| Housing has traditionally been a city or state issue in politics, but Vice President Kamala Harris has been touting ideas for improving affordability as she campaigns for the presidency. Businessweek editor Laura Bliss writes about how we got here. Plus: The perils of a Fed rate cut this close to the election, the future of Microsoft’s Xbox and more safety problems at Yosemite National Park. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. The modern US electorate is fickle when it comes to screening résumés for president. Some candidates are compelling enough that they require zero time in elected office to win the White House. For others, certain forms of executive leadership experience—ostensibly useful—seem to be a liability. For a long time, governorships were a launchpad to the White House, but that’s no longer the case: George W. Bush was the last governor to win the presidency. As for candidates who’ve held office in local government, they’ve struggled in recent history to move past primaries. The last time a former mayor of any city won the White House was Calvin Coolidge.  Harris, if elected, could use the bully pulpit to push for more housing. Photographer: Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg If she wins, Kamala Harris would be one of the rare presidents to have been an elected official in a major metropolitan area. Although she’s never been mayor, she served as district attorney of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011. Coupled with her time as California attorney general, Harris has campaigned heavily on that experience, playing up her identity as a prosecutor in contrast with Donald Trump’s criminal record. She might not be namechecking San Francisco much—or her hometown of Berkeley—but unlike in 2020, she’s touting past achievements such as raising conviction rates for violent offenders and promising to continue the Biden administration’s support of law enforcement. Harris’ focus on housing, traditionally viewed as a local issue, is even more striking in light of her big-city bona fides. She has made access to homeownership a central pillar of her economic policy plan, with pledges to create a $25,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers and to crack down on corporate landlords. She’s also presented ideas for increasing the housing supply, including a $40 billion fund to support “local innovations in housing supply solutions,” new tax incentives for developers and promises to streamline the bureaucratic processes that can bog down projects. She has a specific goal: to build three million new homes in her first term. These are the kind of technocratic fixes championed by the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement, a political framework adopted by activists who view housing affordability as mainly an issue of supply and seek to undo restrictions to building more of it. YIMBYism grew out of San Francisco’s exorbitant rental landscape about a decade ago and has since been adopted by many of the city’s top political leaders, including some of Harris’ closest allies. “It just seems like Harris is cognizant of these things, and she’s pushed them up the policy agenda in a way that is in common with the people with whom she was in political coalition with in San Francisco,” says David Schleicher, a professor of property and urban law at Yale Law School. Harris’ campaign did not respond to requests for comment, including on the question of whether she considers herself a YIMBY. But what would it mean to have a president so attuned to America’s housing shortage—and, apparently, sympathetic to the YIMBY philosophy? Although it’s too soon to say what effect Harris’ proposals would have, some experts doubt they’d be enough to meet that three million unit goal, which would represent a roughly 50% increase in current levels of production. “The ideas that the campaign has put forward, frankly, are not going to get us there by themselves,” says Yonah Freemark, principal research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute. “We would need a very large number of different initiatives from different levels of government to ramp up housing supply to reach levels like that.” Part of the challenge strikes at the heart of why housing has traditionally been viewed as a local issue: Even if Congress succeeded in passing laws promoting (for example) high-density housing development—which is already a long shot—it could be difficult to enforce them, because local governments are ultimately the ones with power to veto projects or saddle them with requirements that raise the cost of construction. However, there’s another way a president could influence housing: with the power of the bully pulpit. “If she just showed up and gave testimony at, you know, a fight going on in a Manhattan community board, or a Bronx community board, it would be the craziest thing that’s ever happened,” Schleicher says. A slightly less crazy version to imagine is Harris weighing in on those types of fights through the usual forms of presidential communication, like speeches or letters. In blue cities, residents and leaders might be receptive. But there’s a risk, given that the affordable housing shortage is no longer a problem solely besetting places like San Francisco and New York. It’s an everywhere problem, which is presumably why Harris has made it a focus of her campaign. And YIMBYism has been adopted by a remarkably bipartisan swath of politicians from both red and blue America. A polarizing executive taking up the issue could jeopardize that coalition. “I don’t entirely know whether the president being the chief cheerleader here would be hugely effective,” Freemark says. “I think people get very resistant, especially when you have partisan conflict.” Related: Businessweek’s October cover story is out now, and it’s all about understanding Kamala Harris—who she is, and what she might do if she wins. You can read the whole thing here.  Illustration: PS Spencer for Bloomberg Businessweek | 
