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Kamala Harris on Welfare & PovertyDemocratic candidate for President (withdrawn); California Senator |
KAMALA HARRIS: To your point, doesn't support our friend Ukraine, doesn't support, something America should always, and has always been a champion of, which is the importance of sovereignty and territorial integrity, which means the importance of standing against anyone who tries to take another nation by force. That's what we stand for as Americans, that you don't do that. And if you do that to our friends, we're going to stand with our friends.
Her plan is light on details: the construction funding (she targets $40bn) would go to local governments, who would need to find their own solutions. Meanwhile, other elements would cut against her ambitious supply targets. She vows to go after Wall Street investors, whom she decries as "buying up and marking up homes in bulk". They actually own less than 1% of America's single-family homes, and have been building, rather than just buying, homes. Another pledge--one that received loud applause when she unveiled it in a speech in North Carolina on August 16th--is to give first-time homebuyers $25,000 towards downpayments on mortgages. With demand for homes still outstripping supply, extra cash of this kind may just translate into higher prices.
The Vice President announced a crucial infusion of funds to address the country's critical housing needs: $5.5 billion in grants to 1,200 communities through more than 2,400 grants. These grants build on ongoing efforts by the Administration, the White House Housing Supply Action Plan and the Blueprint for a Renters Bill of Rights, boost housing supply, lower housing costs, expand rental assistance, enhance renter protections, and invest in stronger, more resilient communities.
"Homeownership is an essential part of the American Dream that represents so much more than a roof over our heads. For people all across our nation, a home represents financial security, the opportunity to build wealth and equity," said Vice President Harris.
So, today, we are investing $85 million, with another $100 million later, to help more than 20 cities remove these barriers. One such barrier is that it can be difficult for affordable housing developers to be able to afford to buy and develop land. To address this, in Milwaukee, our investment will help the city provides subsidies to builders to help them develop vacant lots and abandoned buildings into affordable housing.
Another barrier that often limits building is insufficient infrastructure. For example, in Denver, there are plots of land available but not yet connected to the electric grid. Through this investment, we will help Denver offer loans to developers to build the power lines and water mains that are necessary for new housing.
HARRIS: Part of what I plan to do is through the tax code, so that if anyone is spending more than 30 percent of their income in rent plus utilities, you get a tax credit. And part of my plan is to create grants for people who live in federally subsidized housing or in historically red-lined communities to give them down payments and closing costs for homeownership. And then we need to create incentives for affordable housing.
FOUR CANDIDATES HAVE SIMILAR VIEWS: Cory Booker; John Delaney; John Hickenlooper; Amy Klobuchar.
Harris is calling for a massive expansion of the EITC, including nearly doubling the income cutoff for eligibility. Hickenlooper and Delaney want to double the EITC. Delaney also wants to make it available to people without children. Booker would increase EITC income eligibility level from $54k to $90k, boost the credit for childless workers.
Sen. Kamala Harris has introduced legislation to create a new tax credit for renters who spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent, capped at the fair-market rent for the area and scaled to the renter's income. She has also proposed a new $100 billion plan to close the racial wealth gap by providing down payment and closing cost assistance to people renting or living in historically red-lined neighborhoods.
The Rent Relief Act ($93 billion a year) would offer a refundable tax credit to people making $100,000 or less and spending at least 30% of their income on rent. The credit would be worth a certain percentage of the difference between their rent and 30% of their income. For the poorest renters, the credit would cover the full difference; for slightly less poor renters, 75%, and so on.
The LIFT Act Rent Relief Act would provide $42 billion to people in poverty.
Ending the foreclosure crisis has become Harris' signature issue. She often visits hard-hit neighborhoods. "You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them," Harris said. She successfully pushed through a first-of-its-kind Homeowner Bill of Rights. It requires banks to provide a single point of contact for California homeowners and stop the practice of dual tracking, in which lenders move ahead with a foreclosure, even while they're negotiating with the homeowner to modify a loan. California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill into law this month.
Harris has taken on the country's biggest banks before, suing them for foreclosure abuses. Harris got $18 billion with $12 billion of that amount going toward helping underwater homeowners.