Former President Barack Obama speaks at the DNC. Nate Gowdy
The immediate reaction He noted that former President Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night sounded a lot like statements he has made before. He asked the crowd at Chicago’s United Center if they were “excited” and reworded his 2008 campaign mantra to please the vice president: “Yes, she can.” Local Democrats say they are experiencing an enthusiasm not seen since Obama’s first campaign; the former commander in chief was happy to indulge their newfound hope.
But one item on his agenda sounded very different from the old Obama.
“We can’t just rely on the ideas of the past, we have to find a new way forward to meet the challenges of today, and Kamala understands that,” Obama said, rattling off the main points of Harris’ domestic agenda. “For example, she knows that if we want to make it easier for young people to buy their own homes, we need to build more housing units — and eliminate some of the outdated laws and regulations that have made it harder for working people in this country to build homes. That’s a priority, and she’s put forward a bold new plan to do just that.”
That’s right — the push for zoning reform has gone presidential. Obama’s extensive convention addresses are a useful barometer of the party’s position. I checked to see if any of his previous convention speeches addressed the housing shortage that has strained the finances of low- and middle-income Americans, displaced working people and spawned a homelessness crisis in places like Los Angeles and New York City. The topic never came up in 2020 or 2016. In 2012, in the wake of a severe recession triggered by predatory mortgage lenders, Obama did talk about housing — but only about the idea of making it greener. In 2008, when that housing bubble burst, he talked about falling property values – but that’s a very different problem than an affordability crisis caused by limited supply and high demand. The idea that the government should pave the way for a massive housing boom was simply not what people were talking about in prime time.
“I plead guilty,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont told me this week after praising Harris’ proposal. “It just wasn’t as high on the agenda as it should have been. It’s an issue that’s staring us in the face. You know, two blocks from the Capitol, people are sleeping on the streets. I’m talking to people who are spending 50, 60 percent of their income on housing. It’s an issue that we should have been dealing with, and we need to be bold.”
The failure to address the housing crisis has also become embedded in the Republican message of late, albeit in a very different way. Much of Trump’s narrative of “American carnage” in predominantly Democratic cities is really a story about the aftermath – things like tent cities and visible drug use. At the Republican National Convention last month, Senator JD Vance of Ohio even offered a radical solution to the crisis.
“The absurdly high cost of housing is the result of so many failures and it says so much about the problems in Washington,” he said in his speech at the convention. In his story, “Wall Street barons crashed the economy and American construction companies went bankrupt,” and then “tradesmen were looking for jobs, houses were no longer being built.” And then: “The Democrats flooded this country with millions of illegal immigrants. So citizens had to compete for valuable housing – with people who shouldn’t actually be here.”
His and Trump’s plan was to free up housing by deporting eleven million people.
