Marble Falls       The Census Bureau reports that for a second straight year more than half of America’s 42.5 million households who rent are “cost burdened,” meaning that the rent is sucking up more than 30% of their income.  In short, rents continue to be too darned high.  The Washington Post reports that the burden doesn’t fall equally, either:

Among Black renter households, more than 56 percent were cost-burdened, for a total of 4.6 million. Among Hispanic renter households, over 53 percent were cost-burdened, along with nearly 47 percent of White renter households.

`               That’s not all the bad news.  Rent increases were higher than the increase in home values.

From 2011 to 2019, real rent costs rose less than 3 percent every year, the data show. In 2022, after peaking during the coronavirus pandemic, rent grew 1 percent. But last year, rent rose 3.8 percent, compared with a 1.8 percent rise in inflation-adjusted median home values.

None of this is to say that homeowners were living on easy street, but embedded factors like the cost of insurance whacked them a hard lick as well.

Costs went up for homeowners, too, in part because of insurance. Some 5.4 million of the nation’s 85.7 million homeowners paid $4,000 a year or more for insurance in 2023. Florida had the highest number (1.2 million), followed by Texas (784,000), California (560,000), New York (272,000) and Louisiana (215,000).

It’s no surprise that housing related issues have become central in each candidate’s case for election in November.

…Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, talks about building 3 million more homes if elected, combined with large tax credits to help buyers get into the market. Former president and GOP nominee Donald Trump, meanwhile, says his plans to deport undocumented immigrants will open up housing supply.

I’m sorry to say this, but neither plan seems like a solution.

Deporting immigrants as a fix for high rents and an affordable housing shortage is just absurd.  It almost strains the imagination that anyone seeking public office would make such a claim, but Trump was probably just hip shooting in order to take a whack at immigrants and didn’t care that the subject was about affordable housing.  That’s no comfort, just a weak attempt at a rational explanation for such a preposterous position.

Harris at least understood the question and gets the fact that affordable housing is a real issue, but her proposals don’t really address atmospheric rent or insurance costs.  Building millions of new homes would be good, but even if that happened, and it’s easier to tout the goal than to make it happen, as Britain’s clown Prime Minister Boris Johnson proved.  Such building wouldn’t happen overnight, but would take years.  Furthermore, unless the US reversed its policy of decreasing construction of public housing, private home developers have insufficient incentives to build more affordable homes or rental complexes.  Larger tax credits might help some families try to get into homeownership in the current market, but that sounds like a plan for families with more wealth, not the half of renters who are cost burdened or the homeowners being forced to move to rent or try to hold onto homes without insurance.

Real solutions would require aggressive government intervention in the housing and insurance markets.  Maybe that’s something Harris believes were hurt her chances, and that
Trump, a former and current real estate developer believes is anathema, but ridiculous claims and half-hearted promises are not going to fix a housing market that everyone seems to understand is systemically broken.