Bidenomics is Crushing Working Class Renters In North Carolina, With No End in Sight
North Carolina has seen some of the largest rent spikes in the country under Biden’s watch
President Joe Biden’s inflationary and immigration policies have hurt working-class renters in North Carolina by driving rents sky high. Meanwhile, burdensome regulations prevent housing construction from keeping up with demand.
Housing prices nationwide rose 47 percent since early 2020, which is twice as fast as they rose during the 2010s. In Biden’s third year in office, only 1 percent of newly constructed single-family homes sold for less than $200,000; whereas, in former President Donald Trump’s third year, that number stood at 10 percent.
In this economy, most working-class people can’t afford to buy, so, they must rely on renting to keep a roof over their families’ heads.
But like everything else, rent prices have risen dramatically, far outpacing the measly rise in wages. According to a study by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, half of U.S. renter households in 2022—22.4 million—were “cost-burdened,” meaning they spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities.
Data from Zillow shows that North Carolina has more metro areas than any other swing state where rents have outpaced the national average growth of 35.4 percent over the last five years. They range from Durham’s 36.9 percent increase to a whopping 55.7 percent increase in Burlington. In Asheville, average rents for two-bedroom homes increased by 69 percent.
Urban policy planning firm Demographia ranks housing in Charlotte equally as expensive as Washington, DC for people who live and work there. By the same metric, it ranks Raleigh as unaffordable as Nashville, Tennessee, and Austin, Texas.
It becomes nearly impossible for working-class people to keep up financially when their rents jump 50 percent or more over five years. By the end of 2023, homelessness reached over 650,000—its highest level in recorded U.S. history.
The rent crunch doesn’t only affect urbanites, however. In rural North Carolina, a debt-free college graduate with a good accounting job told North Carolina Public Radio that she became “kind of homeless” when she couldn’t even find a run-down trailer in a bad neighborhood for less than $1,000.
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The Perfect Political Storm
Why has inflation risen so high under Biden, and why have housing costs in North Carolina outpaced it threefold in some areas?
The pandemic created the country’s largest domestic migration of the 21st century. Middle class Americans fled lockdowns, mask mandates, pro-criminal policies, and leftist junk being taught to their children in blue state schools for redder pastures. Many high-earners from the Northeast moved to more affordable states like North Carolina because they could work from home.
The pandemic also disrupted supply chains in 2021, and even a reelected President Trump would have faced higher inflation than in 2019.
But rather than allow the market to heal naturally, Biden did what every Democratic president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has done when faced with a crisis: Pump money into the economy in the name of “doing something” and use it as an excuse to pass expensive, unpopular pet projects.
Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act gets blamed for doing the opposite of its name. Much of that money, however, hasn’t been spent—meaning there’s more Bidenflation in the bullpen.
The real culprit for exacerbating inflation is Biden’s $1.9 billion American Rescue Plan (ARP) in 2021.
Prominent economists—including Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary to President Bill Clinton and economic advisor to President Barack Obama—warned Biden before and after he took office that his stimulus plan would damage the economy.
When Biden took office, American consumers had higher savings, and companies had more cash on hand than usual because of the economic standstill in 2020. In a normal economy, adding nearly $2 trillion to that would create faster demand than suppliers could meet. But with supply chains gummed up, Biden’s rescue plan turned what should have been an inflationary blip into the story of his presidency.
Even the left-leaning Vox blamed and scolded him for making the pandemic-induced inflation worse through his ARP.
The Biden administration has also allowed millions of migrants into the country who overload demand for low-income housing.
Recorded immigration peaked in 2023 at 3.3 million, according to the Congressional Budget Office, compared with just 919,000 annually in the 2010s. In 2019, the U.S. received fewer than 500,000 immigrants, a low point that contributed to much of the economic boom that working-class Americans enjoyed under Trump.
In North Carolina, most immigrants move to dense, urban areas. This creates a blast wave of working-class Americans into the suburbs and rural areas—driving up rents there too, increasing commute times, and making life more difficult for everyone.
(RELATED: North Carolina Passes Citizens Only Voting Amendment for November Ballot)
Fixing the Housing Crisis
Defeating Biden this November is the first step. This would end his inflationary and open border policies.
Deporting North Carolina’s illegal aliens would be the logical next step. The North Carolina Office of Budget and Management estimates that of the 500,000 non-citizen immigrants in the state, 65 percent—some 325,000—are there illegally. Deporting these unauthorized residents would free up considerable housing for poor and lower middle-class North Carolinians by putting downward pressure on rents.
Domestic migration is trickier, especially with Democratic trifectas making their states uninhabitable to the productive classes. Elected officials can’t do much to keep wealthy Americans from moving to their quaint towns and driving the locals away with their purchasing power.
The obvious solution, according to Yongqiang Chu, Director of the Childress Klein Center for Real Estate at the University of North Carolina, is “to just build more houses.” North Carolina officials estimate that the state needs 900,000 additional housing units over the next decade to keep up with growth. Chu recognizes, however, that this is extremely difficult because of high interest rates and political and regulatory roadblocks to further development. In Raleigh, for instance, demand for single-family building permits exceeds the number of permits available.
Although they remain far above pre-pandemic levels, rents for single-bedroom apartments have fallen since 2023, thanks to aggressive multifamily construction.
The rising operating costs, however, have pushed down net operating income growth for these multifamily complex owners from 8.1 percent in spring 2023 to 2.8 percent in spring 2024. This has slowed down multifamily construction, which will spike rent prices again if the government does not curtail low-income housing demand from immigration.
State elected officials can’t affect interest rates, but they can ease regulations on new housing development—something North Carolina’s Republican nominee for governor, Mark Robinson, plans to do if elected.
In June, during a meeting hosted by the Greater Wilmington Business Journal, Robinson criticized cities with high homeless populations for taxing and regulating homebuilders out of business.
“Our economy is built on pillars,” he said. “What are those pillars? It’s public safety, public education, health care, infrastructure, and housing. If you don’t have any of those five things, you can’t have a healthy economy.”
Disaffected, Untapped Voters
Democrats enjoy touting the unemployment rate under Biden, but jobs that can’t keep up with basic housing costs don’t mean much to voters.
Renters in North Carolina are less enthused about voting than homeowners but lean slightly more left. But so do people whose livelihoods are destroyed by natural disasters. People in need gravitate toward politicians who address their needs, even if the solutions don’t make economic sense for the whole economy.
For instance, 81 percent of the state’s renters said they would likely support a candidate who supports rent stabilization. The same poll, however, found that 58 percent of respondents overall prefer less government intervention in their lives, an obvious conflicting opinion among many.
More than anything, renters who have been crushed by Biden’s inflation want to see solutions to make their lives manageable.
Inflation and immigration have caused rents to rise in North Carolina faster than in any other swing state. Stopping these policies on Nov. 5 and then deporting the state’s illegal immigrants would decrease housing demand and drive down rents. Finally, with so many U.S. citizens moving to the Tar Heel State, electing Robinson as governor who vows to deregulate housing construction will speed up the wait time for permits and raise supply in line with demand.