Vice President Kamala Harris promised Friday that she would build 3 million new homes in four years if she were elected, but she and President Joe Biden barely managed to build eight EV charging stations in two-and-a-half years.
Harris said at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina:
There’s a serious housing shortage in many places. It’s too difficult to build and it’s driving prices up. As president, I will work in partnership with industry to build the housing. We need both to rent and to buy. We will take down barriers and cut red tape including at the state and local levels. And by the end of my first term, we will end America’s housing shortage by building 3 million new homes and rentals that are affordable for the middle class.
Harris did not explain how those new homes were to be built in a high-interest-rate environment. She also did not explain whether she meant 3 million units in addition to those that would already have been built, or three million units total. Nearly 1.5 million homes were built in the U.S. in 2023, so 3 million over four years would actually mean construction had slowed down by 50%. Presumably, she meant 3 million additional homes — 750,000 extra per year.
That would match or exceed the pace of the peak housing boom of the post-World War II period. But Harris has a track record against which to measure her promise, and it is the failure of the Biden-Harris administration to build the electric vehicle (EV) charging stations that it promised to build under the infrastructure bill of 2021. at a cost of $7.5 billion. The goal was 500,000; two-and-a-half years later, as of May 2024, only eight EV stations had been built.
The situation is even worse when it comes to the Biden-Harris administration’s promise to build new broadband Internet connections. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr told Breitbart News earlier this week that despite $42.5 billion in the infrastructure bill for broadband, the effort had yet to connect one American to the Internet — and Vice President Harris was supposed to be in charge of the project. The prospects of Harris’s housing boom look doubtful.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.