In some ways, that’s surprising. Housing is as important a kitchen-table issue as health care and education. Housing expenses are the largest item in most households’ monthly budgets. Housing affordability—typically measured as the share of income spent on housing costs—has gotten worse for middle-class families over the past two decades. Home equity is the largest financial asset for middle-income families. Low-income families have long faced the twin problems of housing affordability and instability, but these problems are increasingly threatening the middle class. When the unemployment rate spikes, voters blame the president. When Americans fear losing their health insurance, they flip partisan control of Congress. Yet when rising housing costs squeeze families’ budgets, few voters expect Washington to intervene in their local housing markets.

Yet that may change. Booker, Castro, Klobuchar, and Warren propose a combination of financial carrots and sticks that the federal government could use to induce local governments to reform their zoning. Indeed, a larger federal role in reducing local barriers to development appears to be one area with potential for bipartisan cooperation: President Donald Trump recently created a task force to address this issue.

Read: America’s other housing crisis: undercrowded suburbs

For the past eight years, housing production has lagged behind demand. Urban economists have long documented how zoning and other land-use regulations adopted by local governments are impeding the ability to build new housing, particularly apartments, which provide most rental housing. While well-designed land-use regulations can limit potential harms—for instance, by ensuring that homes are not built in environmentally vulnerable locations—overly strict zoning creates a barrier to building affordable, high-quality housing in metro areas where economic opportunity abounds. Over the past year, the YIMBY movement has persuaded a number of governments to reduce regulatory barriers at the city or state level. If Booker, Castro, Klobuchar, and Warren—or Trump—can successfully throw financial and legal weight behind their proposals, the federal government would be staking out important territory in a policy area it previously has not claimed.

In the past, federal policy instead had the effect of widening inequality and entrenching discrimination. Yet the question of how to atone for the sin of redlining—the federal government’s history of systematically denying mortgages to black applicants and black neighborhoods—is having a breakout moment in the Democratic-primary campaign. Cory Booker prefaces his housing proposals with his parents’ struggle against housing discrimination, segueing into a plan for the federal government to combat exclusionary zoning by local governments. He has also embraced “baby bonds” as a means to close the racial wealth gap. At the She the People forum earlier this year, Warren devoted a substantial portion of her talk to explaining how a long history of racially discriminatory practices has contributed to persistent racial wealth gaps. To combat this, her plan includes down-payment assistance for first-time home buyers in segregated or formerly redlined neighborhoods. Kamala Harris similarly proposes homeownership subsidies for people living in historically redlined communities. Pete Buttigieg’s housing plan is one component of his larger Douglass Plan, aimed at reducing black-white disparities across a number of measures. Castro and Klobuchar both call for more rigorous enforcement of federal fair-housing laws.