Policy proposals and debate about the availability and affordability of buying a home or renting, which along with zoning are controversial issues at the state and local level in Connecticut, are getting new national recognition in this year’s presidential campaign.
Both of the major party tickets have discussed it to varying degrees as voters across the U.S. struggle with costs associated with housing, utilities and groceries. Renters in Connecticut spend about a third of their income on rent, a Consumer Affairs report found. And house prices in the state were up nearly 10% year-over-year in the first few months of 2024 as housing stock remained low.
For groups in Connecticut focused on housing policy, it is encouraging to see it in the spotlight, though they believe some issues remain unaddressed in the candidates’ platforms like homelessness, rent caps and tenants’ rights. Others want housing prioritized locally with the federal government directing attention to other economic issues.
Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has laid out a multi-pronged plan that largely mirrors the Biden administration’s proposal, though the vice president has gone further with some elements. She has proposed $25,000 in down payment assistance, support for first-generation homebuyers, the construction of 3 million new units in four years and a fund to incentivize local solutions on housing.
Former President Donald Trump has discussed the issue in lighter details. Similar to Harris’ plan, he has called for more assistance for homebuyers, but without offering specifics, as well as broadly calling for deregulations. The GOP nominee and his running mate, JD Vance, have both argued that illegal immigration has driven up the costs of housing.
“The housing difficulties that we face are underlying much of the economic anxiety that people are feeling around the country,” Shamus Roller, executive director of the National Housing Law Project, said. “With that, I think people also recognize that, more than they used to, the federal government has some pretty big levers and the federal government has important ways in which they influence the housing market.”
In Connecticut, housing shortages, the availability of affordable units and an aging stock have become pressing issues. The vacancy rate of apartments in the state is at 3.5%, which is one of the lowest in the nation. And Connecticut is short about 98,000 housing units that are affordable and available to its lowest-income renters.
In a recent poll conducted for The Connecticut Mirror, 46% of voters in the state ranked housing costs as one of the most important issues in this presidential election. Similar numbers were reflected across Democratic, Republican and independent voters.
Fifty-one percent of voters said they strongly or somewhat approve of a state policy requiring cities and towns in Connecticut to create zoning for more affordable housing. But on this issue, voters were split along party lines: almost three-quarters of Democratic voters supported such a requirement, while two-thirds of Republican voters disapproved of such a policy.
Support for zoning reforms also differed among certain demographic groups and not just political ideologies. There was more support among younger voters between the ages of 18 and 24 as well as from those who earn under $100,000 in income. The poll also found a majority wanted to see these zoning changes in Hartford and New Haven, while there was more of a split in the Fairfield area.
Any changes over zoning would need to happen at the local level, but experts say that the federal government still has a role to play.
“The federal government has the power of the purse and can really control a lot of what gets built,” said Pete Harrison, Connecticut director of the Regional Plan Association. Harrison pointed to examples in the 20th century when the federal government used money to encourage the building of highways and set up financing for the mortgage industry.
The focus on such an issue was reflected in the recent debates, where housing has typically not been a major topic of discussion in the race for the White House.
“It’s very exciting that housing has been such a focus of discussion in the campaign,” said Erin Boggs, executive director of the Open Communities Alliance in Connecticut. “I have not seen this before at such a level, and I think it reflects the deep need for housing that we’re seeing all across the country.”
Hugh Bailey, policy director at Open Communities Alliance, said the national discussion will likely help fuel state-level efforts to reform zoning.
When President Joe Biden was still in the race, he talked about his housing plan in the June presidential debate. Now as the Democratic nominee, Harris brought up her housing agenda, when asked about the economy and the cost of living. But the issue got the biggest play at the recent vice presidential debate when the moderators devoted a specific question to housing.
Vance argued that cracking down on illegal immigration will lower prices because they are “competing with Americans for scarce homes.” The U.S. senator from Ohio also said that lowering energy prices would help since the delivery of materials to build homes has become more costly.
Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, argued that the problem with housing is that people see it as “another commodity” and it should be viewed as a way of building generational wealth. He wants the federal government to make it easier for states and towns to build new housing and pushed back that “we can’t blame immigrants for the only reason.”
Housing experts say there is little evidence that immigration is a major driver in the U.S. housing crisis and that it is largely due to a lower supply. In states like Connecticut, the median age of its housing stock is from the 1960s. They argue that a plan like Trump’s with mass deportations of immigrants could hurt the construction jobs that are building new units in communities.
“The housing affordability crisis is not driven by immigration. It’s driven by insufficient supply,” said Anika Singh Lemar, a Yale Law School clinical professor on housing. “If you were to deport large numbers of immigrants … then you would also end up disrupting, to a greater degree than it’s already been disrupted, the construction industry in such a way that you would probably negatively impact new supply and rehabilitated supply and you would exacerbate the crisis that we’re in.”
Harrison, of the Regional Plan Association, called the conversation around housing and immigration a “scare tactic,” and said that mass deportation would likely lead to a “collapse of the construction industry.”
Aside from immigration, Trump’s platform broadly wants to help homebuyers by “reduc[ing] mortgage rates by slashing inflation” and “promot[ing] homeownership through tax incentives and support for first-time buyers, and cut unnecessary regulations that raise housing costs.” Presidents do not set interest or mortgage rates.
One area of common ground between the parties is allowing certain federal lands to be used for the construction of new homes, though neither campaign has fleshed out the details around repurposing this land. Experts cast some doubt on this proposal because the availability of such land might not be usable for homebuilding if it is not near existing communities or transportation. And there is much less federally owned land in Connecticut compared to states out west.
“It’s unclear to me whether or not that land is located in a place where it would be most helpful,” said Sarah Saadian, senior vice president of public policy and field organizing at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. ” … There might be some places where it’s helpful, but it’s not a solution for every state.”
For Harris, her plan expands on the administration’s proposal to help first-generation homebuyers whose parents did not own a home. She wants to broaden eligibility for the $25,000 in down payment assistance to all first-time homebuyers, which she argues would target 4 million people over four years.
Roller, of the National Housing Law Project, described Harris’ plan as merging state and federal issues together on housing, pointing to the $40 billion innovation fund to incentivize states to find ways to build and offer more affordable housing. She doubled the amount that was initially proposed by the Biden administration.
Maria Weingarten, a co-founder of the group CT 169 Strong, argued that housing solutions should stay at the local level. She said that presidential platforms should focus more on building up the economy than increasing housing supply.
“Salaries haven’t increased, and they haven’t kept up with the rising costs and inflation that we’ve had, compounded by high energy costs and high local property taxes,” Weingarten said.
She said she’s in favor of adjusting building regulations in ways that help smaller developers build new housing.
Some local experts said that while a multitude of solutions are needed to solve the housing crisis, they want to see plans from presidential candidates that are more focused on rental housing and rental affordability than homeownership.
“It’s fine, it should be absolutely an option for folks, but it can’t possibly be the only focus, and there are plenty of completely valid reasons for someone to want to rent a home or to have an alternative equity type mode,” Harrison said. “The goal should be creating more homes and more types of homes to meet the growing needs of a very different demographic in our country.”
For those looking to rent, Harris is urging Congress to pass legislation that would get rid of tax benefits for major investors who buy up single-family homes to rent and a ban on landlords who use price-setting algorithms to determine rent.
While housing experts say subsidizing demand is a component of addressing the current crisis, like providing some kind of assistance to homebuyers or tax incentives, they need to first address the shortages in supply.
And with the changing lifestyles of people and families, the creation of new housing “will help to address the need to meet a much more diverse array of needs,” Lemar of Yale Law School said.
But housing experts see gaps in the plans offered by both candidates. They say neither campaign has done much to address homelessness, housing for the lowest-income renters or tenants’ rights around the country.
Saadian said universal rent assistance would be one way to address the unaffordability of housing for some of the country’s lowest-income population. With existing funding levels, only about 1 in 4 people who qualify for rental assistance receive it.
Luke Melonakos-Harrison, vice president of the Connecticut Tenants Union, said he’d like to see more discussion of national rent caps. Over the summer, Biden had called for rent caps on corporate landlords to help control rent increases tenants said were untenable.
“Hearing someone on that level say ‘rent caps’ at all hasn’t happened in an extremely long time. [For] decades and decades, that’s been kind of verboten, so it was awesome to hear the concept being discussed,” Melonakos-Harrison said.
Connecticut has seen a growing tenants’ union movement over the past few years that has gained political power at the state level. Tenants unions operate similarly to labor unions and organize to negotiate with their landlords for better living conditions and lower rents, among other things.
Saadian said another option could be to cap percent increases on rent for landlords with federally backed mortgages.
“Our emphasis on tenant protections and renters rights is not a side issue to the housing crisis. It is a fundamental core part of the housing crisis,” Melonakos-Harrison said.
Much of these plans would need congressional approval, complicating how the federal government would play a role in tackling the housing crisis. As things currently stand with a divided government, the narrow majorities in both chambers of Congress make the proposals unlikely to pass.
And while housing is largely a state and local issue, Lemar said she hopes the focus at the national level brings more attention to the issue and how voters think about it within their communities and in local elections like for planning and zoning commissions or state legislative races.
“Simply having this issue at the national level where people can kind of see it as a national issue that’s hurting lots and lots of people across the country kind of changes the tenor of the hyper-local conversations,” Lemar said. “… A national conversation might inform people’s decision about how they spend their time, what they advocate for, what they advocate against.”
This story was originally published in the Connecticut Mirror Oct. 15, 2024.
