Renters for Harris? It looks like it. Close to half of renters think Vice President Kamala Harris would be better for making housing more affordable and almost a third think former President Donald Trump would be better, according to a Redfin-commissioned survey. About one in five don’t know either way.
This isn’t either of the two presidential candidates’ first rodeos. Both have been in office, and on the campaign trail, both have taken up housing because they’ve come to realize how dire the situation is. Their approaches to housing are very different.
The day Harris shared her economic plan in North Carolina, she said: “By the end of my first term, we will end America’s housing shortage.” Part of her plan is to build 3 million homes; another part, up to $25,000 down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers. Harris has also vowed to take on corporate landlords.
Trump, on the other hand, isn’t always clear. He’s said he wants to protect suburbs but has also called zoning a killer. Trump has said he’ll crack down on illegal immigration and utilize federal lands.
Just last night, during the one and only vice presidential debate of this election cycle, Senator JD Vance and Governor Tim Walz backed their running mates, with Vance stressing illegal immigrants competing with Americans for scarce housing and Walz stressing that there isn’t enough affordable housing and the government needs to help. Both approaches have their flaws, and neither candidate can fix the country’s housing crisis on their own.
“While the president has some tools to combat the housing affordability crisis, they can’t fix it on their own,” Redfin’s chief economist, Daryl Fairweather, said in an accompanying analysis. “It’s going to take a coordinated effort between the federal government and local governments over the course of many years, focused on incentivizing more homebuilding to ease a housing shortage that has been brewing since the Great Recession.”
Still, renters tend to be Democrats, Fairweather said. Earlier this year, Fortune spoke with a Substack writer and former Barclays analyst about the politics of housing. He found homeowners are twice as likely to identify themselves as strongly Republican than renters, and renters far more often identify themselves as strongly Democrat.
And renter households are surging. A separate, earlier Redfin analysis of data from the Census Bureau found the number of renter households in the country rose 1.9% in the second quarter from a year earlier, and the number of homeowner households only increased 0.6%. There are still more homeowners than renters, 86.3 million versus 45.2 million respectively. But “the number of renter households grew at the second-fastest pace since 2021, while the number of homeowner households grew at the slowest pace since 2019,” the analysis stated at the time.
Renters are struggling too. Half of all renter households were considered cost-burdened in 2022, totaling 22.4 million renters, the highest on record, a report from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies recently found. And the number of severely cost-burdened renter households hit an all-time high of 12.1 million in the same year. Cost-burdened is defined as spending more than 30% of your earnings on housing, and severely cost-burdened is defined as spending more than half.
“For renters, the landscape is even more challenging,” it said. “While rents have been rising faster than incomes for decades, the pandemic-era rent surge produced an unprecedented affordability crisis.”
Just consider how much people have to earn to rent in some states. In New York, they have to make more than $135,000 a year, according to Moody’s, a 22% increase from five years ago. In Massachusetts, you need to make more than $113,000 to afford rent, and in California, it’s around $95,000.
We’ll see how it all plays out come November.
