In a biographical aside in her Thursday night nomination-acceptance speech, Kamala Harris spoke eloquently, and perhaps inadvertently, about “affordable housing” policy. She recalled the neighborhood in the East Bay where her mother rented an apartment:

In the Bay, you either live in the hills or the flatlands. We lived in the flats — A beautiful, working-class neighborhood of firefighters, nurses, and construction workers, all who tended their lawns with pride.

What she described is exactly the kind of neighborhood we have in mind when we talk about the affordable housing Harris says she favors. But it’s not affordable through subsidy. Its affordability and healthy social fabric are achieved through small, owner-occupied homes on small lots, which create “naturally occurring affordable housing.”

The Bay Area, and California more generally, were once good at building the kind of housing that Harris’s family was able to enjoy.

During just three years, 1921–24, records show that 12,822 new homes were built in Oakland. Most of those were the archetypal affordable California houses: bungalows. Prices were low. A four-bedroom California bungalow built from a popular plan book could cost less than $1,000. In industrial areas of Oakland, two-, three-, and four-family homes were common, providing the means for working-class households to own homes by renting out units to help make payments.

California’s bungalows were part of a nationwide trend of naturally occurring affordable housing: row houses in Philadelphia and Baltimore, three-decker houses in New England, and two-flats on Chicago’s South and West Sides, near where Harris spoke last night.

Harris was, rightly, celebrating what progressive housing policy swept away, through its combination of “slum clearance” and public housing. Today, affordable housing in California means apartments that are deeply subsidized through such programs as the low-income housing tax credit. Construction costs can run nearly $500,000 a unit, according to a study done by the University of California, Berkeley.  

Cost is far from the only problem. Mixed-income rentals, the Democrats’ affordable housing of choice, don’t give those of modest means the chance to own and accumulate wealth. Neither did public housing, their former favorite. Urban renewal disproportionately targeted African-American neighborhoods — and blacks were disproportionately steered into public housing. We should not be surprised by the black–white wealth gap in a country where homeownership is the prime means of wealth accumulation.

What’s more, the small, owner-occupied homes Harris celebrated were part of the means through which Americans built social capital and maintained social order. Small owners had to maintain their properties lest their tenants move out; tenants had to be on their best behavior lest landlords sour on them and move to evict. All of this was swept away by the public and subsidized housing that Democrats continue to promote. Housing vouchers are no way to build wealth. The 3 million new homes Harris is promising — one of her few specific policy proposals — should not require tax credits to be built; if they are true starter homes, they’ll be affordable because they are modest.

A truly constructive housing policy would aim toward encouraging localities to build new neighborhoods like the East Bay flatlands she rightly celebrated. The best way to do that is not for the federal government to remain involved in the destructive ways it historically has, as Harris would like it to. A better path would be to advocate zoning reform and less costly construction methods that can make the construction of new neighborhoods easier, quicker, and more affordable.