(Connor O'Brien / Heights Editor)
Look no further than the Democrats to understand America’s “housing crisis.” From the questionable personal loan applications to local rent control measures, high mortgage rates, and burdensome regulatory costs across the country, Democrats’ fingerprints are all over its causes.
It is rich indeed that Democrats—the self-professed party of the little guy—are themselves rich. Some are so rich that they can have multiple houses with more than one serving as their primary residence, as the Department of Justice alleges in ongoing investigations into Biden-appointed Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and California Senator Adam Schiff.
Each is alleged to have taken mortgages while claiming more than one home as a primary residence because such a claim gets a lower mortgage rate. But mortgage fraud like this was a root cause of the Great Recession. And it’s an even bigger problem for those overseeing the nation’s money supply, in Cook’s case, enforcing laws, like James, or making the nation’s laws, as Schiff does. People in these positions should know better—and do better.
Democrats’ faults in housing hardly stop with headlines about prominent members. At the local level, rent control is a prime driver of limiting the availability of housing. Rent control is a windfall for the “haves” who already own homes, but an even higher headwind for “have-nots” seeking to buy a house—another “Robin Hood-in-reverse” irony for Democrats. While protecting low-income or elderly tenants is a noble goal, these policies often backfire, benefiting entrenched renters, including wealthier ones, while locking out newcomers and stifling new construction.
The claim that rent control primarily aids the “have-nots” like low-income or elderly tenants ignores its perverse effects: It reduces rent supply as landlords exit the market, driving up prices for everyone else. This hurts the very groups it aims to help, as new, low-income renters face fewer options and higher costs, while entrenched beneficiaries—often not the neediest—hoard subsidized housing.
The logic is simple: If you limit rent increases, you reduce the incentive to build more housing. Of course, limiting supply means demand will soon outstrip it in high-demand housing markets—New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., all Democratic strongholds with rent control.
Six states—Oregon, California, New York, New Jersey, Maine, and Maryland—and the District of Columbia have either statewide rent control or allow local rent control laws in major housing markets. All are blue states, and, with the exception of Maine, overwhelmingly so.
Democrats strike again at the national level. Mortgage rates are a prime factor in determining buyers’ all-in costs for a home purchase. Mortgage rates are determined by interest rates, and interest rates depend heavily on inflation expectations. Democrats have been the party of spending-fueled inflation.
The Biden administration took advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to skyrocket federal spending. Then Democrats kept it there for four years. According to Congressional Budget Office figures, between fiscal years 2021 and 2024, the Biden administration exceeded pre-pandemic spending levels by $8.2 trillion. In the process, they ran $7.5 trillion in total deficits, averaging slightly over 7.5 percent of U.S. GDP.
The Biden administration’s hyper-spending helped fuel historic inflation. When Joe Biden took office in January 2021, inflation—measured by the Consumer Price Index—was 1.4 percent. By March—shortly after he signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act into law on March 11—it had almost doubled to 2.6 percent, and by the end of 2021 it was 4.7 percent. In 2022, inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June—a 40-year high. By the time Biden left office in January 2025, it remained at 3 percent. Inflation remains a concern and a major reason mortgage rates remain so high, having risen from 2.77 percent in January 2021, peaking at 7.79 percent in October 2023, and remaining at 6.6 percent today.
Another factor driving housing costs at the national level are regulatory burdens, policies that Democrats are constantly pushing for. According to a 2021 National Association of Home Builders study, regulation accounted for $93,870 of a new home price, nearly a quarter of the average cost of a new home at the time ($394,300).
During Biden’s presidency, Democrats outdid themselves when it came to imposing a costly regulatory burden on Americans. Even as they were headed for the White House exit, Clyde Wayne Crews of CEI tabulated that Biden’s administration issued “243 rules across the 7,641 pages published in the Federal Register during these fleeting first weeks of 2025 before his departure.” The American Action Forum estimated that the total burden from regulations over Biden’s tenure amounted to $1.8 trillion.
Democrats are always decrying the crises they create. America’s “housing crisis” is only the latest example. Daniel Huff and Paige Bronitsky hypothesize that Democrats want to leverage housing policy to expand diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) requirements: “Democrats have brought DEI quotas to every institution in America. Your neighborhood is next.”
The solution is simple: Get the government out of the way and let the private sector work. Of course, Democrats’ answer is always the opposite: Have the government do it, so we can socially engineer through it.
In my opinion, America doesn’t have a “housing crisis,” but a much bigger Democratic crisis.