One slightly good thing about the first-time buyer bonus would be that it would mean the price is effectively cheaper for first-timers than for people who've bought before, thus offsetting the market advantage that previous buyers otherwise have, while making no difference for the seller. But it doesn't address the origins of the problem.
In the USA for the last several years, the housing problem is partially supply & demand, and also partially the wallstreetification of the market: houses or even entire neighborhoods get bought by rich corporations, which removes them from the market for people wanting to buy a place to live, who are thus made more likely to need to resort to renting (from a corporation which will then save management costs by just not doing any of the stuff a landlord is supposed to do). In a lot of cases the buyers are even in another country.
There are a few ways the law could address that, such as a ban on real estate sales to buyers outside the country and/or a ban on real estate sales to buyers already owning more than a certain maximum number of rental units. The closest Kamal's proposals come to so far is one about buying houses "in bulk", but it doesn't say anything about a corporation buying just as many of them one at a time in separate deals instead of one bulk deal. The same proposal also says they wouldn't be allowed to rent them out at excessive prices, but doesn't define what would be excessive prices. And saying they can't do X "and" Y doesn't equal saying they can't do X "or" Y, and each component of this process is harmful by itself.
That kind of weasel-wording, coupled with the first-time buyer bonus which will result in more price-rising, means the corporations who are doing this to us won't have as much incentive to buy opposition to this in Congress, which might make these proposals easier to pass than if they looked more like they were really meant to do something serious about the nature of the problem.
