As Harris Courts Sun Belt, Housing Costs Stand in Her Way

Shuttered factories and trade deals helped turn working-class Midwesterners against Democrats. Will the high cost of housing do the same in the Sun Belt?

The promise of the American dream has shimmered in Las Vegas for as long as the city has existed. That hope of a stable middle-class life has attracted would-be homeowners from California, sun-seekers from the East and immigrants from all over the world.

But for many voters here, it now feels like a mirage. In a state that relies on hourly wage workers in tourism and service jobs, many cannot find an affordable place to live.

The result is a well of cynicism, frustration and anger — with national consequences.

Presidential elections have long been shaped by economic discontent in the emptying, industrial towns of the Midwest.

This year could be the first in decades to turn on the Sun Belt version.

It’s not the exodus of steel companies or auto manufacturers that has left workers reeling, but a long-festering housing problem that is yielding the same result: Many working-class voters say a promise has been broken, and they are looking for someone to blame.

In the final weeks of a deadlocked presidential campaign, there is no better place to observe this restlessness than the stuccoed neighborhoods that snake into the desert around Las Vegas. The median home price is $445,000, an increase of more than 50 percent compared with five years ago, and well out of reach for many in a region where the median income hovers around $70,000. Rents average $2,000 in a city where many workers make less than $20 an hour.

Many once-reliable Democrats say the issue has eroded their trust in politicians. In the state’s Democratic hub, that means turning away from Vice President Kamala Harris.

“When we got the new president, I didn’t hear nothing, I didn’t see any changes,” Maria Ocampo, 54, who has voted Democratic for decades, said of the Biden administration. This year, she does not plan to vote at all.

Ms. Ocampo moved to Las Vegas three decades ago and quickly bought a modest home with her husband. But they have since divorced, and Ms. Ocampo watched as her rent kept climbing over the last few years, even as her business selling dried chiles and candy at a local swap meet struggled.

At one point, she said, her landlord more than doubled the rent to $2,800 a month.

After her business shut down for several months in 2020, sales briefly picked up as the coronavirus pandemic began to ease. But now Ms. Ocampo said her family’s dozen stands made a tiny fraction of what they did in 2019.

“They just promise things,” she said. “But I don’t see nothing coming out for us.”

In interviews with dozens of voters in and around Las Vegas, the rising cost of housing was routinely cited as the most persistent financial difficulty weighing on their minds. That was particularly true for Black and Latino blue-collar workers, voters who have moved away from Democrats, according to recent polls.

In Nevada, that group makes up one of the fastest-growing parts of the electorate and is being fiercely fought over by both parties in the final weeks of the campaign.

And while the problem is particularly acute in Nevada, anxiety about finding an affordable place to live is evident in many swing states, in Philadelphia, Phoenix and Kalamazoo, Mich. In Maricopa County, which surrounds Phoenix, the average price of a home is now $470,000, up about 50 percent since the pandemic.

Both presidential candidates have tried to speak to these worries. Ms. Harris made one of her first policy proposals a plan for three million new housing units across the country in the next four years and a $25,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers. Her plan would require support from Congress.

But in Nevada, few persuadable voters said they had heard of Ms. Harris’s idea. Some who had viewed it with scorn — another example of a soon-to-be-broken election year promise.

Many of these voters were equally skeptical of the Republican nominee, former President Donald J. Trump. He has said his plan to deport immigrants will free up affordable housing. Economists, however, widely agree that plan would worsen the housing crisis because it would hamper the construction industry.

Polls show the race in the state is tied.

Nevada’s six electoral votes have been fought over for the last 20 years. While Democrats have eked out victories in the state in the last several elections, the margins have shrunk, leaving party officials anxious about any further erosion.

Like so many Las Vegas residents, Shakriyah Uwoloh moved to Las Vegas from Los Angeles because of the high cost of living in California. But her income has not kept pace with her bills. The rent on her two-bedroom apartment was $700 a month a year ago. Now, it is $1,200.

“It has just skyrocketed,” she said. Though she voted for President Barack Obama twice before, she has no intention of voting this year. “To be honest, I don’t see too much happening.”

Mr. Obama won a whopping 55 percent of the vote in 2008, when he campaigned vigorously in Nevada and spent hours courting the state’s powerful Culinary Workers Union and repeating its slogan about “the Las Vegas Dream.”

But the Great Recession and the foreclosure crisis changed everything. Thousands lost their homes or abandoned them altogether. Wall Street-backed firms bought thousands of properties for under $100,000. Now, many are rented for several thousands of dollars a month to the same type of workers who once owned them — people who work in sprawling distribution warehouses or serve tourists in the glittering casinos.

The pandemic eviscerated the economy again. And although the tourism industry has climbed back, voters still feel rattled.

When Armando Garcia, now 26, was growing up in Las Vegas, his parents urged him over and over to do what they had not been able to — buy a home. For years, Mr. Garcia tried to make the numbers work, but during the pandemic he fell behind on bills, paying for basic groceries with his credit card and struggling to make the rent he splits with four roommates.

Eventually, they were threatened with eviction. Mr. Garcia, who earns $20 an hour working for a betting company, cobbled together a loan from several family members, allowing them to stay.

But the experience shook them. Even two months later, several belongings remain in the garage and boxes are scattered around their living room, packed up in a panic. One roommate cried every day for two weeks, Mr. Garcia said, imagining couch surfing or living out of her car.

“The dream of having my own home is not a dream I’ve had since I was 21,” Mr. Garcia said, sitting in his mostly barren living room, adding that it “feels too bold” now. “It just feels unrealistic. It doesn’t feel like I can, like, daydream about it for very long because it just feels like I have realism around me all the time.”

Mr. Garcia is unlikely to vote for Ms. Harris next month, he said, though he will support local Democrats, and instead will write in another candidate or simply not cast a presidential ballot. He said there was “zero percent chance” he would vote for Mr. Trump, who he said would do more to favor the wealthy and endanger immigrants.

Like Mr. Garcia, many voters in Las Vegas blame wealthy California transplants who flocked to southern Nevada during the pandemic and out-of-state investors for driving up prices. There are also other factors: Higher interest rates have made borrowing more expensive, wages have not kept up with rents and there is a shortage of affordable units.

Josefina Hurtado, a 47-year-old server at the Westgate casino, sold her three-bedroom home with a $500 monthly mortgage amid a divorce several years ago. She assumed she’d be able to save up and find a similar modest ranch house within a year or two.

But she lost hours and income during the pandemic and now rents a house on the farthest southern outskirts of Las Vegas for $2,000 a month. She has taken a second job doing medical billing. Her landlord is now selling that home for $490,000 — far more than Ms. Hurtado could ever dream of paying.

“Nowadays you have to make at least six figures just to live comfortably here, just to buy your food and pay your bills,” Ms. Hurtado said. Like many other women she works with, she has frequently taken in family members who cannot afford rent at all. “The idea of a middle class seems like a struggle,” she said.

Still, Ms. Hurtado is convinced that a Harris administration will do more to help people like her, and she has spent the last several weeks knocking on doors to persuade other voters. She is less focused on policy specifics than on Ms. Harris’s own life story.

“Her mom was a single parent, she knows what a struggle is,” she said. “She’s seen us. She can be the one to make a difference.”