Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) established name recognition and political bona fides from his military service in the U.S. Marine Corps, his education at Yale Law School, his work for state and federal politicians, and his time as a venture capitalist. He published his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, in June 2016. The book reached The New York Times’ bestseller list and was adapted into a movie in 2020.
But Vance’s aspirations were larger, and after vying for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Ohio, he won the 2022 election for the seat and has been serving since early 2023. Vance’s political profile was launched further when he was selected in mid-July by Donald Trump to be the Republican vice presidential candidate in the November election.
Immigration’s impact on housing
Unlike Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ vice presidential pick, Tim Walz, who has served as Minnesota’s governor since 2019, Vance’s lack of executive experience has meant that he has not been in political positions designed to execute policy.
But he has been a prominent member of the Republican minority in the Senate since being elected. He serves as a member of both the larger Senate Banking Committee as well as its subcommittee that deals specifically with housing issues, and he also serves on the body’s special committee on aging.
Immediately prior to his selection to serve on the Republican presidential ticket, Vance gave a speech in Washington, D.C., at the annual National Conservatism Conference where he spoke about issues of housing and tied them to the broader national issue of immigration. Vance suggested that immigration has had a direct impact on higher home prices in certain communities and accused “elites” with “flood[ing] the zone with non-stop cheap labor.”
“The places in our own communities and states that have the highest immigration rates are the places with the highest home prices,” Vance said during his speech. “It’s not a correlation versus causation issue. If you actually look at it metro zone by metro zone, or parcel by parcel, you can see that where there is more immigration, there are higher home prices.”
Criticism of institutional investors
Vance also mentioned housing when accepting the vice presidential nomination at this year’s Republican National Convention, where he mentioned a generational gap regarding homeownership.
“Months ago, I heard some young family member observe that their parents’ generation, the baby boomers, could afford to buy a home when they first entered the workforce,” Vance said. “But ‘I don’t know,’ this person observed, ‘if I’ll ever be able to afford a home.’ The absurd cost of housing is the result of so many failures, and it reveals so much about what’s broken in Washington.”
Vance attributed this lack of affordability for younger people to the 2008 financial crisis, saying that “Wall Street barons crashed the economy and American builders went out of business. As tradesmen scrambled for jobs, houses stopped being built. The lack of good jobs, of course, led to stagnant wages.”
Vance has been a consistent critic of institutional investor presence in rental housing in particular, according to a profile of his housing policies written by National Housing Conference (NHC) president and CEO David Dworkin.
Dworkin’s piece highlighted an appearance on a local ABC News affiliate in Columbus, Ohio, where Vance was asked about supporting a bill from his Democratic colleagues in the Senate that is designed to curb institutional investor activity in housing.
“They have access to lower interest rates [and] cheaper money, and they completely crowd out the availability of homes for people who just want to buy a piece of their community,” Vance said. The news report also highlighted the increasing prevalence of single-family homes owned by out-of-state institutional investors who raised rents and broke ground on new built-to-rent subdivisions.
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 the local ABC affiliate, Vance said most proposals designed to tackle the issue do not go far enough.
Homelessness and HUD
Dworkin also highlighted questions by Vance to Lou Tisler, executive director of the National NeighborWorks Association, in a 2023 Senate Banking Committee hearing about “housing-first” approaches to addressing homelessness. Vance explained his belief that the efficacy of the program is debatable.
“I worry that what ‘housing first’ has done is taken a lot of people who are very much struggling and very much deserving of our compassion, though I think how we provide that compassion is up for debate,” Vance said. “But it also introduces people with serious drug problems, with serious mental illness problems, into communities with kids who are already in a very unstable situation. And now they’re having things like drug use normalized around them.”
Vance also criticized Section 8 Housing Choice vouchers in Hillbilly Elegy, and Dworkin described Vance’s perspective as expressing “the deep divisions within poor rural and exurban communities over federal assistance programs, sometimes shared by the same person.”
According to a story from Business Insider in May 2023, Vance believes that spending on programs through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is “bloated” and is contributing to inflationary pressures on housing costs.
“A large share of the HUD budget I think actually could be cut and could be cut in a way that preserves housing assistance for needy families,” Vance said. “It’s being positioned as ‘congressional Republicans are heartless’ because they want to pass these spending cuts. Well, I think the more heartless thing to do would be to do nothing, to allow the inflation to continue to spiral out of control, higher interest rates, higher rent payments, higher mortgage payments for American families.”
