Matt Gorman, a former aide to Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, warned during a Friday CNN appearance that sellers will add the down payment assistance proposed by Vice President Kamala Harris to the price of homes.
Harris proposed giving first-time homebuyers up to $25,000 in down payment assistance during a Friday speech laying out proposals regarding the economy. Gorman, who worked on Scott’s 2024 presidential campaign, said that Harris was trying to moderate from positions she held during the 2020 election, but that the housing proposal was “far left.”
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“But look, when it comes to the 25K, I mean, you just added $25,000 to every price, on every home price in the country because if you’re giving that away, essentially for free, people will add it into the price,” Gorman told “CNN News Central” co-host Boris Sanchez. “Obviously price controls have come under criticism from the Washington Post, Catherine Rampell, whom this channel’s talked to earlier. So you‘re going to see a lot of that in the messaging over the next couple of days, if not weeks, as we go into the convention.”
Home sales reached their lowest point since 1995 in 2023, according to the National Association of Realtors, with home prices reaching an all-time high in May. The average mortgage rate in the United States was 6.45% as of Thursday, according to U.S. News and World Report, but surged over 7% at times in 2024.
Prices increased by over 20% since President Joe Biden and Harris took office in January 2021. The Consumer Price Index rose by 2.9% year-over-year in July, down from a recent high of 9.1% in June 2022.
Featured Image Credit: The White House
