Housing costs are a top voter issue. Here’s how Harris and Trump compare on solutions.

The housing affordability crisis has spread so widely across America that both major presidential candidates are weighing in on a topic that usually gets little attention in national campaigns.

Whichever candidate is elected will face a daunting task.

Once mainly a problem for low-income residents in a handful of big cities, the lack of affordable housing now increasingly affects the middle class and communities nationwide. Home prices hit an all-time high this year, while surging rents stressed the finances of a record number of renters in 2022, the latest numbers available. Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that about 1 in 4 renters spend more than half their income on housing and utilities.

Both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump say they would address the problem by increasing the housing supply. In two areas, they even agree on how to do it. Both would use federal land to allow new housing projects and streamline permitting rules so homes could be built faster and more cheaply. But they face a fundamental problem.

The federal government has little sway over new housing permits. Instead, cities and towns increasingly restrict where they allow construction. Even places that once embraced growth, like Houston and Atlanta, are issuing fewer housing permits than they did 20 years ago.

Anxious to avoid overcrowded schools and streets, many desirable localities have made it hard to build new middle-class subdivisions, let alone affordable rental housing for people with low incomes. Homeowners have another reason to resist growth: home value.

“You’re … not going to convince people that it’s a great idea to destroy the value – or to lower the value – of their most precious asset” by increasing the housing stock, says Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economics professor and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. But that local, “not-in-my-backyard” logic – known as NIMBY – is dimming the American Dream of owning a home and moving up the income ladder – and slowing national economic growth.

Ms. Harris aims to overcome that local reluctance with federal incentives. Mr. Trump acknowledges NIMBYism and has even promised to protect it. “I will also stop Joe Biden’s sinister plan to abolish the suburbs,” he said in New Jersey. This means he would limit his deregulation push to federal rules.

Here’s what the candidates propose.

Vice President Harris:

• Sets a goal of 3 million new housing units in her first four years, boosting construction activity by roughly 50%. If successful, it would rival the peak of home building in the 1970s.
• Proposes a $40 billion Innovation Fund for Housing Expansion (double the Biden administration’s proposal), which would encourage more flexible local zoning and expanded development.
• Calls for a $25,000 down payment credit for the nation’s 4 million first-time homebuyers.
• Supports a boost for the tax credit that creates most of the nation’s low-income housing, including the development and renovation of single-family to four-family housing in distressed neighborhoods.
• Wants to stop institutional investors from buying homes in bulk and marking up prices.
• Seeks a 5% cap on rent hikes for corporate landlords, for two years.
• Pledges to curb price-fixing among corporate landlords. (In August, the Justice Department sued RealPage, a real estate software firm, charging that its price-setting tool allowed landlords to collude to raise rents.)

Former President Trump:

• Promises general low inflation and deregulation, which would allow mortgage rates to fall and homes to be built more cheaply.
• Points to his restrictive immigration policies as a solution to easing housing demand.
• Says he would ban federally backed mortgages for undocumented immigrants.
• Calls for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants to ease demand for low-income rental housing in large cities.

Some experts criticize Ms. Harris’ down payment assistance for first-time buyers, saying the effort could fan inflation and would be better spent helping builders make housing projects pencil out.

Others point out that Mr. Trump’s planned deportations could deprive employers, including home builders, of their most sought-after corps of workers, raising labor costs and fueling inflation the former president said he could avoid.

“The good news is Trump is saying, ‘Hey, we need housing!” says Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The problem is a lot of the stuff that he’s put forward either won’t be terribly successful or will have very severe and negative unintended consequences.”