The housing crisis is a serious problem for the US and many locales. Watching The Herd correctly notes that Harris' proposed (up to) $25k tax credit for first time home buyers wouldn't address the issue of lack of supply. That policy got the most hype, but Harris proposed serious measures to boost the supply of affordable housing as well as making it easier for first time home buyers to purchase.

It's a dead letter now, but here's Harris' economic proposal: kamalaharris.com - Policy Book Economic Opportunity

To boost affordable housing supply they proposed to:

1) Boost the existing Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which subsidizes construction of affordable housing, with a target of adding 1.2 million new affordable homes.

2) Create a new Neighborhood Homes Tax Credit, which targets rehabilitation and construction of owner-occupied homes in low income neighborhoods.

3) A tax cut/credit targeted for homebuilders who are building affordable homes for first-time home buyers.

4) Creation of a $40 billion Local Innovation Fund for Expansion of Housing, which would provide a flexible pot of money that communities could access for their innovative plans to expand affordable housing supply.

I like WTH's proposals to incentivized building multi-family housing of 4-16 units.

Reform of zoning laws to allow building small multi-family buildings and/or garage apartments/accessory dwelling units in more neighborhoods would be great, but that's set at the local level, and is subject to NIMBY resistance. Plus most residential neighborhoods of the last 40 years or so have been created with private deed restrictions against such building, about which the government has little to no say.

It's a pretty intractable problem. It's particularly bad in my home town of Asheville, NC, where home and rent prices have been relentlessly rising to big city levels while employment opportunities are mired at small tourist-city levels.

A couple of interesting proposed developments here aim to build what are basically dormitories in downtown: multi-story buildings filled with small studio apartments that have their own bathrooms, but not full service kitchens. Instead there are shared kitchen facilities on each floor. They aim to deliver rental units at fairly deeply affordable prices with little or no public subsidy, which is absolutely impossible in those locations with traditional apartments. Seems like a great idea, walkable to downtown employment opportunities, though not for everyone, of course.