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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. For the first hour of our show today, we will re-air the national call-in election special that we did last night in partnership with the public radio program, Marketplace in our series America, Are We Ready? It was America, Are We Ready To Make Housing More Affordable? Then we'll do a live hour of the show at eleven o'clock from WNYC in New York. [music]

Brian Lehrer: From WNYC in New York and Marketplace from American Public Media, this is America, Are We Ready? Hello, everyone. I'm Brian Lehrer from WNYC.

Kimberly Adams: I'm Kimberly Adams, senior Washington correspondent from Marketplace. Once again tonight, we're teaming up to help answer maybe the number one question on the minds of so many swing voters this year. Are we ready for what the outcome of this election will mean for our economy?

Brian Lehrer: Last week, we asked America, "Are we ready to do something about the cost of health care?" comparing Trump and Harris and their parties in Congress on that.

Kimberly Adams: Our topic tonight is housing costs. For so many Americans, it's the number one challenge to affording our lives.

Brian Lehrer: Right. For many Americans, it's the increasing cost of rent in many parts of the country, as there's a documented shortage of rental buildings compared to demand.

Kimberly Adams: On home ownership, there's the generational challenge of today's young adults struggling to buy a first home like their parents or grandparents did because incomes and prices do not match up as well as in the past. We'll invite your stories on the phones on what you'd like to see the government do about the cost of housing, and we'll compare what Vice President Harris, former President Trump, and their parties in Congress say they'll do about it. We're so happy to have on our guest on this to help explain the landscape and help take your calls. Jerusalem Demsas is a staff writer for The Atlantic who, among other things, wrote a very deep dive article for them in September called Who's Responsible for the Housing Crisis? Hi, Jerusalem.

Jerusalem Demsas: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Kimberly, you've been looking at this in your real job with Marketplace. How important are housing costs when voters are weighing their choices this election, in your experience?

Kimberly Adams: Well, you can tell it's a huge deal given how much attention the two candidates, two presidential candidates, are talking about it and giving this attention on the campaign trail. It's especially important in swing states, where research from Redfin shows that housing payments have nearly doubled since 2020, and that makes median price homes in these swing states pretty much unaffordable for typical residents, if you're talking about just spending about a third of your income on housing. That's just talking about homeowners. Renters are almost two times as likely as homeowners to put housing affordability in their top three issues this election, according to that Redfin research.

Brian Lehrer: There's a generational divide here, right?

Kimberly Adams: Right. 9 out of 10 Gen-Z-ers say that housing affordability is important for deciding who they're going to vote for this year. Then if you look at what we were talking about earlier, housing being less affordable, particularly buying a home compared to previous generations, the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies looks at something called home price to income ratio. It reached a record high in 2022, especially in cities where there's all-time highs in terms of that home price to income ratio in 78 of the nation's 100 largest markets, where the medium sale price of a home is 5.6 times the median income. That was back in 2022, and prices have gone up since then.

If you go back as recently as 2000, and certainly in the '80s and '90s, it was only about three times the median income. Now Jerusalem, if you don't mind me turning to you, can you lay out what that housing crisis looks like in different parts of the country?

Jerusalem Demsas: Definitely. Looking at the national level statistics, the median sales price for a home now, it's roughly $420,000. That's really, really high. Before the pandemic, you were seeing numbers in the 300s, below the 300s, even as the median sales price. There's obviously a lot of geographic variation of what that number will look like. If you're somewhere in a hot housing market like San Francisco, that's been hot for a long time, it's much higher than that. If you're in places, for instance, like in Upstate New York, that's going to be much lower, in Buffalo, where you're seeing $200,000 or $300,000 where that's below the median sales price for the average home.

I think what's important here, when you're trying to find common trends across the country, is that you see real effect of remote work. What that's meant is that you see people moving towards suburbs, people moving towards exurbs and moving towards secondary and tertiary markets. A lot of these cities that, for a long time, got to avoid the housing crises that were normal in places like New York or Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, all of a sudden, the Nashvilles of the world, the Boises of the world, the Austins of the world, these places became extremely, extremely expensive.

When you look at the markets right now that have seen the highest change in an average rent from June 2023 to June 2024, those are in places that I think people are familiar with now hearing as being hot housing markets. It's the Phoenix suburbs, it's the Austin suburbs, places like Georgetown, Texas, the Atlanta suburbs. Macon, Georgia is extremely hot right now. so you see these places where people have moved to and migrated to in response to some of the more expensive housing markets on the coasts.

Brian Lehrer: Almost no place is safe from the housing crisis. That's what I think-

Jerusalem Demsas: No place is safe.

Brian Lehrer: -I hear you saying. Jerusalem, to help set the scene, you wrote it in The Atlantic that the American population is growing and aging, and in many cases, looking for smaller houses, but the types of homes Americans need simply don't exist. What's that mismatch in the marketplace? Then we'll discuss what Trump and Harris propose to do about it, if anything.

Jerusalem Demsas: I think this is a very important point, not to toot my own horn there, but I think there's something that you hear from housing developers, from realtors, from people who are searching from housing all the time. It's that even when people go right to the market where they want to buy a home, they know where they want to buy a home, and they make good money, they can make into the six figures, they have a down payment saved up, they're not even the population of people that have struggled to do that, they don't find the housing that they need.

For instance, I think a really clear example of this is with seniors who have been searching to downsize because they don't need these larger single family homes, but they want to stay in their communities. In order to do that, you have to have small homes adjacent to big homes in the same kinds of neighborhoods, and that just isn't how the American planning system has worked for decades.

The fundamental reason for this is that we have had a bias built into our local systems of government. Local governments across the country have been biased against smaller homes. This has been built over years and years of belief that we can just say all the homes that are going to be built in an area are going to be these large single family homes. In the vast majority of this country, it is literally against the rules. You cannot, even if you own the land, build a smaller house than is legally prescribed.

What that means is that the homes that are built are these large single family homes that are only affordable to people who are making a high income. On top of that, even the people who own those can't even build things like granny flats or mother-in-law suites in the backyard. What that's created is a massive supply shortage. Right now, experts are estimating anywhere between 4-7 million homes short. A large part of that is that even as we're building a lot of housing, we're not building these smaller types of homes because local governments don't want those to exist.

Kimberly Adams: We're talking about a federal election and what the presidents say they're going to do, what these members of Congress campaigning say they're going to do, but as you point out, a lot of this is local. How much, when people are going to the polling place or sending in their mail in ballots, does what happens in these federal elections matter for housing policy?

Jerusalem Demsas: It's a really great question. The levers of power are in local government, and a lot of state governments over the past few years have really reacted to the problem of housing and realizing that local governments have failed on this question by taking back some of that power. Of course, that's different than between the federal and state governments. There's constitutional authority that the states have, and federal government can't just take that away from them and legislate how their zoning codes and their land use codes can look.

What the federal government can do is actually still pretty significant. I think primarily there is a lot they can do from the bully pulpit. There has not been a lot of attention on this issue. There's a common refrain. Housing politics is local and voters are fed up with people shifting blame between, "Oh, it's not my fault, it's not my responsibility at the federal level," so you've seen increased attention from folks at the top of both tickets on this issue.

There's a lot you can do. There's a lot of pressure that can be put from the federal government, whether that's positive pressure in terms of, right now, Kamala Harris could easily call up democratic legislatures in New York City and say, "There is a proposal right now to make it easier to build housing in New York City. I believe you should pass it. It is how I would get my agenda as, as president, done."

Also there's a bunch of levers that can be pulled at the federal level. Tons of federal dollars go out to states and localities all the time. I think it's an increasing focus to see if it's possible to get Congress and the president to get together and say, "Okay, if we're sending all this money out, we should condition it on making sure that these places are actually contributing to the solution, not to the problem."

Brian Lehrer: Let's hear from a caller. Sherry in Tyler, Texas. You're on America, Are We Ready?

Sherry: Hello?

Brian Lehrer: Hi, Sherry.

Sherry: Hi there. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good.

Sherry: I'm sorry. Yes, I'm here.

Brian Lehrer: You have a story about your son and his wife and their baby, I understand.

Sherry: No, not their baby. My son and his wife are-- they've been happily married in their 20s. No children, no debt. Excellent jobs. They have no debt, but, of course, buy a home.

Brian Lehrer: Sorry. No baby yet. Go ahead. No debt but?

Sherry: Oh, that's okay. No, but buying a home is not financially possible. Of course, they don't want to move. They enjoy living there. One thing I did see in Austin that I was very impressed with was they took the old airport and they turned it into mixed housing shopping development with townhomes, and it looks wonderful. It looks like they did a very good job, but unfortunately, there's not enough space for more of that.

Brian Lehrer: Is Austin here where they live?

Sherry: Yes, sir. High property taxes.

Brian Lehrer: Sherry, hang on. I'm going to come back to you after a break. We do have to take a break, but stay there, Sherry. It's America, Are We Ready To Control Housing Costs? We'll continue with Sherry and our guest in a minute.

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Kimberly Adams: It's America, Are We Ready To Control Housing Costs? the second of our Wednesday night election specials. Next week, America, Are We Ready To Tame The Cost of The Care Economy, Child Care and Caring for Older or Disabled Relatives, Which Can Have A Significant Impact On Our Lives and Our Family Finances? I'm Kimberly Adams, senior Washington correspondent for the public radio program Marketplace.

Brian Lehrer: I'm Brian Lehrer from WNYC, with our guest, Atlantic Magazine staff writer Jerusalem Demsas, who covers housing a lot. We're in the middle of talking to Sherry, who called in from Tyler, Texas, telling us about her son and his wife in a one-year marriage. They both have great jobs, late 20s, no debt, but they can barely afford their rent in Austin. Sherry, I wonder if you have an answer to the second part of the question we're inviting people to answer, which is, is there something you would like from government, including the federal government, to help with this situation?

Sherry: Well, I always think it's something that developers need to be incentivized to build low income housing. From what I'm able to gather, it's much easier to develop higher end homes, and it's all tied to the property taxes. The government depends in the state on the property taxes, and so the more valuable the home, the higher the property taxes they'll receive every year. I don't think there's incentive for lower income housing as much as there is for higher income housing. I don't know what the government can do except to decentivize (sic) to make it more attractive for developers to build lower income housing, that it's more affordable. How are you going to do it?

Brian Lehrer: Pretty specific. Sherry, thank you very much. We really appreciate your call. Good luck to you and your family. Jerusalem, what are you thinking listening to Sherry? She came up with one idea, incentivize development of affordable housing. She ended the call by saying, "I don't know how they're going to do it."

Jerusalem Demsas: No, it's a great point. I think this is one of the big problems is that it's in order to get all different levels of housing built. It's really hard to get that done easily in all cities. One thing that has been successful is the low income housing tax credit, which is something that Congress could expand. It is the primary way that new affordable housing is built in this country. Expanding that tax credit, putting more money into it and making it easier for developers to access that money quickly is really important.

There are still a lot of problems that developers have even when they're able to get this sort of financing in order to build, like affordable housing developers get this financing all the time to build projects, but they still run into the same hurdles that market rate developers do, in that, you want to build a low income development or even a development that's for someone who's at average income in many of these cities in the US. You will face a bunch of opposition at the local level, whether, "It's not in my backyard," behavior from people in the neighborhood who don't want to see that development or you just see things in the permitting process or in the zoning process that make it very difficult to reach.

It's important that as these dollars are expanded, there's a lot of pressure put on places around the country to do a lot of this liberalization of these laws. In Austin, as Sherry mentioned, it's actually become easier. The Austin City Council and also the Texas state government has actually done a lot to make it easier to build these smaller types of housing. Just earlier this year, they actually passed legislation at the local level making it easier to build homes on small single family homes. That kind of action is what's going to be really helpful in addition to expanding this tax credit.

Kimberly Adams: Let's take another call now from Daniel in Pittsburgh. Go ahead, Daniel.

Daniel: Hi, my name's Dan, and I personally think that it's crazy that we don't allow rent control in many parts of the country. I've been a renter for most of my adult life so far, and it just can get so exorbitant, whether I'm living in Pittsburgh or when I was living in Boston. A lot of opponents of rent control say, "If we install it, then developers or landlords won't have a reason to improve the conditions of their homes." Even now they don't because there's such a high demand that they can just keep raising prices without providing services. I think rent control could be a useful lever.

Brian Lehrer: Daniel, thank you very much. That brings us to the section of the hour where we're going to compare the presidential candidates, Harris and Trump, on their platforms for how to control rental cost as well as home ownership costs for buyers. The Harris-Walz campaign website has at least four housing proposals. The first says, "Build 3 million affordable rental units and homes to combat the housing crisis," but that's very general. It doesn't say how many rentals versus homes for sale or how the federal government would incentivize building in local communities around the country, as the first caller, Sherry wanted to hear about.

The Harris-Walz site also says, "Give first-time homebuyers up to a $25,000 tax credit." Also to Daniel-in-Pittsburgh's point, "Penalize firms that hoard homes to drive up prices and outlaw price fixing by corporate landlords." Here's Harris on the corporate landlords.

Harris: Some corporate landlords, some of them, buy dozens, if not hundreds, of houses and apartments, then they turn them around and rent them out at extremely high prices. It can make it impossible then for regular people to be able to buy or even rent a home. Some corporate landlords collude with each other to set artificially high rental prices, often using algorithms in price fixing software to do it. It's anti-competitive and it drives up costs. I will fight for a law that cracks down on these practices.

Brian Lehrer: Jerusalem, that's one promise she is making. Now, looking back a little bit, I see that as a senator, Harris introduced a bill called the Rent Relief Act, which would give tax credits to renters who make less than a six-figure income and pay more than 30% of their income in rent. I haven't heard her talk about that idea in this campaign. Just before President Biden ended his campaign in July, there was reporting that he was about to propose some kind of national rent control. That's actually the way I saw it attributed to him. National rent control, specifically to Daniel-in-Pittsburgh's point.

I'm not sure if he ever did it. I haven't heard Harris mention anything like that. Did she drop that Biden idea? Did she drop her former idea of a tax credit for renters?

Jerusalem Demsas: There's a lot of proposals that have been floating about. I think it's one of the difficult things of reporting on the economic policy of the campaigns right now for different reasons. On the Trump's side, they don't really give a lot of specificity or even consistency in the proposals they're putting out on a lot of these things. On the Harris side, a lot of it is new, being developed very quickly, in large part because she entered the race quite late and also does not have a long track record of working on these issues. As a result, this stuff is being developed in recent years.

When it comes to the rent control proposal that Biden was announcing right before he dropped out, that is something that I know that they toyed around with on the Harris campaign. It seems to have dropped out of most of their messaging recently. It's one of those things that's very difficult. We use the word "rent control" as such an umbrella term. It means so many different things. It's like saying, "I want better healthcare policy. I want cheaper healthcare." There are a lot of different forms of rent control, and many of them can be really, really harmful.

The types of rhetoric you hear from economists about concern about rent control, which is very unpopular with economists, is the type of rent control where it sets a clear cap, and it makes it very, very difficult to ever let new development pencil. That means you hit a break on supply. Even if the people who currently have housing are able to benefit from lower rent, you can't build any more housing, or the private sector won't build any more housing for future people. If people want to move that means that they also don't benefit from that supply as well.

There are ways to design good rent control policies. It has to be designed in concert with a lot more supply coming on board. You need to make sure it's not actually disincentivizing the private market from investing in new properties. That's the concern with rent control, is, can the cities actually do that, play that game, and not hurt the market as a whole?

I think that this question, what Harris is raising here, about corporate landlords, it's one of those things that's become very, very popular as a talking point on both the right and the left. It's popular because these are very unsympathetic actors. Who is going to defend these private equity landlords or these massive landlords? I think it's really overstated the impact that these landlords have on the market.

Primarily, if they have properties, they're either renting them out, which means they're not just sitting unused, they're going to people, just in the same way that rental apartments, they're owned by large investors and they are rented out to people. Also, they're just such a small part of the market. They don't make up enough of market share to actually influence prices that meaningfully. I think the place where you've seen the most interesting stuff in this space is on the algorithm rent RealPage. Price fixing, you do see some action being taken from lawyers to hold them accountable.

Kimberly Adams: You mentioned that there hasn't been much from the Trump campaign formally on housing policy, but the RNC, the Republican National Committee, does have some details, at least a couple of proposals on their website about cutting unnecessary regulation, opening federal lands to housing construction, tax incentives. Let's listen to some of what Trump has said about this.

Trump: Overregulation of housing in the housing market is a primary cause of the rising housing costs across our country. Nationwide, it's estimated that the regulations account for more than 25% of the cost of a new home. Think of that. Regulation and unnecessary regulation is 25% the cost of a new home. As a result, the supply of affordable housing cannot keep up with demand. Today, over 37 million American households have to spend more than 30% of their income on housing.

Kimberly Adams: Jerusalem, you mentioned that the corporate price fixing narrative is overplayed. What do you think of these narratives? Is overregulation to blame for our housing crisis?

Jerusalem Demsas: Over regulation is a serious concern. When I'm talking about these local governments, we're talking about things that don't sound very interesting, but are really important, for instance, things like minimum lot sizes. That says, how much land does every house have to sit on? Economists have found that-- they compared places with more stringent minimum lot sizes with places with less stringent ones, and they found that it increased the price of a home by $30,000. That's a lot of money for one regulation to be increasing the price of a home buy. There are many, many of these that are really, really harmful.

I do think it's a bit disingenuous of the former president here. He's talking about these issues and talking about how over-regulation is a concern. when he was president, he specifically fought against the idea that we should be getting rid of these exclusionary zoning laws. He was radicalized against it, I think, in part because Senator Cory Booker came out with a plan to tie certain federal dollars to getting local governments to make it easier to build more housing.

As a result, you heard a lot of rhetoric from the former president saying things like, "Democrats are going to destroy the suburbs. They're going to destroy your home, your neighborhood. They're going to bring in all this horrible housing into your areas." This is a clip, you've played, where I think that he is making a different argument, but his most repeated claim is that ending exclusionary zoning is actually bad.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to come back to that later on when we talk about that issue head on. I want to take a call from Edward in Baltimore, who I think is skeptical of the very premise that building more housing will help ease the housing shortage and bring down costs. Edward, you're on, America, Are We Ready? Hi. Do I have that right?

Edward: Yes, you are absolutely right. It's made a nice talking point for both candidates that building more houses is going to somehow relieve the housing market. The fact of the matter is houses are just too expensive, and it's not affordable to most people. Before you can save, you can get your down payment and have a pathway to home ownership. Now it's almost impossible.

The second thing I wanted to say is, as a person who wants to downsize from a four bedroom home to maybe something smaller is it's not feasible. For what I would be selling my home, I would be losing my 2.5% rate, lower the price of my house, to bring in prospective buyers, and then move into a home that's just as expensive, if not more, than a bigger home that I'm moving out of.

Brian Lehrer: Can I ask you, Edward, why you don't believe that building more homes would bring down the costs? The Economics 101 textbooks doesn't mean they're right, but they would say basic supply and demand means if you have a hundred homes and a hundred buyers, the price is going to be higher than if you have a thousand homes and a hundred buyers.

Edward: As I said, I had a 2.5%- years ago, 2.5% mortgage rate. Now, if I was to sell, I'd have to market my home with the new, with the 7.5 interest-- I'd have to market my home lower to bring in prospective buyers. Then I would have to turn around and buy a home equivalent- even with building new homes, equivalent to what I'm selling for.

Brian Lehrer: The market gets you both as a buyer and a seller. Jerusalem, what are you thinking as you listen to Edward's call? Edward, thank you.

Jerusalem Demsas: Edward, I think, is raising something that's really important, which is that there are a lot of factors in the housing market that are restraining people's ability to access affordable housing. This problem of lock in where people are locked into their existing residence because they got a really, really good interest rate on their house, whether it's a long time ago or it's in 2021 when interest rates were really low. That is something that we see over and over again.

Of course, the price of housing and the cost to an individual on a monthly basis is both the principal, the whole price there, but it's also what your mortgage is going to look like. That is very different based on what interest rate environment looks like. While we can't just make Jay Powell at the Federal Reserve only care about having low interest rates for people in housing, we can reduce the cost and the price of land by making it easier to build these smaller homes.

This supply skepticism that Edward has, a lot of people have this, a lot of people feel like that standard e-con 101 story, it doesn't really make sense with housing because they look around in their communities and they see a lot of housing being constructed and they still don't see these prices coming down. I think it is a very counterintuitive thing to try to show people because it doesn't always comport with how they feel is going on in the real world. I really want to underscore here that this is one of the most repeated findings in the housing supply literature.

There's a study that was from last year that looked at new large market rate apartment buildings across eleven American cities and found that the average new apartment building lowers rents within 250 meters of that building by 5-7% relative to the trend. That's a savings of $100 to $159 per month, and that's at the level of building we're doing right now, which is not enough in relation to how people are moving.

There's other studies that look at New York City, that look at German housing markets, that look at San Francisco, and over and over again, they're finding this standard e-con story to be true. It doesn't mean it'll relieve everyone's pain, but it is a necessary prerequisite. You can't solve the housing crisis if you don't have enough homes.

Brian Lehrer: Michael is calling from Knoxville, where he says he's a housing lawyer and he has some policy suggestions. Michael, we're going to let you start your answer, then we're up against the break we're going to have to take, but start to set this up for us and then you can give us details after the break.

Michael: Sure. I work in this area day in, day out with a bunch of other lawyers and represent tenants in eviction cases here in Knoxville, Tennessee, which has some of the fastest rising rent in the country. One of the policy suggestions that I would have is to expand people's access to counsel for eviction cases. It greatly increases housing stability. It enforces people [unintelligible 00:30:02] under the Fair Housing act.

Brian Lehrer: Michael, I have to cut you off to go to the break, but I have a follow-up question for you after the break about how this might impact costs or not. It's America, Are We Ready to Control Housing Costs? We continue.

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Brian Lehrer: It's America, Are We Ready to Control Housing Costs? the second of our Wednesday night election specials. Next week, America, Are We Ready To Tame The Cost of The Care Economy, that's child care and elder care, Which Affect Our Lives and Our Family Finances So Much? I'm Brian Lehrer from WNYC with Jerusalem Demsas as our guest, Atlantic magazine staff writer who writes a lot about housing.

Kimberly Adams: I'm Kimberly Adams, senior Washington correspondent for the public radio program, Marketplace. We want to pick back up with our caller, Michael in Knoxville. Michael, you're a housing lawyer and you were giving some solutions.

Michael: I think one thing that I would suggest would be expanded access to counsel. Every time someone goes into housing court, they may think that they're guaranteed a lawyer for such an important issue but they're not, because it's a civil matter. In jurisdictions that have expanded access to counsel or even made it a right to counsel for an eviction, you see tons of benefits inured to those tenants and that their housing becomes much more stable. Every time someone is evicted, that person loses, possibly, a good portion of their property. It's a very expensive thing to go through on the tenant side and just the court resources and legal resources that that takes to fight these litigation to litigate these [inaudible 00:31:52].

Brian Lehrer: Do you think there's a trickle-up effect? Because that would help the people at the lowest end, the people who can't afford or are on the margins of not being able to afford, staying in the rental they have. Do you think that trickles up, in a sense, to reduce prices across the board for rentals, or is that particular to the people who risk eviction?

Michael: I'm not sure exactly how that would affect things economically. I know firsthand the kind of economic effect that it has on tenants. What it does for the housing market as a whole, I think if it's stabilized, if you've got more predictable housing, like lease terms, then I think that's going to have probably a good and stabilizing effect that would push housing prices downward.

Brian Lehrer: Michael, thank you very much for your call. Let's go next to Mark in St. Paul. Mark, you're on America, Are We Ready? Hello.

Mark: Hello.

Brian Lehrer: You were in the housing market. You were in the market to buy a house, I see.

Mark: Yes. The problem we're having is we're being underbid from getting houses because people are paying cash. We're looking for a smaller two bedroom house here in St. Paul, Minnesota. There's actually quite a few of them, and they've been going for around 225,000 to 235,000. It gets frustrating. Last year, we lost out on three homes where we were the highest bidder, but because we had to use financing, the owner, the seller, chose the cash offer. I'm not sure how people have a spare $230,000 to plop down and buy a house with cash, but the way the economy is, with everything getting more expensive, it's harder than heck to save up a large chunk of money like that.

Kimberly Adams: Jerusalem, do you think that there's anything that the candidates are proposing that would actually deal with this problem that's so common throughout the housing market, people feeling like they're being outbid by investors or big conglomerates for just regular houses?

Jerusalem Demsas: The all-cash offer concern is something that I've heard a lot in my reporting. Interestingly, most all-cash offer offers, from what we can tell from the data, are coming from other individuals. It's like people who are able to make these offers. This is not primarily a concern coming from conglomerates. The reason this is happening is because as people are really pushed into the housing market and the supply has been really low, you see richer people bidding for homes that would traditionally have gone to middle class people and then middle class folks bidding for homes that have traditionally gone to lower income people. I think that's a real concern here.

There's been some proposals in Congress to try to make it easier and from Vice President Harris to provide down payment assistance to first time homebuyers. That could help, but it's really, really difficult, even if you get that down payment assistance, to be more competitive in the housing market against all-cash offer.

The previous suggestion, though, I think is really interesting to underscore about the right to counsel. I think this is a really important principle and also a great policy. There was a study in New York that looked at what happened when they rolled out their right to counsel for tenants at or below 200% of the federal poverty guidelines. They found that tenants who got lawyers were less likely to get possessory judgments. They faced smaller monetary judgments. They were less likely to get evicted. That's huge.

It's also really important for places that are concerned about their homelessness crisis, because we know that, especially of low income tenants, evictions are a one-way ticket for a lot of people to being homeless. I think that that's a really, really good policy to try to stem the flow of people who maybe just need a couple months to get the rent that they can pay back before getting evicted.

Brian Lehrer: Jerusalem, you mentioned the incentives, the assistance for first-time homebuyers putting down down payments. Both Harris and Trump, I believe, are for some version of that. I feel like we hear Harris talk about it more, $25,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers, probably up to a certain income limit, I think. Are there different proposals between Harris and Trump on exactly that that you can compare?

Jerusalem Demsas: I haven't seen any down payment assistance proposal from the Trump campaign. It's obviously difficult sometimes to track because sometimes there are throwaway comments that the former president will make on housing.

Brian Lehrer: It's on the RNC website, tax incentives For first-time buyers, but that's not Trump per se.

Jerusalem Demsas: That's not the Trump campaign. Those are Republicans who I don't think are working with the campaign to develop policy. That's the Republican line. Agin, there are down payment systems programs led by Republicans. For instance, Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida has a down payment assistance program. These programs can be very, very helpful to people who are able to access those dollars.

There's often concern in such a supply-constrained market, that if you give a bunch of people access to down payment assistance, you're just going to raise prices because property owners will realize, "I can increase my prices here to make up and to eat into that $25,000." You're not actually helping as many people as you would like. You have to make sure you're targeting that properly. I've talked with the Harris campaign senior advisors about this, and they've talked publicly about this as well. They understand the timing here is really important. You don't want to just pump a ton of money into housing demand without increasing supply because then you'll just increase prices.

Brian Lehrer: Let's talk a little bit about what these candidates actually did when they were in office, their various offices. I see that when Harris was California attorney general, she drafted and helped to pass what's called the California Homeowners Bill of Rights. Here she is talking about that and other actions on housing she took as AG.

Harris: As State Attorney General, I drafted and helped pass a homeowner bill of rights, one of the first in America. During the foreclosure crisis, I took on the big banks for predatory lending with many of my colleagues, including Roy Cooper, and won $20 billion for California families when I was Attorney General.

Brian Lehrer: There she is in reference to Roy Cooper. He's the governor of North Carolina. She was campaigning there at that time. Jerusalem, do you know what's in that Bill of Rights? Did that have to do with the mortgage and financial crisis of 2008, 2009? What's the homeowner's bill of rights?

Jerusalem Demsas: This is all happening in the context of the financial crisis. The settlement she's talking about there, too, is in response to what the banks admitted to having a misled investors in the security of the mortgage-backed securities, and so they had to pay back and provide some kind of financial relief in response to that settlement. The Homeowner Bill of Rights includes a few things. What the bill drafters call it, it was a transparency in the mortgage process, tools for communities to prevent blight after the banks foreclose on homes.

There's basic standards of fairness, I'm quoting from it now, in the mortgage process, which included an end to a specific kind of foreclosure process that people felt was unfair. It's very targeted at this moment in time. It's not really speaking to our current crisis, but it was something that was a very big part of her profile when she was Attorney General of California.

Kimberly Adams: Jerusalem. You mentioned a bit earlier about Trump's narrative around zoning and what housing should be where, and people going after the suburbs. Early in his term, he had embraced a plan to use federal government to push local governments, including suburban ones, to build higher density apartment buildings. but flipped on that after the George Floyd protests began and saying things that were going to prevent low income housing from coming near your single family homes. Here's a clip of that.

Trump: Finally, I will save America's suburbs by protecting single family zoning. The radical left wants to abolish the suburbs by forcing apartment complexes and low income housing into the suburbs right next to your beautiful house. You have a beautiful house, and they want a nice low income building to be right next to you.

Kimberly Adams: So much of our politics, including housing policy, is tied up in the culture wars now. I wonder how you see that shaping the ability of policymakers to actually change anything.

Jerusalem Demsas: I think this is a really good point. There's obviously a lot of conflation happening. Many of the proposals are about making it easier to build smaller single family homes or duplexes or townhomes. Trump is reaching for these tropes around, "These large apartment blocks are coming for your suburbs, this low income housing is coming for your suburbs," which, it is a part of the rhetoric from people who are trying to build more housing, but it's not the whole thing. I think it's created fear monger about what these changes would actually look like.

It's been a challenge in many parts of the country, in places like California, Washington State, Oregon, Colorado, Montana, Arizona. Lots of states that have been tackling this problem in recent years, they've had to really combat the idea that what they're doing is trying to destroy the neighborhood character of these communities. They've really shown how these new homes, are compatible and actually make these places better, more lively, more vibrant, more economically dynamic places. It's been a lot of gentle density. The common term that people use is this missing middle.

It's not just apartment blocks we need or giant single family homes. We need smaller single family homes. We need starter homes for people who are buying for the first time. I think that's been one way that people have tried to combat this image.

Brian Lehrer: Because the show is not just coast to coast, it's more than that, here's Emily in Maui. Emily, you're on America, Are We Ready? Hi.

Emily: Hi. Good to speak to you.

Brian Lehrer: What you got?

Emily: Our issue here is since the Lahaina fires, a lot of the homeowner insurance and condo owner insurance have gotten really expensive because they're trying to figure out how to cover that combination of wind and hurricane stuff. I imagine that's going to continue to be more relevant in California and all the areas that have been affected by the hurricane that even if they can buy and get into the market, the insurance costs are adding a lot to that.

Brian Lehrer: That's a really important thing to bring up. Jerusalem, to generalize that question to the max, I think this is legitimate, is climate change beginning to affect the cost of housing in America?

Jerusalem Demsas: Definitely. What you're hearing, of course, in Hawaii, but also in Florida and California, lots of places where you see these natural disasters, you'd see even insurance companies trying to pull out coverage. There was a study earlier this year from some folks at University of Pennsylvania looking at homeowners insurance. They have a 50 million observations in their data set, they're looking from 2014 to 2023, and they find that in the last three years, actually from 2020 to 2023, there was a 33% increase in average premiums. Home insurance premiums are going up a ton. That's very clearly that climate exposure is a big part of that.

They also find that in households that are climate exposed are likely to face $700 higher annual premiums by 2053. That's a massive expense for people. This is going to be really difficult. These are difficult conversations that have to be had now about how development and where development should happen. We really need to be building in places we know are safe and we need to be expanding in places that are less likely to be impacted by these hurricanes.

It's very, very hard to figure out how to do this sort of development because people have homes and they like to live in their communities, they don't want to leave them and they want to come back and rebuild in the exact same place that has been flooded before and could be flooded or could be caught up in a wildfire again. It's a very difficult policy question for how to balance these concerns.

Kimberly Adams: Are any of the candidates actually planning to do anything either at the congressional level? Are you hearing anything from the presidential candidates about these rising costs of insurance? Because this isn't just affecting the people in these areas hit by disasters, it's raising home insurance prices nationwide.

Jerusalem Demsas: Definitely. You can even look at the maps in the study I cited. It's Benjamin Keys. He's at the University of Pennsylvania. You can see the map, and all over the country, you see increases in home prices or, sorry, in insurance prices.

I've not seen any serious proposals to address this. Part of it is the politics that this is very, very dicey. What a lot of states want is essentially for there to just be infinite bailouts for this homeowner insurance for people whose homes get destroyed by these hurricanes. Of course, we want to help people, but if we're rebuilding without requiring climate resiliency, then are we just going to have the same problem year after year after year? It's incredibly costly, not just to people's tax bill, but also to people's lives to continuously develop in an irresponsible manner. This is a problem that I think is not going to be talked about on the campaign stage because it just is so politically controversial.

Brian Lehrer: We have one minute left. Here's a political question to end with. You have an article about how YIMBY, yes, in my backyard, yes, denser housing, yes, more affordable housing in my neighborhood. YIMBY has become popular in the Democratic Party. Not in the Republican Party?

Jerusalem Demsas: The Democratic Party has increasingly embraced this, at least, at a rhetorical level. You see this in the DNC where you had Barack Obama and Kamala Harris talking about building more housing and getting rid of these regulations. It can be just talk a big talk because actually at the state and local level, Republican jurisdictions have been really at the forefront of being pro growth. That's why you see more affordable housing in places like Florida and Texas than you do in California and New York.

I'm hopeful that this YIMBY takes over-- the ideas take over the Democratic Party and that Republicans are able to join them in that, but it remains to be seen.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Well, folks, that's episode 2 of our Wednesday night call-in series, America, Are We Ready to Control The Cost of Living? Next week at this time, episode 3, America, Are We Ready to Tame The Cost of The Care Economy, Childcare and Elder Care, Which, Of Course, Affect Our Lives and Our Family Finances So Much? Thanks, everyone, for your stories, questions and suggestions on the phones tonight. Thanks to our guest, Jerusalem Demsas, staff writer for The Atlantic. Jerusalem, thanks so much.

Jerusalem Demsas: Thank you so much.

Kimberly Adams: I'm Kimberly Adams, senior Washington correspondent for Marketplace. If you'd like to follow our reporting on the economy in this election, you can find Marketplace in any of your podcast feeds, along with the show I co-host with Kai Ryssdal, Make Me Smart.

Brian Lehrer: I'm Brian Lehrer from WNYC. If you want to follow my other election related work, you can check out my daily podcast that's simply called Brian Lehrer: A Daily Politics Podcast.

Kimberly Adams: America, Are We Ready? was produced by Megan Ryan, Alyssa Castles and Zach Gottehrer-Cohen with Jason Isaac at the audio control. Esperanza Rosenbaum has been taking your calls. Talk to you again next week and have a great night.

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