Joe Mitchell, the Republican nominee in Iowa's 2nd Congressional District, has a position on government housing subsidies. He does not like them.
He has called the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit — the main program that builds affordable apartments in this country — "a disaster" that needs to be "totally reformed." His complaint, in his own words on a business podcast this year: "It's too much paperwork. It's too much compliance. Too much cost."
There is a housing subsidy he leaves out of that speech. It is the one his companies took $2,559,880 from.
The vote, then the credits
Iowa Starting Line went through the record. Here is the sequence.
In May 2021, Mitchell was a state representative. He voted for Senate File 619, a bill that expanded Iowa's Workforce Housing Tax Credit. That program hands out $35 million a year through the Iowa Economic Development Authority.
Afterward, Mitchell became a developer. His House financial disclosure lists him as a partner in BAM Development, Monroe Street Landing, Emerald Cove LLC, Bousselot & Mitchell Company, and J Mitchell Real Estate LLC.
Two of those firms — BAM Development LLC and Bousselot & Mitchell Company — built housing projects that applied for and received Workforce Housing Tax Credits:
- A 16-unit development in Grinnell
- A 30-unit development in Clear Lake
- A 20-unit development in Dyersville
The three projects took a combined $2,559,880 in credits from the program he had voted to grow.
What this is and isn't
It is worth being precise, because the facts are damning enough without stretching them.
The credits are awarded through a competitive application run by state economic development staff, not handed out by legislators. And Mitchell was not yet a partner in either company when he cast the 2021 vote. Nobody has shown that he voted knowing his own future firms would collect.
What the record does show is a lawmaker who voted to make a housing subsidy bigger, then spent the following years building a real estate portfolio that leaned on that exact subsidy — and who is now running for Congress telling Iowans that housing subsidies are the problem.
The federal program he wants "totally reformed" is the one that builds housing for people who cannot afford market rent. The state program he voted to expand is the one that paid his companies. His criticism, as Iowa Starting Line put it, is rooted in the perspective of a developer.
This is the third time the pattern has run
Mitchell's campaign sells him as an outsider taking on a system that "works for insiders and lobbyists." We have now documented that claim colliding with his own record three separate times.
He founded and presides over a real estate trade group that spent nearly $75,000 lobbying the Iowa Legislature — while running against lobbyists.
His entire published housing plan is deregulation, which Iowa already tried: a law capping what cities can require of developers for stormwater runoff, passed in a state with worsening floods.
And now the housing subsidies he attacks in public are the kind his companies banked $2.5 million from.
There is one more name on the paperwork. BAM Development was co-founded in 2021 by Mitchell, fellow Iowa Rep. Michael Bousselot, and Matthew Arenholz — the husband of Rep. Ashley Hinson, who voted in the Iowa House to double the very credit BAM went on to collect. Mitchell was not in the legislature for that 2017 vote, but he joined Hinson in voting for the 2019 bill that doubled the small-city set-aside again.
Who this is actually about
Iowans in the 2nd District are not looking for a debate about tax credit compliance costs. They are looking at rent and a mortgage rate.
The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit that Mitchell wants "totally reformed" is the program that produces the units at the bottom of the market — the ones a family priced out of buying actually needs. His argument against it is that it involves too much paperwork for developers.
He is a developer. His companies have taken $2.5 million from the state credit whose paperwork he was willing to do.
What the record shows
Joe Mitchell voted in May 2021 to expand Iowa's Workforce Housing Tax Credit. Two development companies he later partnered in collected $2,559,880 from that program across three Iowa towns. He is now campaigning against the federal housing credit as "a disaster" with "too much paperwork" — the program that builds housing for Iowans who cannot afford to buy from developers like him.
Source
"Joe Mitchell cashed in on housing tax credit he voted to grow", Iowa Starting Line, August 31, 2026. Photo: Iowa Starting Line.
