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Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., ascended the Inman Connect stage on Thursday to argue that homeownership is the backbone of the American middle class while making his case to an audience of real estate professionals that, “Realtors are key small business people.”
Kennedy made the comments while chatting with Inman founder Brad Inman, who quizzed the heir from America’s most famous political dynasty on topics ranging from vaccines to good governance to the war in Ukraine. Midway through the conversation, Kennedy said that when he was a kid, the average home cost $7,000, while the average income was $5,000 a year. The result was that “everyone could get into a home” and that widespread access to equity fueled an explosion of wealth.
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“The American middle class was the greatest economic engine in history,” Kennedy said. “This ferment of economic activity was rooted in homeownership.”
However, Kennedy was critical of changes in the housing market that have pushed homeownership further out of reach for many people.
“We’re going today from a nation of homeowners to a nation of renters,” he said. “And when we do that, we’re going to go from citizens to subjects.”
Near the end of his interview, Kennedy also weighed in on recent antitrust lawsuits against the National Association of Realtors and various companies that have rocked the industry. Though Kennedy said he wasn’t sufficiently versed in the issue to make promises, he said that based on “what I know about it, it seems counter productive.”
“It seems unjust and it does not seem rational,” he added.
Kennedy went on to promise that if he is elected, he would figure something out that “makes sense.” But he repeatedly praised the “free market” real estate agents.
“Realtors are key small business people,” he said, “and we want to build small business in this country.”
Kennedy’s vision for improving access to homeowners, he explained, involves limiting the ability of major corporations to buy large numbers of homes. That, he said, would free up more supply. Meanwhile, he also wants to create incentives that would push local governments to loosen their zoning and planning laws — a plan that he believes could also add to the supply of housing by spurring the building of things such as tiny homes.
If Kennedy were to win the election — something polls currently suggest is unlikely — he would appoint a task force to address housing affordability.
“We need to build,” Kennedy told Inman reporters following his appearance on the Connect stage. “We need to be imaginative about building low-income housing — low-income housing that’s enriching rather than subduing.”
“There’s plenty of other nations that have population growth and don’t have housing crises,” he added, “and a lot of it has to do with the overregulation at the local level of zoning and planning regulations.”
Though Kennedy took the stage at the very end of Connect’s final day, hundreds of attendees lined up for the event. The line ultimately snaked away from the ballroom, through the Connect exhibition hall and down a nearby corridor. A team of armed Secret Service agents — some dressed in suits and others in police-style uniforms — screened attendees with metal detectors and wands as they entered the room.
By the time Kennedy finally walked on stage, at least 400 people — some of whom mentioned delaying flights home — had piled into the room.
Earlier in the conversation, Inman also noted that Kennedy has been portrayed in the press as opposing vaccines. Inman asked Kennedy to clarify his opinion.
“If you want to get a vaccine you ought to be able to get a vaccine, but you ought to know the safety profile and the risk profile and the efficacy of that vaccine,” Kennedy said as scattered applause broke out in the room.
Kennedy then went on to discuss trust in institutions, and criticized the common pandemic-era refrain that people should “trust the experts.”
“Trust the experts is not a feature of either democracy or science,” he said, adding that trusting experts is actually a feature of religion and totalitarian regimes. In reality, Kennedy continued, members of a democracy need to “maintain a posture of fierce skepticism.”
He went on to describe his career as an attorney, saying that this attitude of skepticism was an important part of the job.
“My job as an attorney is to be able to read science critically and then deconstruct it and put an expert on the stand and make him break it down,” he said on stage.
On the presidential race itself, Kennedy later acknowledged to Inman reporters that Vice President Kamala Harris’ sudden entry last month may hurt his own campaign in the short-term, but he expressed faith that concerns over her economic policies will ultimately rattle business leaders.
“I think in the short term it’s taken points away from me,” Kennedy said. “I think over the next three months, we’re already sensing uneasiness particularly in the business community with Vice President Harris’s record in California and a record of what people consider hostility to the business community.”
“It’s a very dynamic election,” he added. “You don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”
Developing…
Update: This post was updated after publication with additional comments from Kennedy’s visit to Inman Connect.
Email Jim Dalrymple II
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