President Joe Biden speaks during a Month of Action event at the Stupak Community Center Tuesday, March 19, 2024. Biden addressed his plans to make housing more affordable.
Tuesday, March 19, 2024 | 5:01 p.m.
President Joe Biden spent part of his campaign event Tuesday at a community center near the Las Vegas Strip detailing his plans to help more Americans achieve the dream of homeownership.
He reflected on his childhood, growing up in Pennsylvania where his family had unstable housing. The housing complex they lived in eventually became government housing, he told the group of supporters at the Stupak Community Center.
“We weren’t poor, but we didn’t have anything left at the end of month,” Biden said.
Biden laid out a proposal for a mortgage relief credit that would provide homeowners with a $10,000 tax credit over two years.
The relief credit, according to the White House, would provide middle-class first-time homebuyers with a credit the equivalent of reducing the mortgage rate by more than 1.5 percentage points for two years on the median home. That would save families $400 a month on their mortgage payments, officials said. The median price of existing single-family homes in Las Vegas was $460,000, an 8.2% increase from last year, according to a report from Las Vegas Realtors.
Biden is also calling on Congress to provide up to $25,000 in down payment assistance to first-generation homebuyers, saying the proposal would help 400,000 families nationally purchase their first home.
He additionally asked the National Association of Realtors to follow through on an agreement where people buying or selling a property could negotiate commissions lower than the customary 5% to 6%.
Biden also said he wants to end the “legacy of discrimination” involved in home evaluations. Homes in majority Black neighborhoods are valued at 21%-23% lower than equivalent homes in majority non-Black neighborhoods, according to a Brookings report.
“It’s exacerbated the racial wealth gap and held back Black and brown families, and it’s simply wrong,” Biden said.
The president said the plan followed legislation his administration previously championed, including the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in 2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. That, Biden said, helped 50,000 Nevadans make their rent payments.
Biden said his 2025 budget included $258 billion in housing investments. And, he said, those investments won’t come at the expense of higher taxes, chastising Republicans who imply it would.
“It’s not only my plan, it’s fully paid for, and while I’m paying for it we’re also reducing the federal deficit at the same time,” said Biden, who was flanked by large red signs reading “lowering housing costs.”
He continued, “You know Republicans talking about, ‘big-taxing Democrats?’ Give me a break.”
Biden praised local housing advocates, saying they were doing “God’s work.”
Biden’s stop in Las Vegas followed a morning meeting in Reno with staff and volunteers at his campaign headquarters there. Both stops, as well as the rest of the week’s events in battleground states of Arizona and Texas, are part of the Biden campaign’s “I’m on Board” month of action.
The action is designed to engage voters in “the fight for the soul of the nation,” the Democratic Party said in a statement.
Biden’s reelection campaign has opened offices in Washoe County and in specific areas of Las Vegas that aides said would help the campaign engage Black, Latino and Asian American voters. The president said Tuesday that his campaign would open more offices in the state, and Daniel Corona, the campaign’s deputy political coalitions director, said Biden’s reelection effort was hiring a political director to focus on rural parts of the state.
Bilingual campaign organizers are already in place in Arizona, and the campaign has opened an office in Maryvale, a major Latino community in Phoenix. The campaign has hired more than 40 staffers in Nevada and Arizona.
The Reno appearance coincided with the launch of Latinos con Biden-Harris (Spanish for Latinos with Biden-Harris). Campaign ads ran in English, Spanish and Spanglish, a blend of the two languages, as did two Spanish-language radio interviews with the president. Biden is also emphasizing his pro-union, pro-abortion rights message during the trip.
“The Latino community is critical to the value set we have,” Biden said on “El Bueno, la Mala y el Feo” (“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”) on Univision Radio. “I plan on working like the devil to earn your support.”
Biden’s push with Latino voters is part of the campaign’s broader efforts to lay the groundwork to reengage various constituencies that will be critical to his reelection bid. That effort is all the more crucial as key supporters of Biden’s base, such as Black and Hispanic adults, have become increasingly disenchanted with his performance in office.
In an AP-NORC poll conducted in February, 38% of U.S. adults approved of how Biden was handling his job. Nearly 6 in 10 Black adults (58%) approved, compared with 36% of Hispanic adults. Black adults are more likely than white and Hispanic adults to approve of Biden, but that approval has dropped in the three years since Biden took office.
Biden took plenty of swipes along the way at his likely 2024 opponent, former President Donald Trump. It’s a rematch of the 2020 contest, where Biden narrowly topped Trump in Nevada by about 30,000 votes.
Biden said Trump had a lack of focus on infrastructure and gave tax cuts to the wealthy.
“You remember, my predecessor kept on about infrastructure every week for four years,” Biden said. “We didn’t build a damn thing. You think I’m kidding, I’m not.”
The campaign has been active in Las Vegas this month.
Vice President Kamala Harris and first lady Jill Biden each hosted their own campaign events in recent weeks focusing largely on women’s reproductive rights, veteran health care and cultivating the Democratic Latino voting base.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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