Vance and Walz spar over housing in VP debate

The candidates for vice president highlighted their housing policies in the VP debate on Tuesday night, one month out from election day. JD Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio, and Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, outlined how their parties would address the housing crisis.

After several housing mentions from both candidates in the first hour of the debate, CBS News moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan actually threw out a dedicated question specifically about housing issues.

In the weeks since they were selected as the respective running mates of Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, both VP candidates have spoken about the need to address housing issues.

Vance has previously railed against the presence of institutional investors in housing, immigration and “bloated” programs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), while Walz has championed the housing policies announced by Harris alongside a track record of implementing housing policy as governor of his state.

But Vance and Walz each come at their housing perspectives from very different ideologies and they were on full display during the debate.

Walz: housing is a path to middle class stability

“There’s a shortage of more than 4 million homes in the United States, and that contributes to the high housing prices,” Brennan began. She first turned to Walz, asking where a President Harris would build the 3 million new homes she promised in her sweeping housing plan.

“The problem we’ve had is that we’ve got a lot of folks that see housing as another commodity,” Walz said. “It can be bought up, it can be shifted, it can be moved around. Those are not folks living in those houses.”

Tim Walz

Walz referenced the $3 billion housing plan he signed into law as governor, calling it the “biggest investment that we’d ever made in housing” and saying it helped to “cut red tape” for state housing programs. But Walz also said that there is only so much that could be done about housing at the federal level.

“Local folks make it easier to build those homes,” he said. With respect to the vice president’s downpayment assistance plan, Walz drew comparisons to a veteran’s home loan, saying that one advantage veterans have is that they “don’t have to pay the downpayment. You’re going to pay it back, and you’re going to pay your mortgage. Those are things that we know in the long run, the appreciated value, the generational wealth that’s created from it.”

Walz went on to say that Minneapolis has benefited from low inflation and a 12% increase in housing stock, “because we strip some of these things in, and we’re implementing a state program to make sure we give some of that downpayment assistance.”

Walz added that stable housing is a path to stable jobs, and a safer home life for kids, which saves taxpayers money in the long run. He also took a shot at some of Vance’s stated positions related to immigration and housing.

“We can’t blame immigrants,” Walz said. “The fact of the matter is that we don’t have enough naturally affordable housing, but we can make sure that the government’s there to help kick start it [and] create that base.”

Vance: immigration raises housing costs, energy plan can help

The moderators then directed the question to Vance, saying that President Trump’s housing proposals are primarily centered on seizing federal lands to build homes, remove regulation, provide tax breaks and curb illegal border crossings.

When asked about the immediate impact on housing affordability these proposals would have, Vance began by expressing some agreement with Walz.

“We don’t want to blame immigrants for higher housing prices, but we do want to blame Kamala Harris for letting in millions of illegal aliens into this country, which does drive up costs,” Vance said. “25 million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country. It’s why we have massive increases in home prices that have happened right alongside massive increases in illegal alien populations under Kamala Harris’s leadership.”

JD Vance

Vance also said some of Walz’s expressed housing ideas were “halfway decent,” but said that the vice president has had the chance to implement some of the policy proposals she has made during the Biden-Harris term of office.

“If she wants to enact all of these policies to make housing more affordable, I invite her to use the office that the American people already gave her, not sit around and campaign and do nothing while Americans find the American dream of homeownership completely unaffordable,” Vance said.

Vance also said that the Trump campaign’s energy plan would serve to make housing more affordable.

“One of the biggest drivers of housing costs, aside from illegal immigration, is [energy],” Vance said. “Think about it: if a truck driver is paying 40% more for diesel than the lumber he’s delivering to the job site to build, the house is also going to become a lot more expensive. If we open up American energy, you will get immediate pricing release relief for American citizens, not  — by the way — just in housing, but in a whole host of other economic goods, too.”

Vance came in 23 seconds under time with this response, and when offered an opportunity to add more he expanded on Trump’s federal lands proposal.

“What Donald Trump has said is, we have a lot of federal lands that aren’t being used for anything,” he said. “They’re not being used for national parks, and they could be places where we build a lot of housing. And I do think that we should be opening up building in this country. We have a lot of land that could be used.

“We have a lot of Americans that need homes,” Vance continued. “We should be kicking out illegal immigrants who are competing for those homes, and we should be building more homes for the American citizens who deserve to be here.”

Final clash

In the final moments of the housing section, Walz criticized Vance’s characterization of illegal border crossings during the Biden-Harris term, but also said that the federal lands proposal comes with caveats.

“Are we going to drill and build houses on the same federal land?” Walz asked. “When people hear federal lands, these are really important pieces of land,” saying that as a national parks enthusiast he would be concerned about a policy that might target them.

“But again, this is when you view housing, and you view these things as commodities, like there’s a chance to make money here,” Walz said. “I think there’s better ways to do this. We’ve seen it in Minnesota. We’re able to refurbish some of these houses, and were able to make some investments.”

Vance stated that a study by the Federal Reserve helps corroborate the Trump campaign’s claims about immigration driving up housing. Reporters at the New York Times said during the debate that it wasn’t immediately clear which study Vance was referring to, but Vance stated that the campaign would share the literature on social media after the fact.

But Vance ended the housing section of the debate criticizing the regulatory structure of the Biden-Harris administration, saying that Harris has helped lead an administration “that makes it harder to develop our resources, makes it harder to build things, and wants to throw people in jail for not doing everything exactly as Kamala Harris says they have to do [them],” Vance said. “And what that means is that you have a lot of people who would love to build homes, who aren’t able to build homes.”

The housing section of the debate ended with Vance reiterating the belief that immigration continues to drive housing costs higher.

“I actually agree with Tim Walz,” he said. “We should get out of this idea of housing as a commodity. But the thing that has most turned housing into a commodity is giving it away to millions upon millions of people who have no legal right to be here.”