Councilman Kramer (00:00):
… allow me to introduce our headliner speaker for the season. He began his career serving in the United States Marine Corps for four years, including a tour in Iraq. Upon returning home, he went to law school, became an investor in startups across the Midwest, and penned the best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
(00:20)
In 2022, he was elected to the US Senate, representing the state of Ohio where he served for two years. During his time in the Senate, he worked closely with NLC to advocate rail safety legislation in Congress and to make communities safer, co-sponsoring the Railway Safety Act of 2023. Last year, he stepped up to join President Donald Trump in his presidential campaign, and was elected Vice President of the United States in November of 2024. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming the Vice President of the United States, JD Vance.
Vice President Vance (01:18):
Thank you all. Thank you. Please, please, please take a seat. It's good to see everybody. Good afternoon and thank you all for having me. Thank you to Councilman Kramer for the kind introduction. I was talking with him backstage a little bit. My wife and I both love the city of Louisville and have spent a lot of time there, so thank you for being here. It means a lot, and thanks for the kind words.
(01:41)
And I'd say to all of you, whenever I was in the Senate and I welcomed a group from Ohio, and I know you guys represent the entire country or cities and municipalities all over the country, I would always just say, "Enjoy the town because it is your city." And I think that Washington is a beautiful place. It's a beautiful place to spend a few days. I know you guys have some work to do, but I also think it's important to get out there and see the people's city. It was built with your tax dollars. I think these incredible buildings and museums are supported by all of you, and of course, by all the people that you represent. And so I hope you enjoy your time in Washington D.C.
(02:15)
So, I know you're all busy, and I know it's never easy to come here to Washington, especially on a Monday. So I appreciate the effort involved in getting here, and I also appreciate the mission of this conference. The work you all do back home is extremely important. Most Americans, of course, they interact with their state and local governments far more regularly than they do their federal government, and that's the way it's supposed to be. That's the way the Constitution sets it up. We know that good governments starts at the local level. So while those of us in Washington certainly take up most of the press attention, and we do that whether we want to or not, I want to acknowledge the enormous impact local governments have on the lives of our great American citizens.
(03:08)
Now, the Trump administration believes in the wisdom of federalism and leaving local issues to local officials, but we also recognize the importance of supporting and collaborating with all of you, because so many of the issues that you deal with, of course, implicate local issues, but state issues and federal issues as well. And one area of shared interest between President Trump, and I think every single person in this room, is the importance of providing good housing for our citizens at a reasonable and affordable cost.
(03:46)
And I have to say, I'm hard-pressed to think of a time in my 40 years of life where it's been so hard for normal American citizens to afford a home. Even renting a home has become a challenge, or worse yet, fallen completely out of reach for so many of our families. I was talking with a relative a couple of years ago and she just made kind of an off-handed observation. As a younger person than I am, she was looking to buy her first home, and just mentioned that when her parents were growing up, they could afford a nice home on a single middle-class income. And she was sort of mentioning this as a sorrowful thing. She was sad that wasn't true for her generation. And I think all of us in this room, certainly including me, have a little bit more work to do, I think to make housing more affordable. I want to talk about that because I think it's the issue where our interests in some ways are most aligned with the people in this room.
(04:42)
Now, I read recently that the average income it takes to buy a new house is nearly two times the average salary of your typical American family. Not the average American worker, but the combined incomes of a husband and wife. And that's just not acceptable or sustainable in the United States of America. We want Americans to be able to afford the American dream of homeownership, because we know that when people own their homes, it makes them a stakeholder. It makes them a stakeholder in their neighborhoods, in their cities, and ultimately, of course, in this country that all of us love so much. We want our citizens to feel that investment in their own country. And it's hard. It's hard to feel that investment if you feel like you can't even own a slice of it, even if that's what you want to do.
(05:30)
Now, on a more basic level, we don't want people living paycheck to paycheck. We don't want them to make trade-offs between a trip to the grocery store and meeting next month's rent, because even if you don't yet own a home, or even if you don't ever want to own a home, the knowledge that if you work hard and spend wisely, eventually you'll be able to afford a nice place to live. That goes, I think, a very long way to giving people a sense that they belong here and a sense that they have a stake in the future.
(06:02)
Now, there are some important reasons why that belief is dwindling among Americans today, and a lot of it, of course, comes from the historic inflation that this country has dealt with over the last four years. Now, under the previous administration, get a little bit political, the cost of a median price home in America more than doubled, and that was just in four years. And if your salary didn't keep pace with inflation and rise 20%, your buying power took even a bigger hit. And of course, if you think about this, if the price of a home doubles and your actual salary doesn't double, then you're a lot worse off. And we know that most Americans did not see their salary double over the last four years. So it's no surprise that home sales hit a 30-year low in 2024.
(06:52)
Now, another reason for the elevating costs comes down to zoning. And the reality, as you all know, is that zoning is an area where federal authority is actually quite limited. And I'm sure none of you want the federal government in the business of mandating how cities and towns handle local laws, and that's certainly not what we want to do either. But I would ask everyone in this room is to be good partners with us, and certainly partners with your citizens, and think about how we can improve the costs of housing for our citizens. And I think one of the ways that we're going to have to do that is by being a little bit smarter about our local zoning rules.
(07:30)
And in particular, when I think about zoning, I can't help but think about it without, of course, the communities that I know best, which are those that I represented in the state of Ohio. And Columbus, Ohio in particular, I assume we've got some Columbus people here, and Columbus is a boom town in so many ways. I've got relatives and family members who live there who love Columbus. It's a magnet because it's had so much economic development. But one of the things that I worry about when I look at a city like Columbus or Miami, which became a boom town during the COVID years, is the unaffordability of housing. And we've got to fix that.
(08:07)
If we actually want these places to be magnets, not just for jobs and investment, but also the dreams of our young people, we've got to actually make it easier to build homes. And in particular, I think the city of Austin has done a pretty interesting job, because in Austin you saw this massive increase of people moving in, the cost of housing skyrocketed, but then Austin implemented some pretty smart policies, and that brought down the cost of housing. And it's one of the few major American cities where you see the cost of housing leveling off or even coming down.
(08:38)
Now, the Trump administration has taken important steps to make building cheaper and to boost the supply of housing. Now, of course, it's going to take time, but this is a day one issue for our entire team from the president on down. On his first day in office, the president issued an executive order making it a priority to bring down prices for new buyers. Now, part of that will come from slashing needless regulations, which according to some estimates, account for about 25% of a new single-family bill today.
(09:08)
We've also seen Secretary Turner, our great Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, he's working hard on this issue, cutting some of the Biden rules at HUD that hike costs and shift the decision-making from local governments to Washington D.C. And Secretaries Burgum and Wright, and certainly Administrator Zeldin at the EPA, are putting in important work to bring down the costs of energy, which is of course a critical input to the cost of building a home, to say nothing, of course, of heating one and keeping its lights on.
(09:40)
But I actually want to focus on something a little bit different, because I think this is one of the areas where what the Trump administration can do and has done is going to be one of the major drivers of bringing down the cost of housing. Now, local zoning, regulations, the cost of energy, these things are about the supply of housing. How do we get more houses out there to be built? But I think it's important to talk about the demand side of the housing market. And so much of what we're doing in the Trump administration when it comes to the immigration issue is framed about law enforcement, about reducing fentanyl coming into our communities. And that is true. That is a big part of why we're doing what we're doing at the border. But when we talk about housing and why costs are so high, we don't talk enough about demand.
(10:26)
And one of the drivers of increased housing demand we know, is that we've got a lot of people over the last four years who have come into the country illegally, and that's something we have to work on if we want to meaningfully reduce the cost of housing, too. Now, just think about this. If you allow 20 million people to compete with American citizens for the cost of homes, you are going to have a large, and frankly, completely preventable spike in the demand for housing. And that is what we, of course, have seen. Because while we made it a little bit hard to build homes in this country over the last four years, we've also unfortunately made it way too easy for people to compete against American citizens for the precious homes that are in our country to begin with.
(11:15)
Now, I'll say this, it's actually not just an American problem either. If you go to Canada, where because of their laws and regulations, they've seen a massive increase in the number of people who have come into their country. You go to the United Kingdom, you go across the world and you see a very consistent relationship between a massive increase in immigration and a massive increase in housing prices. And we have to be honest about that.
(11:46)
Well, I see one of our nice representatives out here wants to actually, I guess, continue to flood the country with illegal immigrants, making your communities and citizens unaffordable. But ma'am, with all respect, one of the reasons why we're doing what we're doing is because we want to make it more affordable for Americans to live. That is one of the reasons why we're doing what we're doing. Now, last week, I visited the southern border and we decided to check in on what's going on there at the southern border.
(12:28)
And of course, like I said earlier, you often hear about immigration enforcement as about crime and about drug trafficking, and that is a big part of it. I was at Eagle Pass and I was talking to local border control down there, and they told me that in just a matter of weeks, their small part of the border had gone from 1,500 daily encounters to less than 30. And again, that's in a matter of weeks. That's just a simple matter of common sense border enforcement. That matters. Thank you.
(13:09)
And let's talk about why it matters. I mentioned housing, but one of the things I heard down there, I was talking to the mayor in that community and he said, "It's incredibly stressful on local resources." It's stressful on their local hospitals. It's stressful on their local schools to have this massive increase. And so while, look, I recognize there's a diversity of opinions here, clearly there is, I also think it's important to be honest about those disagreements, to acknowledge those disagreements, but to say that the reason why we care about border security is because we want your communities to be safer. We want them to be more affordable, we want there to be less drugs in our country, and we want your citizens to be able to live the American Dream. It is the birthright of every single one of our citizens, and we're going to fight for it every single day.
(14:15)
So, with all due respect for some of the disagreements in opinion, I'd say we welcome disagreements, we want to talk about those disagreements, but we also have to respect the law in the United States of America. I can tell you that, yes, of course you're going to disagree with some of our policies. That's okay. Come and tell us when you disagree with our policies and we'll have a conversation about it. Maybe don't shout it in front of 2,000 people. I can't even hear what you're saying, sir.
(14:58)
But importantly, importantly on this question of immigration, we have to recognize that yes, you can disagree with some of the laws that are in place, you can disagree with the enforcement of those laws, you can even vote for people who want to change those laws, but while we have immigration laws on the books, we will enforce them, and we expect our local municipalities to help us.
(15:32)
So it will be the policy of the Trump administration to enforce the nation's laws, and it will be the policy of the Trump administration to say that it is not up to local cities to choose which federal laws that they're going to enforce. It's important. We can't do immigration enforcement with sanctuary cities. We've got to have everybody respecting the law, and that is going to be one of the major policy focuses, of course, of the Trump administration, and it already has been.
(15:59)
And I want to just say one final point about this issue of housing and of the strains that immigration, and illegal immigration in particular, put on our housing stock. We know from economists that blue collar folks are often those who face the biggest cuts in wages and in services when you have communities overwhelmed by illegal immigration. I come from a blue collar family, and I think one of the main drivers is that we need to be able to give our citizens, Black, white, or whatever skin color, whatever belief system that they have, if you are an American citizen, you deserve to have a government at the local, city, and federal level that fights for the American Dream for you.
(16:47)
And we've seen, yes, over the Biden administration, but let's be honest, over 40 years of American policy, we've seen a lot of our blue collar Americans, urban and rural, struggling. Struggling to afford a home, struggling to raise their kids in safe communities, struggling to look to the future with hope and optimism. And so, with all respect for policy disagreements, I think that one thing that unites us in this room is that we want to give our blue collar people in the United States of America a shot at the American Dream again. We may disagree about how exactly to do it, but let's do it together, let's fight for our people to together, and let's reinvigorate the American Dream for the American citizen once again.
(17:49)
And let me close here with just an acknowledgement here. I know you guys have some of the hardest jobs in government, Democrat, Republican, or nonpartisan, you guys are the ones of course who fix the potholes. You guys are the ones that make sure our local police have the funding that they need, our local firefighters are able to do the incredible job that they do.
(18:09)
So, I just want to let you know, from the Trump administration, from the president, the vice president and everybody else, we respect what you do. We are impressed by you, we think you guys are doing a great job, and we want to make sure that you have a presidential administration that is making your lives easier and not harder. So please, consider our administration one with an open door. Please come to us when you have issues. Even if you don't like what we're doing on the policy, you guys have got to be able to come and talk to us. So, keep doing a great job, keep doing what you're doing, enjoy the rest of your time in Washington. God bless you guys, and thank you for doing the great job.