The Housing Wealth Gap — The Hidden Narrative in the 2020 Presidential Elections
While the narrative behind how we think of the “American Dream” is slowly starting to turn, the American ideal of The Single Family Home is slowly starting to shift — Americans are now on path towards the slow, gradual acceptance of urban density over suburban sprawl, which has been a long time coming. This was the kind of the whole point of the YIMBY Arts project to begin with so I’d like to think that we made a contribution towards that cause, at least in a small way.
There’s a lot to unpack in the paragraph above, but here I’d like to focus on how this will affect the upcoming elections in the future — in particular, the presidential elections of 2020 coming up next year. Housing is something that very few politicians talk about, but is an issue that is ever-present in the things that we do day to day.
Hidden Inequality in Housing/Wealth
In the general elections, Democrats and Republicans will tell 2 different stories regarding how Americans are doing from an economic point of view. If you look at traditional measurements like GDP, stock prices, and unemployment rates the US economy is doing fairly well, and Trump will certainly be repeating those stats over and over during his reelection campaign in 2020. At the same time, it’s also true that almost 4 out of 5 Americans are living paycheck to paycheck right now, one accident away from going into colossal, inescapable debt. Which version of America is the “real” America?
The truth is that it’s both: it just depends whether or not you’re looped into the systems that the US relies upon to measure economic prosperity. In the US, ever since FDR’s New Deal the economic engine towards generating personal wealth has always been tied to homeownership, which still very much holds true today. We spend billions every year subsidizing homeowners (with taxpayer money, no less) for that dream, for better or worse.
I would argue, however, that it’s already taken a turn for the worst: The “homeowners first” program may have made sense when land was cheap and abundant, but given how Millennials, working-class people, and minority groups continue to get left out these engines, these policies have become more harmful than helpful to most Americans at this point. This problem could be easily solved by simply building more housing supply but since the US has been very resistant to the consideration of these types of solutions (especially at the local levels) we’ve now reached a point where we may be forced to rethink and re-evaluate what we value as a society, as a whole.
Most Americans right now don’t really have any real incentive to see the status quo succeed — if Trump destroys all of the systems, prestige, legitimacy, safeguards and apparatuses around it, so what? What’s in it for me?
Who’s Willing to Talk About Housing?
Though people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has strongly resonated with the psyche of the American public in ways both good and bad, what’s missing from her Green New Deal and policy proposals is the acknowledgment that single-family homes are, by far, the most problematic when it comes to America’s environmental and economic issues going forward. Infill housing towers over basically everything else in terms of its carbon-footprint —if you live in a suburban single family home, you will basically be wiping out all of your other contributions to combat climate change since one family taking up so much space and infrastructure for themselves is a huge luxury and a burden on society itself. And as mentioned above, the growing economic inequality being primarily about homeownership, the refusal to acknowledge the problem at its root will inevitably just lead to both parties kicking the can further down the road.
Knowing how smart and calculated AOC is in her political endeavors, she may be waiting for the right moment to pounce on these issues, when talking about housing becomes less of a taboo. Maybe her reference to the New Deal is her way of trying to trick people into talking about housing issues, since that’s where it all started to begin with. At the same time, if she’s not willing to go specific when the moment comes, she may end up exposing herself as a charlatan and yet-another-politician just telling people what they want to hear. Only time will tell.
So far there are only two candidates in the Democratic Party Primaries willing to talk about housing supply (the thing that will actually solve the problem) as part of their platform — Andrew Yang [who explicitly uses the word NIMBY in his platform] and Elizabeth Warren. Other candidates are willing to talk about the struggles of “ordinary Americans” but usually avoid talking about housing as part of the problem since it tends to be politically unpopular. The debates will bring more clarity to what issues Americans care about and what each candidate’s real priorities are, however.
Though seemingly polar opposites, AOC and Trump have one thing in common — they won by simply acknowledging the pain and struggles that ordinary Americans are going through right now, during this time of great economic and social change. People often criticize both candidates for their lack of “policy knowledge” but the general public is so desperate for the system to acknowledge them that they will probably immediately vote for anyone who is willing to speak to the pains of their everyday struggles. The Democrats did this very poorly in 2016 but this year they have the opportunity to nominate someone who has both the empathy and smarts to get the best of both worlds—or — they’ll make the same mistake again and sabotage their chances at unseating an incumbent president, which is looking more and more likely, at this point.
This was to be expected, but the moment Trump won he basically threw all of his voters under the bus and went right back to using traditional measurements (GDP, stock prices, unemployment) in order to tell people how “great things are” — the irony is that a lot of Democrats were doing this during Obama’s presidency as well, even as the wealth gap continued to to get wider. (Though to Obama’s credit, he never bragged about it like our current prez does.)
There are a lot of voters on the right who’re ready and willing to make the switch, but 2020 will come down to if the Democrats can really field a candidate that can really speak to working-class populations on that level. Yang and Warren stand out to me as being already there, but the debates can change all of that in an instant since potentially even the front-runners like Biden and Saunders could potentially surprise everyone with a more ambitious vision for where America could go in the future.
But it should be very clear by now that royalty candidates like the Clintons, Bushes, or Kennedy’s ought to be forgotten at this point — win or lose, the Trump presidency will be (hopefully) the last of its kind, at least for a while.
[Ryan is the Online Director at Abundant Housing LA. Views here are mine, not the organization’s. He’s also the founder of the YIMBY Arts Project, which is starting a gaming/political podcast series with Fallout 76 as its backdrop. Support the project by downloading the Brave Browser, using this link!]
