Tim Walz Doesn’t Own a Home. Is That Weird?

Minnesota governor and vice presidential hopeful Tim Walz seems to have embraced becoming "America’s Dad." Some of the most shared Walz photos online feature him cuddling baby farm animals at the Minnesota state fair; there’s a YouTube video featuring his daughter, Hope, as they bungle their way through a "public service announcement" for Minnesota’s 2019 "hands-free" driving law; the Los Angeles Times even ran a story on his gearhead enthusiasm for car collection and repair. It’s stuff your dad might do—enjoy a day at the fair, goof around with his kids—and it’s doing some heavy lifting in a campaign that seeks to appeal to middle-class Americans. Perhaps what is more pertinent to many Americans’ personal circumstances is that Walz’s recent financial disclosures revealed that he and his family don’t own any property. If the Harris-Walz ticket wins in November, that will set him apart from many past executive officeholders.

This isn’t to say that Walz is like the many Americans who cannot afford to buy a home: Prior to becoming governor, Walz and his family owned a 3,200-square-foot, single-family house in Mankato, Minnesota. They sold that five years ago for less than the $315,000 asking price, according to Axios, and they moved into the Minnesota governor’s 1912 Tudor Revival–style mansion. While the state was rehabbing the property, including its electrical and mechanical systems, Walz and his family lived in a University of Minnesota estate usually occupied by university presidents, according to CBS News. 

But this situation isn’t entirely unprecedented. According to NBC Chicago, former Vice President Mike Pence’s 2021 financial disclosure statement revealed he owned few assets outside of his government pension and retirement fund; prior to spending four years living in the Vice President’s home at the Naval Observatory, he occupied the Indiana governor’s mansion. After losing the 2020 election, he rented a home in Virginia before moving back to Indiana. 

Unlike presidential property holdings that tend to capture public attention—such as Barack Obama’s purchase of a home in Martha’s Vineyard, or the Bush dynasty’s family ranch in Texas—vice presidents’ homes aren’t often subject to such scrutiny. Vice President Kamala Harris is a bit of a real estate maven, with a condo in San Francisco, a 3,500-square-foot home in Los Angeles, and a $1.78 million condo in Washington, D.C., which she purchased after being elected to the Senate in 2017. Town and Country reported in July that these properties are collectively valued at around eight million dollars.

Prior to his time as vice president, President Joe Biden had already accumulated two Delaware homes, according to another Town and Country story. The article also notes that Biden had long been in the business of buying real estate. A New Haven Register story notes that Dick Cheney sold his McLean, Virginia, townhome (and another home in Dallas) when elected as George W. Bush’s vice president and purchased a $1.35 million property in 2000 to build an 8,000-square-foot "in town home," and later bought a sprawling waterfront estate in Maryland in 2005 for $2.67 million. He sold that in 2019 well under its purchase price. He has also long owned a retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. In some ways it does, then, seem unusual for Walz to not own any real estate. Yet compared to Republican VP pick JD Vance, who, according to Business Insider, owns a historic five-bedroom property in Cincinnati, a rowhouse in D.C. (which he now rents out for $3,700 per month), and a house in the D.C. suburbs, the comparison becomes more stark.

Coupled with Walz’s financial disclosures that reveal he owns no stocks or cryptocurrency—only his teacher’s pension—his family’s financial status remains an outlier for VP hopefuls but possibly more in-line with the "everyman" that many candidates seek to appeal to. It’s nothing new in recent presidential runs: We might remember the endless "Main Street versus Wall Street" invocations of the early aughts; Joe the Plumber, who became a conservative icon in the 2008 election; and photos of John Kerry fumbling a football that rose to viral meme levels before memes were a thing. Presidential campaigns are a race to the middle, but America’s Dad might have a head start. 

Related reading:

Democrats Make Housing Policy Part of Their Campaign-Year Pitch

How Will the Next President Fix the Housing Crisis? 

Top photo: Tim Walz and Gwen Walz, Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune/Getty Images