(The Center Square) – Arizona leaders from both sides of the aisle are honing in on the affordable housing crisis.
Recent polling shows that affordable housing is one of Arizonans’ top priorities and while neither party has taken a very strong stance in the past, policy leaders are now highlighting how they can help Arizonans.
On Wednesday evening, the Arizona Republican Party held a news conference to discuss how the Trump campaign will create more affordable housing with Senate President Warren Petersen, AZGOP Chairwoman Gina Swoboda, and other Republican officials.
“Young people when you poll them, the top two concerns that they have are the inability to achieve their dreams,” Swoboda said, noting that home prices have increased over 32% in the past four years. “They can’t pursue home ownership. They are completely locked out of the market.”
Petersen highlighted that one of the biggest barriers to affordable housing in Arizona is regulation barriers.
“It takes forever now to start a development and to build homes,” Petersen said. “Some of the homes we used to build 25 years ago are illegal. We need to increase the supply.”
Petersen said that Democrats’ typical strategies of price controls or government aid will only make housing more expensive – “There’s nothing more expensive than a free government program,” he said.
Swoboda also noted the consequences of price controls.
“Price controls have failed,” Swoboda said. “It leads to red lines, famine and economic collapse. If the government will just get out of the way and allow the markets to unleash the supply and demand in this country, we will see the rising tide.”
Arizona’s Democratic legislators have said that the solution to unaffordable housing is to limit the number of large corporations coming into the state and buying up the housing supply.
“There’s a lot of reporting and a lot of studies showing that out-of-state corporations are coming to Arizona and binding up a massive share of the market,” said Assistant Minority Leader Oscar De Los Santos. “Those were Arizona homes that should have belonged to Arizona families and they’re now belonging to out-of-state corporations. That’s robbing an Arizonan’s chance at homeownership.”
Additionally, Gov. Hobbs recently established a bipartisan first time home ownership program which Democrats would like to appropriate more money to in order to help first time home buyers with a down payment. Most housing affordability legislation has been bipartisan in Arizona, but with more than 30% of Arizonans facing a housing cost burden, this could be a tipping point for the election.
“This is a rare opportunity for both parties – an important issue where neither side has a pre-existing advantage or even a defined message,” said David Byler, chief of research for Noble Predictive Insights. “The party that figures out how to win on housing will benefit hugely.”
