Sky-high housing costs have emerged as a key issue in the farcical presidential contest between Democrat Kamala Harris, former “top cop,” and Republican Donald Trump, her egomaniacal landlord opponent.
In a self-congratulatory statement, Diane Yentel, CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, lauded the NGO’s “organizing that’s putting pressure on politicians to respond.” In reality, it is not the efforts of professional reformists earning six-figure salaries, but the intolerable degree of the housing crisis, which is driving the capitalist candidates to offer false promises about bringing down the price of housing for workers.
The so-called “American dream” of homeownership is getting further out of reach for workers in the world’s richest country—data from August 2023 showed housing affordability at its lowest point in nearly 40 years. Since the 1960s, rising housing costs have outpaced overall inflation by an outrageous 240%, and workers should be skeptical that the vaunted “invisible hand” of the market will deliver relief anytime soon.
Empty promises
Both capitalist candidates are promising tax incentives and mortgage “assistance” for first-time home buyers—half measures which will not fundamentally alter the underlying crisis. What they will do is enrich the same capitalists who drove up housing costs in the first place.
Trump is blaming immigrants for out of control costs, claiming migrants increase competition for scarce housing stock. He’s promising to boost supply by converting federal lands into ultra low-tax, low-regulation zones for new housing development.
Harris—capital’s “responsible” candidate, overwhelmingly preferred by Wall Street, the big banks, and the Fortune 500—proposes increasing housing supply by massively expanding subsidies for developers, including the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). Jim Parrott, co-owner of Parrott Ryan Advisors, and Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, salivated over her plan in a recent Washington Post op-ed, calling it “precisely the sort of effort needed, both in its scope and its design. Indeed, it is one that both sides of the aisle should eventually find appealing, as it marshals the resources of the private sector to tackle a public policy challenge that plagues red and blue states alike.”
In reality, Harris’s scheme wouldn’t make housing more affordable for workers in any significant way, but Parrott and Zandi know these subsidies would be a massive cash grab for their billionaire clients.
In reality, Harris’s scheme wouldn’t make housing more affordable for workers, but would be a massive cash grab for billionaires. / Image: A Disappearing Act, Wikimedia Commons
Capitalist cash grabs
Tax credits like the ones Harris is pushing are a perfect example of parasitic capitalism: it is no longer profitable for capitalists to invest in building working-class housing, so the state uses workers’ tax dollars to bribe them into doing so.
The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that, at present funding levels, the LIHTC program will result in a total transfer of $71 billion to big banks and investors between 2022 and 2027. To put this in perspective, the Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates it would cost only $20 billion to completely end homelessness in America. Expanding a program like LIHTC means only one thing: placing an even bigger share of society’s wealth into the hands of the same finance capitalists who are already making a mint speculating on the housing market.
The economic anarchy of capitalism
Trump and Harris’s housing policies share a common basis. They are both rooted in the myth that the housing crisis is caused by a simple shortage of places to live. The truth is that America’s housing crisis is a result of the anarchy of the market. Census Bureau data show that for every homeless person in the US, there are 27.4 vacant homes waiting to be filled. Thanks to the lack of an overall plan of production, many of these vacancies are in places where few people can find jobs, while other cities don’t have enough houses and apartments for all their workers.
This economic anarchy is hitting housing markets across the world. Governments in Australia, Chile, Colombia, France, Germany, Portugal, and Turkey have all implemented tax-incentivized housing programs, sometimes offering even more favorable terms to finance capital than those in the US. With their system in its death throes everywhere, capitalists need to shore up declining profit margins by robbing the working class. The role of politicians like Harris is to convince voters that this blatant thievery will somehow help them better afford someplace decent to live.
Only a socialist revolution can truly solve this problem. All the vacant homes and land currently owned by banks, private equity firms, and real-estate monopolies must be expropriated and incorporated into a socialized housing plan, as part of a democratically planned economy. With the commanding heights of the economy nationalized under workers control, we could build millions of new housing units, and even new towns and cities, in order to ensure quality, affordable housing for all.