single-unit zoning, an effort seen as critical to paving the way for more building.

“America is not a museum,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who’s locked in a tough reelection race, said as Democrats gathered on the last day of the DNC. “We build museums for preservation purposes. We protect some places for historical reasons, but cities are valuable because of their people, and in order to serve and protect those people and to make sure they have a safe affordable place to call home, all roads lead to housing.”

Red and blue states alike have pursued similar paths as lawmakers in state capitals have taken zoning power away from localities.

Washington state and Vermont have also effectively banned single-family zoning. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis have made housing reform top priorities. They both found out the hard way how politically combustible the issue is even within their party: Hochul pursued a modest approach to housing this year after facing blowback to a more ambitious proposal that failed in Albany last year, while Polis also had his original measures rejected by fellow Democrats in Denver before reaching compromise this year.

Conservative states like Montana have taken action, too, appealing to an anti-California sentiment in a push to keep the state affordable for locals after a rush of homebuyers hailing from liberal enclaves swooped in to buy cheaper housing during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The “YIMBY” pro-housing movement, or Yes In My Backyard, hasn’t had a natural political home with its center-left and center-right appeals. But with top Democrats from Obama to Harris to Polis to House Financial Services ranking member Maxine Waters devoting substantial time to the issue at the DNC, the push from the national ranks to apply pressure for more and cheaper housing is unmistakable. There could be wide appeal, from younger people disillusioned by the housing market to more conservative-leaning voters who are also feeling squeezed.

The backlash, though, is already underway.

Trump said earlier this year he will stop Democrats’ plans to “abolish the suburbs” and in 2020 laid out a vision for “preserving local decision-making” on housing.

“The thing is, if you took Trump’s name off of that statement and put it in Takoma Park or North Berkeley, you could almost hear a ‘progressive’ Democrat city council member saying the same thing,” said Matthew Lewis, a spokesperson for California YIMBY. “The crux of why it’s so important for Democrats to hear this housing message is that when they go home to their cities, most U.S. cities are governed by Democrats, most U.S. cities have similar housing shortages and it’s the Democrats who actually are sitting in the seats to solve the problem.”

One thing the two parties seem to both embrace to some degree is the idea of selling off excess federal land for affordable housing development.

But even if it happens, it’s unlikely to make a significant dent in the overall scope of the problem given that much of it is far from metro areas and not suitable for development.

Harris has focused on housing policies that could be tough sells in Congress, including up to $25,000 in federal down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, a $40 billion “innovation fund” to encourage localities to build more housing and cracking down on rent hikes. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan nonprofit, estimated Harris’ economic agenda would increase deficits by $1.7 trillion over a decade.

“We welcome Kamala Harris’ excitement about allowing more housing to be built and easing some of the onerous zoning requirements that have created an artificial scarcity of housing,” Polis, who signed a half-dozen housing reform laws this year, said last week. He added that he’d support some federal intervention in the form of attaching strings for localities to access housing vouchers and funding.

Much of it, though, comes down to state and local zoning and land-use regulations that can make it prohibitively expensive — and in some cities outright impossible — to build affordable units. Regulations from all levels of government typically account for 25 percent of the cost of building a new single-family home and about 30 percent of the cost of building a new apartment building, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

Economists and housing advocates are skeptical that a carrots-only approach will work: Many localities have traditionally resisted efforts to build new affordable housing within their borders, and mayors are often keen to keep the federal government off their backs.

But “the impediments are often political, not economic, and it’s hard to use economics to overcome something that’s economically nonsensical,” said Jim Parrott, a fellow at the Urban Institute and a former senior White House economic adviser in the Obama administration.

Even if the feds have a limited toolkit, Rosemarie Hepner, vice president at the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center for Housing, said the rhetoric from top Democrats offers local officials “political cover” to address the issue.

Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, added that housing is currently a relatively “depolarized and bipartisan” issue in states that both sides agree is urgent, giving politicians “more room to run” — compared to immigration or trade, where “everything is more boxed in.”

For Democrats, it’s a test of whether they can overcome being their own worst enemy at times. Wealthy homeowners, some liberal, have historically acted as an immovable force to block zoning changes or affordable housing projects.

Now, pro-housing Democratic candidates “can go out and say, ‘I am with Barack Obama. I believe this is a problem. I support our presidential nominee when she says this is a problem.’ If you’re a mayoral candidate, are you suddenly not on the side of Barack Obama?” said Bobak Esfandiari, a YIMBY activist in San Francisco who was at the DNC. “It sets up a very healthy contrast.”

Katy O’Donnell contributed to this report.