Miranda Devine: Leftists to blame for much of the US housing crisis as almost a third of Americans are housing-poor
It was typical of Joe Biden’s presidency that, when faced with a difficult problem, he would take the cynical approach of finding a scapegoat to blame while making a promise he never intended to keep. His response to the housing affordability crisis last year was a textbook case: blame “rent-gouging” landlords and greedy realtors, make the false promise that his administration would build 2 million new homes via more deficit spending, and hope nobody asks questions — a safe bet, considering the incurious media that surrounded him. “Folks are tired of being played for suckers and I’m tired of letting them be played for suckers,” Biden said in a campaign speech hammering his scapegoats last year. Having promised to lower housing costs during his State of the Union address earlier in the spring, Biden’s fiery rhetoric showed he had not the faintest idea how to solve the problem. During his presidency, the cost of a median-price home more than doubled, and rents soared to record highs, according to a Heritage Foundation paper, “Biden’s Housing Headache.” In several cities, it takes more than the entire median household after-tax income to afford a median-price home. Almost one-third of American adults are “housing-poor,” spending 30% or more of their income on a place to live. The result is that Americans “increasingly live out of their cars because they can’t afford housing.” Some cities have taken to reserving parking lots exclusively for homeless workers. Young people have all but given up on the American dream of homeownership that their parents and grandparents achieved. “The Biden administration has effectively transformed homeownership into a luxury outside the reach of the middle class,” wrote the authors. It should not be this way. But Damian Eales, the CEO of realtor.com (a fellow News Corp.company), has a plan.
His “Let America Build” campaign launched this week identifies urgent policy changes that would ...