Harris’ $25K homebuyer grant plan is an ‘equity’ giveaway in disguise

 Kamala Harris is promising to provide “first-time homebuyers with $25,000 to cover the down payment.”  

Her promise is proving popular: 80% of Democrats and even 20% of Republicans favor it, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.  

But the devil is in the details, and the media are asking no questions.

The biggest question is whether Harris as president would help all first-time homebuyers, regardless of their race — or target the help to achieve racial equity, as her past actions suggest.

Harris has a long track record of promising $25,000 in down-payment help, but her goal was never to help all first-time homebuyers.

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Instead she insisted she aimed to close the home ownership gap between black and white families.

As she said in 2019, “We must right the wrong — after generations of discrimination — and give black families a real shot at home ownership.”

Her $25,000 down-payment promise was limited to “first-generation homebuyers.”

Why did she limit the help to buyers whose parents never owned a home?

To ensure that most of the help would go to minority homebuyers. 

Only 44% of black families owned their homes in 2021, compared with 73% of white families. 

Black buyers are nearly twice as likely as white buyers to qualify for down-payment help if the assist is limited to first-generation home buyers.

Last month, Harris insisted her “values have not changed.”   

When it comes to housing, that is true.

For the last 3½ years, Vice President Harris has pushed racial equity as a government-wide goal. 

Biden’s State of the Union message this year boasted the administration’s support for legislation to provide “$25,000 down-payment assistance to buyers from families where no one has ever before owned a home.”

The Democratic National Committee platform, approved Aug. 19, also limits the $25,000 down payment help to buyers “from families where no one has ever before owned a home.”

Now Harris, the presidential candidate, appears to be having an expedient change of heart — also known as a flip-flop — to broaden her housing policy’s appeal.

But she’s not abandoning her racial-equity goal entirely.

On Monday, Harris’ campaign website finally posted its first policy statements.

In one, she claimed the $25,000 down-payment help would be offered to “first-time homebuyers” — adding that “first-generation homeowners” will get “more generous support.”

Of course, no president can offer $25,000 to homebuyers.

That’s the responsibility of Congress, which controls the nation’s purse strings.

So it’s not Harris’ campaign website but the Downpayment Toward Equity Act, the legislation backed by Harris-Biden and sponsored in the House by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and in the Senate by Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) that spells out who is actually eligible.

The bill provides $20,000 to first-generation homebuyers with incomes below 120% of the mean in their area. 

The help increases to $25,000 if the buyer is from a “socially and economically disadvantaged group,” defined as being “Black, Hispanic, Native American or Asian American.”

The bill says its purpose is “to narrow and ultimately close the racial homeownership gap in the United States” — to correct, Waters has said, “grave injustices against people of color” produced by past US policies. 

These are reparations.

When Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) proposed that an earlier version of the bill should help all low-income first-time homebuyers, he got pushback from racial justice and housing advocates who complained the change would make too many white Americans eligible.   

“A tax credit for all first-time homebuyers is going to expand the racial homeownership gap,”  objected David Dworkin, president and CEO of the National Housing Conference.

“We are simply providing first-generation homebuyers, largely people of color, what white first-time home buyers have been receiving for years in the form of the ‘Daddy Down Payment’ loan — family assistance that is almost never repaid,” Dworkin said.

Harris has used the same argument, repeatedly.

In June, she told the 100 Black Men of America Conference that she supports helping black homebuyers so that they can “build intergenerational wealth” and overcome historic racial bias.

Now, Harris is flip-flopping, as she has on fracking and illegal immigration. 

But what would she actually do as president?

Economists have pointed out the dangers of offering down-payment assistance to families who may lack the income to keep up with mortgage obligations. Those are valid concerns.

But above all, voters need to know whether Harris’ down-payment program is a racial equity measure in disguise.

Does Harris intend to treat all Americans fairly, or will she be the divider-in-chief?

Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.

https://nypost.com/2024/09/09/opinion/harris-25k-homebuyer-grant-is-a-disguised-equity-handout/