Transcript of VP JD Vance Remarks At National League of Cities Event

You know, 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 government 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. Now, the Trump administration believes in the wisdom of federalism and leaving local issues to local officials. But, we all 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.

The Housing Crisis in America

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. 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 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. 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.

The Impact of Inflation on Housing

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.

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 percent, your buying power took even a bigger hit.

And of course if you think about this, if the price of a home doubles and the price 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.

Zoning and Housing Costs

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 our, excuse me, 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.

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, you know, Columbus, Ohio in particular, I assume we’ve got some Columbus people here. And, you know, Columbus is a boom town in so many ways. I’ve got, you know, 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, you know, Miami, which became a boom town during the COVID years, is the unaffordability of housing.

And we’ve got to fix that. 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.

Trump Administration’s Housing Initiatives

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 percent of a new single-family bill today. 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 cost 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.

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.

Immigration and Housing Demand

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. 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.

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.

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.

Border Security Progress

Now, last week, I visited the southern border, and we decided to check in on what’s going on there at the southern border. 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.

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.

Enforcement of Immigration Laws

So, with all due respect for some of the disagreements and 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. And I can tell… And 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, but…

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.

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.

Supporting American Workers

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.

And we’ve seen 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, we’ve seen 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 together, and let’s reinvigorate the American dream for the American citizen once again.

Recognition of Local Government’s Vital Role

And let me, let me close here with just an acknowledgement here that I know you guys have some of the hardest jobs in government. Democrat, Republican, or non-partisan, 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.

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, 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 a great job.

[End of transcript]

Related Posts

• Transcript: Trump-Mamdani Meeting And Q&A At Oval Office
• Transcript: I Know Why Epstein Refused to Expose Trump: Michael Wolff on Inside Trump’s Head
• Transcript: WHY Wage Their War For Them? Trump Strikes Venezuela Boats – Piers Morgan Uncensored
• Transcript: Israel First Meltdown and the Future of the America First Movement: Tucker Carlson
• Transcript: Trump’s Address at Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day