Last week, the Harris-Walz campaign unveiled multiple economic policy proposals, including a plan for housing. Attention being paid to housing issues is both welcome and urgent. Home prices have increased by 47 percent since the beginning of 2020, rents jumped 30.4 percent nationwide between 2019 and 2023, and half of all US renters are now rent-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent. Meanwhile, the number of unhoused people reached an all-time high of 653,100 in 2023, eviction filings in many cities far exceed pre-pandemic levels, and real estate investors bought 18 percent of all homes and 26 percent of all “low-priced” homes sold in the fourth quarter of 2023. The housing sector is in dire need of a sweeping overhaul.

However, while recent polling has shown that voters strongly favor measures such as rent control and federally funded social housing over indirect incentive-based approaches to alleviate the various crises related to housing, the Harris-Walz proposal essentially doubles down on the existing paradigm: more public subsidies, more tax incentives, and more empty hopes that developers will solve things.

Although the majority of ideas presented in the agenda are quite vague, here’s a quick look at what they might mean and what, in all likelihood, they will and won’t achieve.