3d render illustration of several house shaped arrows escaping from a crack on the ground.

Did you hear the news? Top Democratic strategists now believe that sky-high home prices and the dearth of affordable housing can be a winning issue in the 2020 presidential race.

Imagine that. After years of radio silence on housing prices by Democrats on the national stage, some of the party’s brightest stars are starting to talk about a problem that has long plagued middle and working class families across the country.

A trio of Democratic senators eyeing runs for the White House, including our state’s senior senator, Elizabeth Warren, are pushing ambitious plans to ease the housing crunch.

Here’s what a former aide to Joe Biden and now a high-paid political operative, had to say to The Hill, a news outlet that covers politics and Congress.

It’s about “showing voters that you care about them, that their issues are your issues and that you’re going to fight for them,” Scott Mulhauser, founder of Aperture Strategies, told The Hill.

Well, it’s about time. The real mystery is what in the world took the self-proclaimed party of the common woman and man so long to make this astounding realization.

Party strategists cite home prices rising faster than incomes, but that’s been happening now for at least a couple decades, if not more.

Home prices nationally have more than doubled since 2000, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. It’s even higher for the nation’s largest metro markets, like Boston.

Needless to say, few people have seen their incomes double since 2000, and certainly not the middle and working class families the party of Obama, Clinton, Johnson and Roosevelt have long championed.

Maybe the party’s top players have lost touch with their traditional base in their embrace of high-flying tech tycoons and wealthy Wall Street donors. For the Lexus liberals of the New Economy,

there is no housing crisis, unless having too many luxury condo towers to choose from strikes you as a problem.

Still, it’s great that Democratic strategists have discovered housing as an issue – or more accurately rediscovered, given the attention Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society gave to that all-important issue of keeping a roof over one’s head.

Scott Van Voorhis

Democrats Need to Combat State and Local Zoning Barriers

But how Democrats go about trying to tame out-of-control home prices and rents may be even more important, with an approach that doesn’t look at the real roots of the problem having the potential to do more harm than good.

For a party that has traditionally pushed for tighter regulation of business, that will involve embracing changes that may feel a bit odd or even downright uncomfortable.

Affordable housing programs at the federal level have been underfunded since the Reagan Administration gutted them back in the 1980s. There needs to be a big step up in federal spending on affordable housing of all types and that’s an easy position for any Democrat to take.

However, while more Section 8 vouchers or rehabbed public housing projects would be good things, they aren’t going to bring down rents or help middle class families priced out of the housing market.

The budding field of Democratic presidential candidates needs to go well beyond a simple push for more spending on federal housing programs.

Rather, Democrats need to borrow a page from the Republican playbook on deregulation and take aim at the state and local zoning barriers that have stifled the construction of new housing across the country.

The crazy prices home buyers face today are no longer just an issue for a few hot metros like Boston and Seattle but for towns and suburbs across the country. Nor are high prices the result of some mysterious, hard-to-understand economic malaise for force.

Economists, housing advocates, builders, real estate agents, mayors – you name it – agree that NIMBY attitudes and obstructionist zoning rules have led to a chronic shortage of homes for sale. And it’s that shortage, in turn, which is the main factor driving up prices and rents.

Whether running for president or Congress, there are risks for Democrats who push to lower the barriers to new housing that have been erected across the country.

Such a move will surely anger some of the party’s more affluent supporters, with expensive suburbs often the worst offenders when it comes to opening the doors to new housing – unless it’s a tear down of a modest cape to make way for some hideous, oversized, multimillion-dollar monstrosity.

It would also be an acknowledgement that overregulation, at least in the form it’s taken in today’s housing market, can have doleful consequences for average people.

But for a party that desperately needs to reclaim its working and middle class roots, it’s a solid place to start.

Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.