Ohio Republican Senator J.D. Vance draws his popularity and political bona fide from his military career in the United States. United States Marine Corpshis education level is Yale Law Schoolhis work for state and federal politicians, and his experience as a venture capitalist. He published his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” in June 2016. new york times“is on the bestseller list and was adapted into a movie in 2020.
But Vance had bigger ambitions, and after seeking the Republican nomination United States Senate In Ohio, he won election to the seat in 2022 and has served since early 2023. political image.
Impact of immigration on housing
Unlike Tim Walz, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s vice presidential choice and Minnesota governor since 2019, Vance’s lack of executive experience means he has never served in a position aimed at A political position that implements policy.
But since his election, he has been a key member of the Senate’s Republican minority. He is a member of the larger Senate Banking Committee and its subcommittee devoted to housing, as well as a member of the agency’s Special Committee on Aging.
Before being selected as the Republican presidential nominee, Vance spoke at the annual National Conservative Conference in Washington, D.C., where he addressed the housing issue and tied it to broader national immigration issues. Vance said immigration had a direct impact on rising home prices in some neighborhoods and blamed “elites” for “flooding” the city.[ing] An area with a constant supply of cheap labor.
“The places with the highest immigration rates in our own communities and states are also the places with the highest housing prices,” Vance said in his speech. “It’s not a question of correlation and causation. If you really look at it metro by metro, parcel by parcel, Observe, you will find that the more immigrants there are, the higher housing prices will be.
Criticism from institutional investors
Vance also raised the issue of housing when he accepted the vice presidential nomination at this year’s Republican National Convention, citing the generational gap in homeownership.
“A few months ago, I heard some young family members observe that their parents’ generation, the baby boomers, were able to afford a home when they first entered the workforce,” Vance said. “But ‘I don’t know,’ this guy says, ‘if I can afford a house.’ Ridiculous housing costs are the result of many failures, and it shines a light on Washington’s problems.
Vance blamed the lack of affordability for young people on the 2008 financial crisis, saying: “Wall Street tycoons caused the economy to collapse and American builders went bankrupt. Homes stopped being built as businessmen scrambled to find jobs. Of course, there was a lack of good Work keeps wages stagnant.
Vance has been critical of the presence of institutional investors in rental housing, particularly national housing conference (NHC) President and CEO David Dworkin.
Dworkin’s work highlights a local appearance abc news Vance’s branch in Columbus, Ohio, was asked if he would support a bill introduced by his Democratic colleagues in the Senate that would curb the activity of institutional investors in housing.
“They can get lower interest rates [and] Money is cheaper, and they completely crowd out the housing supply for people who just want to buy a part of the community,” Vance said. The news report also highlighted the growing prevalence of single-family homes owned by out-of-state institutional investors, who have raised rents and broken ground on new rental housing complexes.
While his Senate colleague Sherrod Brown (D) drafted a bill called the Stop Predatory Investing Act, no Republicans supported it. When asked about it by a local ABC affiliate, Vance said most proposals aimed at solving the problem don’t go far enough.
Homelessness and HUD
Dworkin also highlighted the questions Vance posed to Lou Tisler. National Association of Neighborhood Worksduring a 2023 Senate Banking Committee hearing on a “Housing First” approach to addressing homelessness. Vance explained that he believed the effectiveness of the program was questionable.
“I’m concerned that a ‘Housing First’ approach will impact a lot of people who are struggling and very much deserve our compassion, although I think how we provide that compassion is up for debate,” Vance said. “But it will also suffer. People who have serious drug problems and serious mental illness issues are brought into communities where kids are already in very unstable situations and now things like drug use are normalized around them.
Vance also criticized Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers in Hillbilly Elegy, with Dworkin describing Vance’s views as expressing “deep divisions within poor rural and exurban communities over federal aid programs, sometimes by the same people.” differences held.
According to a Business Insider report in May 2023, Vance believes that through U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) “bloat,” exacerbating inflationary pressures on housing costs.
“I think a significant portion of HUD’s budget could actually be cut, and it could be cut in a way that preserves housing assistance for poor families,” Vance said. “It’s been positioned as ‘ruthless by congressional Republicans.’ , because they want to pass these spending cuts. Well, I think the more ruthless thing to do would be to do nothing and let inflation continue to get out of hand, interest rates higher, rents higher, mortgages higher for American families.
