The housing plank is sadly, junk.
Let's say there are 10 families, and 8 houses. Due to this, the price of a house is $1 million.
If you give the 2 homeless families a million bucks, they won't be able to buy one of the houses, or if one is sold, it just displaces the other family.
It's ok to "print money" to help people out as long as there is supply - people on this thread have noted that.
OK, so Harris says that they are gonna build a bunch of houses. Great. Certainly if there are incentives to developers - including that sweet $25k downpayment money - they would be willing to build!
It's incredibly ironic that these words come out of the mouth of Kamala Harris - former District Attorney for the City of San Francisco. San Francisco has the most legal obstacles to housing development in the Bay Area. The Bay Area has the most legal obstacles to housing development of any place in the world. It's insane, someone could try to tear down a rat and blackberry bush infested shithole and build a nice home on it and the neighbors will place piles of discretionary review on it, or try to get the blighted rat trap designated as a "historical property" because Emperor Norton had a beer there once.
It's not even simple to figure out the motivation for these roadblocks - usually it's that the neighbor is worried that the new home will block their view. Often they are 3rd generation in their home living hand to mouth, and don't want new people in the neighborhood. Or maybe they're just crazy gadflies.
There was something in there about building on "Federal Land". That should be interesting. There is some "Federal Land" in SF - the old Presidio Military Base. Good luck building there. "Somehow" it will get taken off the list (Pelosi cough cough). But most "Federal Land" is in the middle of fucking nowhere - where we don't need any houses. Let's build some halfway between Sparks and Winnemucca and people can commute 90 miles to the Gigafactory.
To be clear, Trump has no answer either. This all comes down to a couple things that are a third rail.
1) Overriding local control on housing/zoning
2) Restrictions on 2nd homes. That's a taking.
We own 3, all in housing stressed locations. We'll be getting a long term tenant for one now that we purchased the newest one, but the Tahoe place stays AirBnB until the County finishes banning them. People in Douglas County aren't super smart. They think that if people can't AirBnB their ski houses they will have to sell or get a long term tenant. It probably *costs* me money to have tenants in Tahoe, given the fairly small rents, the cost of running the heat and hot water, and the damage that tenants do. It's worth it just to have foot traffic so we detect roof leaks or pest invasions.
If they ban AirBnB, we'll just stop renting it out and let friends use it for free. The carrying cost is bupkus. The house is depreciated so the tax bill on a sale would be large compared to just letting my son inherit it. Whatever money is left from a sale, what would I do with it? Put it in the stock market? Owning that home is diversification.
It makes me queasy because really, we're part of the problem. The tax code has so many incentives - deferring capital gains, property tax basis, stepped up basis on inheritance - to NOT sell. If we make it more tax efficient to sell, it's a giveaway to rich landowners.
Really the only solution is to somehow make localities match their housing supply to jobs. We give incentives for businesses to start in certain locations, and the local governments are very willing to take the new jobs. Screw it - if you don't commit to housing the workers, you don't get any tax incentives for jobs.
Building more housing has the added benefit of reducing the lucrative business of being an existing homeower, which brings more inventory to market.
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