Presidential elections are decided by many things: media exposure, financial backing, personal chemistry, timing and luck. Policy positions often are just a way of signaling where a candidate stands on the political spectrum. But 2020 is shaping up to be different, the most ideas-driven election in recent American history. On the Democratic side, a robust debate about inequality has given rise to ambitious proposals to redress the imbalance in Americans’ economic situation.
For the last century or so, U.S. housing policy has given short shrift to renters, who are disproportionately lower-income and minority, while giving preferential treatment to homeowners.
Their solution was the Housing Act of 1937, which was intended to provide public housing for lower- and middle-income Americans and give the federal government more control over where that housing was built. The key word is “intended.” Attacked by the real-estate industry and conservative politicians as “communistic,” the Housing Act was watered down by Congress; in the end it applied only to the poor and allowed communities to opt out.
Booker’s bill, called the Housing, Opportunity, Mobility and Equity Act, materialized shortly after Harris’s. It goes a bit further. Like Harris, Booker would provide a refundable tax credit to cost-burdened renters; unlike Harris, Booker would also attempt to tackle the low supply of affordable units, one of the main causes of the crisis.
The politics of housing will always be complicated and controversial. On the Democratic side, however, the appeal of these proposals is clear: renters are a growing and ever more geographically diverse segment of the population, and demographically, there’s a lot of overlap with the party’s increasingly minority and millennial base.