For top candidates, homeownership not a hot topic on the campaign trail
Previous Clinton and Bush made it integral part of presidencies
If the American Dream has meant anything, it’s owning your home.
“No greater contribution could be made to the stability of the nation and the advancement of its ideals,’’ President Calvin Coolidge said 90 years ago, “than to make it a nation of home-owning families.’’ Nearly eight decades later, President Clinton left office boasting of “the highest homeowning rate in our history.’’
That rate was even higher in 2004, when President George W. Bush accepted the GOP nomination and touted “the ownership society.’’
But in this presidential election, homeownership is an issue no candidate wants to own, and few even touch.
This was apparent last week at a conference in New Hampshire on what its organizers called “the silent housing crisis.’’ Speaker after speaker bemoaned the candidates’ neglect of falling homeownership and rising rents.
Housing is “the least talked about issue on the campaign trail,’’ said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R- S.C., one of seven presidential candidates to speak at the conference. “Most politicians have no idea.’’
According to the Terwilliger Foundation, which specializes in housing and organized the conference, almost 11 million renter households (27% of all renters)
pay more than half their incomes for housing. Homeownership has been falling for the past decade, leaving the rate (63.4%) where it was in 1967.
If this is a crisis, it drew none of the leading candidates to the conference at Saint Anselm College — not Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina or Donald Trump.
Why isn’t anyone talking about housing? Two reasons:
First, the attempt by the Clinton and Bush administrations to create more homeowners by making it much easier to get mortgages is seen as a primary cause of the housing bubble that
helped plunge the nation into a recession from which it’s still recovering.
Second, terms such as “affordable housing ’’ and “subsidized housing ’’ turn off some voters, especially the more conservative.
“When people hear ‘affordable housing,’ they think ‘public housing,’ ’’ explained former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, another of the candidates at the conference. The term “workforce housing ’’ — denoting middleclass stalwarts such as teachers and police officers — is more inclusive, he said.
Whatever you call it, housing was missing from the televised debates, despite the political resonance usually associated with such a national ideal.
“This is a classic example of why people have turned off to politics,’’ says Joel Kotkin, a scholar at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., who advocates more support for homeownership. “It shows the disconnect between the political class and what people are thinking about, especially Millennials,’’ who bear the burden of rising rents and are often shut out of home owning.
Homeownership can be politically fraught.
In July, then-candidate Rick Perry said the Great Recession was partly caused by the efforts of Hillary Clinton’s husband to increase homeownership. Low-interest loans backed by federal mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused a housing bubble, then a financial crisis, he said.
“If Secretary Clinton wants to take credit for the ‘Clinton economy,’ then she must defend the destructive homeownership policies advocated by her husband that pushed shoddy loans to people who couldn’t afford them, and the economic chaos that followed,” Perry said.
He also attacked Jeb Bush on housing policy, saying he did not do enough to cope with the housing crash when he was Florida governor.
Even those at the New Hampshire conference were not above jabbing the policies that created millions of new homeowners. “A guy in jail is probably not a good candidate for a mortgage,’’ Graham said. “We went too far.”
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee criticized the pre-2007 “push to get people into homes. … We so relaxed the definition of affordability that people were buying homes they couldn’t afford. … That led to a disaster.”
Which is why housing has been politically ostracized. “No candidate wants to push what so recently failed,” says Christopher Leinberger, who teaches, writes and consults on housing.
“It’s not the sexiest issue in the world, and it kind of depresses people,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said.
“(This issue) shows the disconnect between the political class and what people are thinking about.” Joel Kotkin, a scholar at Chapman University