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Excerpt from lidblog.com
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign has unveiled a new scheme to facilitate home building and home purchases with hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies, including a $25,000 first-time homebuyer subsidy. The campaign estimates that it will cost $100 billion to facilitate 1 million first-time home purchases a year over the next four years.
Additionally, Harris wants to expand homebuilder tax credits to facilitate the construction of an additional 3 million new units over that time.
Similar incentives are already used by Congress via the Departments of Housing and Urban Development and Treasury to facilitate home and apartment construction and renovation, including $3.3 billion of community development block grants, but what Harris is proposing is much larger.
In the 2000s, underwriting standards were reduced to facilitate an expansion of mortgage loans to homebuyers. According to the New York Federal Reserve data, a massive injection of credit as mortgage debt nearly doubled from $4.9 trillion in 2003 to $9.29 trillion by the end of 2008, as home prices jumped a gargantuan 40 percent according to the Freddie Mac Home Price Index. The number of mortgage holders had skyrocketed from 80 million in 2003 to 98 million in 2008. From 2003 to 2007, more than 9 million new privately owned units were put onto the market.
