The Biden White House announced on Tuesday that it would move to limit rent increases by corporate landlords. The plan would also open surplus federal land for housing construction and allegedly revitalize cities devastated by Joe Biden’s policies and street soldiers.
This is the White House statement.
President Biden is taking action to make renting more affordable for millions of Americans. Today, President Biden is announcing new actions to lower housing costs, including:
- Calling on Congress to pass legislation giving corporate landlords a choice to either cap rent increases on existing units at 5% or risk losing current valuable federal tax breaks;
- Repurposing public land sustainably to enable as many as 15,000 additional affordable housing units to be built in Nevada; and
- Rehabilitating distressed housing, building more affordable housing, and revitalizing neighborhoods, including in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The President called on Congress to make the American Dream a reality for more families by passing the Biden-Harris Housing Plan, which would build 2 million homes, and provide $10,000 in mortgage relief to unlock homeownership for millions of Americans. Already, more units are under construction than at any time in over 50 years, and the rate of new housing starts is up 17 percent compared to the last Administration.
Can we take a moment here to fact-check another egregious lie by the Biden White House?
U.S. single-family homebuilding fell to an eight-month low in June amid higher mortgage rates, suggesting the housing market was likely a drag on economic growth in the second quarter.
…
The number of housing units under construction fell 1.5% to a rate of 1.563 million units, the lowest level since January 2022. The inventory of single-family housing under construction dropped 1.3% to a rate of 668,000 units.
Biden claims the most housing units under construction in 50 years. The numbers call bullshit. pic.twitter.com/TyaLMDwPRg
— streiff (@streiffredstate) July 17, 2024
Check the data for yourself.
The policy was announced as the GOP convention got underway in Milwaukee as a ploy to draw some of the spotlight away from that event and to convince wary and weary Democrats that Biden still has what it takes, even though for four years they have ignored Barack Obama’s sage advice: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.” For instance, Biden’s announcement of this scam.
Biden says he’s going to cap rent raises to $55.00
🤡🤡
The teleprompter probably said 5%
A president doesn’t have that power, yet he says Trump is who will be a “dictator”
— Phil Holloway ✈️ (@PhilHollowayEsq) July 17, 2024
For more on Biden’s bizarre performance, read Bochie’s Biden in Vegas Shouts at the NAACP, Battles the Teleprompter, and Praises the BLM Riots.
Taken on the whole, it is a fraudulent effort that is doomed to fail for two reasons. First, Congress isn’t going to pass this monstrosity as an election looms in which Biden must be seen as the underdog. Second, the rent control portion of the bill appears to be patently illegal unless the corporations entered into some sort of financing agreement with the government with that stipulation prior to the passage of the proposed law.
As the Washington Post pointed out, one of the few things that mainstream economists agree on is that rent control destroys housing.
The plan is also likely to prove controversial among economists, including many Democrats. Experts on both sides of the aisle tend to argue that government limits on rent discourage new development by making it less lucrative. Housing is so expensive in America in large part because there simply aren’t enough homes, with economists estimating a shortage of between 1.5 million to 5 million units. With construction and labor costs already high, some fear that developers could respond to new restrictions by reducing new construction.
“Rent control has been about as disgraced as any economic policy in the tool kit. The idea we’d be reviving and expanding it will ultimately make our housing supply problems worse, not better,” said Jason Furman, who served as a top economist in the Obama administration and is now a professor at Harvard.
The Wall Street Journal provides more details on how the Biden plan would benefit only Joe Biden’s reelection propaganda.
Enter Mr. Biden, who on Tuesday pitched conditioning “valuable federal tax breaks” on landlords capping rent increases at 5% annually. The White House says its plan would apply to “corporate” landlords with more than 50 units, covering more than 20 million units or roughly half the country’s rental stock.
What are such lucrative tax breaks? The press release refers to “faster depreciation write-offs.” Under the current tax code, residential rental property owners can depreciate a building’s value over 27.5 years, rather than 39 as for other types of commercial real estate. A shorter depreciation schedule increases the incentive to invest in rental housing.
Conditioning this tax benefit on landlords limiting rents to 5% would do the opposite. It would reduce and could even eliminate the return on rental housing investments, especially since inflation has driven up insurance, construction and maintenance costs. Investors will have to pay higher taxes or accept a lower return. The Administration wants to increase subsidies for affordable housing even as it promotes policies to make such projects less financially attractive.
This nonsense, like the malarkey of his Supreme Court plan (Biden Coming After the Supreme Court—Wants Term Limits, Enforceable Ethics Code, Immunity Amendment), is just fodder for the truly stupid among his followers. No one has asked why Biden waited until the last months of his misrule and after a humiliating and disastrous debate performance to announce these major undertakings instead of doing them in his first two years when he controlled the Congress and was not viewed as an animatronic turnip by the public.
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