Harris to propose up to $25K in down-payment support for 1st-time homebuyers

How about this: crank up the taxes on houses people don't live in. Make owning empty real estate so unprofitable that it's better to rent it out cheap than to try to screw renters.

Make it a crime to own an empty house.

That's a terrible idea. The real life effect is that prices will simply go up. You need to force down real estate prices in general, and offer very low interest rates for first time buyers.

Having experienced this kind of policy in Australia; it’s great in theory - but the issue is that builders/sellers just ended up jacking up the prices of their homes to absorb the grant.

can't wait for all homes to go up 25k in response. Without purchase control this is useless

This would be great but you know centrists will fuck it up and it’ll be like, “You can get up to $25,000 as a tax credit if you’re a veteran who owns a small business in an opportunity zone and have a low income but also somehow have a spouse who is a lawyer and can spend 30h finding and filling out the paperwork and tracking down bank statements from when you both were 19.”

We had a help to buy scheme in the UK similar to what Harris is proposing. Spoiler warning: it didn't help.

Only thing that will stem the demand is a massive house construction scheme and outright building new cities.

They should give lower interest rates to those with less means instead of the other way around.

This can absolutely change people's lives. Paying rent can make it impossible to save for a down payment. A 30k windfall (inheritance) helped my wife and I make the down payment on our first house. And then our mortgage payments were cheaper than our rent was. Even if the overall "sticker price" of a home is higher, it's a negligible difference over the lifetime of a loan.

The plan to make housing affordable has been known for years, decades even.

You don't cut prices, because it means cash-rich buyers will buy up the stock as investment in the long-term.

You don't (only) give people money to buy, because you're giving money to people that own property as a portfolio piece.

You:

• Freeze rent so that any increases fall below inflation, making it a long-term loss, but stable in the very short term.
• Provide opportunities for people to buy their rental properties, with tax incentives for those that sell at a cheaper rate.
• Freeze house prices and gradually drop over the long-term, so that they are a slowly depreciating asset.
• Assist those that wish to buy their rental properties.
• (Forgot to add this) Agree a gradual drop over the space of several years to push the price of a house down.

This gives those that own multiple houses the means to sell property with a one-time tax benefit. You'll lose money initially, but in the long term people can afford houses and the market will move on from property as an investment piece. The reason no one wants to do this is because it'll take years to come to fruition, and most leadership terms aren't that long.

Helping with a down payment makes it easier for a homeowner to assume debt, but that doesn't make the houses cheaper.

Yeah. Throw more money instead of punishing predatory lenders and speculators. Jesus.

This will just add to the house price inflation.

This is a band-aid that does nothing to fix the problem. This kind of "solution" was implemented in my country as well. The direct result was an increase in housing prices across the board.

The problem isn't that people are lacking the money for a downpayment. The problem is that volatility in the job market combined with ever increasing prices means you can't commit to buy a place of your own and pay it for the next 30 years, because the first time you lose your job you'll have lost all progress towards owning your home.

The fix you want is government-built housing. Make a neighborhood with government money. Sell the apartment for 1/3 of the price if the buyer is a teacher/fireman/doctor/other high-demand jobs in governmental employ. That way you fill the positions, the housing prices stop going up, and young people get to securely purchase a house before they're 50.

But of course, that's not the end-goal, is it? No the objective is to make more money for those who already own all the land and houses. And there's no need to spend time thinking about it, just make some fucking vouchers. We all know who'll end up cashing them in.

I'd rather have a fix for our broken credit system. Denying someone a loan that will be a 2200$ house payment in an area where they will be lucky to get a 3k apartment is insane.

Mannnnn I just want a home but it'll take more than this

This is a band aid size solution on the gaping wound problem of housing shortage. She should really be putting her time into coming up with an answer to increasing housing supply

Won't help with high property values, high taxes, and unaffordable home insurance.

I'd rather they raise the cap on deductions (mortgage interest, state and local taxes) back to how it used to be Pre-Trump and give additional tax rebates to first time home buyers. His tax bill raised my effective tax rate a shitload. I would never have been able to buy my first house without those provisions.

The real solution is probably to build unfathomable quantities of publically owned housing and rent them out at affordable prices. I suspect this won't meaningfully move the needle on the issue.

How long would it take for the sellers to price in those extra 25k they can wring out of buyers?

Just build more houses. Costs are out of control. I'm in my 40s, and have a good down payment saved up, but prices and interest rates mean I'm still priced out of buying a home.

In this generation helping home buyers is like helping the wealthy. Most of us have no hope in hell of ever coming close to buying.

Harris is basically become Frodo Baggins and Walz is all about the PO-TAY-TOES

This isn't fair to people like me, who were fortunate enough to buy their first house without 25k from the government. Won't someone think about how disadvantaged I am!

I mean that means if you can find 10 best friends you can all pitch in to put 50% down on a 500 sqft condo in a major city, right? This means its essentially paying a 7x7 ft square of housing at the federal level. Realistically they'd need to start at 90k and state and local govs should pitch in another 90k each to make home buying in most cities affordable.

this will get all kinds of messed up. I had one of these years ago. It used to be you had to take a home ownership course. Had to earn under X amount and not have owned a home in the prior 9 years. You had I think 10 months to find house.

NOW you have to be of a specific demographic, the sum us larger. and yay need ti already be in close on the house. Which is nuts because if you are already in closing there's a huge chance when you go to apply the funds are gone. Can't afford the house. Before, the grants were limited/. But you knew before CLOSE that they were out of grands for the year.

You said this last time when you ran with Biden.

Finally, paying your rent on time will have some kind of reward.

Am I a first time home buyer if I moved for a job and have been renting at the new location for 3+ years?

As long as they don't add any "if you own a business in a disadvantaged community for two years" BS to the end of it, neat policy. Would be great if they paired it with something that will bring prices down while helping people who aren't in the "can potentially afford a house" income bracket, like a massive federal public housing program.

It’s probably mostly going to be used by people buying second homes for renting out

Edit glad they’re thinking of doing it, but I think qualifying for the program needs to be made strict to ensure against first time home buyer fraud

That sounds like an incredibly horrible idea with tons of unintended consequences. I hope almost nothing less than a Trump presidency, so I hope this is not a sign of things to expect from her campaign.

Then again, people are dumb, so if this somehow convinces them to vote for her instead of the orange catastrophe, it might be fine.

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