“The Rent is Too Damn High” and the 2024 Election

Image by Alan Geraghty

Just like the rest of us, housing advocates are processing the implications of last week’s election results. As stated many times here and in excellent comparisons by Shelterforce and the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, slumlord Donald Trump’s second-term plans for housing are far worse than anything the Harris-Walz ticket proposed.

But few voters dove deep into the candidates’ housing plans, while many were painfully aware that, as the Tenant Union Federation says, the rent is too damn high. A record number of people are paying an unsustainably high percentage of their income for rent. This spike happened on the Biden-Harris watch, so the struggle to afford housing, for most households their top expense, helped Trump.

A lot.

Doug Henwood’s “It Was Always About Inflation” article in Jacobin is as blunt as its title. While acknowledging there were many factors involved in Trump’s win, Henwood zeroed in on the fact that working class people are justifiably upset about the rising cost of survival:

The reason for this poor performance was inflation: incomes couldn’t keep up with rapid price increases. Overall prices have risen over two-and-a-half times as much under Biden as they did under Trump. Ditto food prices. Gas prices, which are highly visible and which Americans seem to think should be low by divine right, were flat under Trump but are up 29% under Biden. Housing prices have risen twice as fast under Biden as Trump . . .

As a result of these price increases, the highest in over forty years, real incomes have taken a hit. Under Trump, the average real hourly wage (wage rate adjusted for inflation) was up 4.8%; under Biden, it’s down 1.3%. 

While these might sound like a numbing array of economic statistics to nonspecialists, it’s clear that people felt them and voted accordingly. A third of voters, 32%, said the state of the economy was the most important factor in deciding how they voted, and they went for Trump by 61 points. That’s three times the share that chose immigration, 11%, and eight times the share that said foreign policy.

Henwood highlights the rising cost of housing, which the Tenant Union Federation’s Tara Raghuveer also lifted up. Raghuveer retweeted post-election her X/Twitter July 2022 statement that underscored tenant unions’ unheeded call for the Biden-Harris administration to use its power to regulate rents:

An inflation reduction strategy that doesn’t prioritize rent regulation is doomed. Housing costs are American households’ biggest monthly expense, and rent is a key driver of core inflation. Now is the time for federal action to regulate rents, by any/all means necessary.

The data back Raghuveer up. A NBC News analysis showed that the areas of the country where Trump made his biggest gains compared to the 2020 election were also the areas where housing costs increased the most.

“Housing prices are a big part of the inflation story, especially the most persistent and severe parts of the inflation story,” Bernard Fraga, a professor specializing in voter turnout at Emory University, told NBC. “So you can’t separate out the price of housing from voters’ general concerns about the state of the economy.”

Some commentators have claimed that these voters were duped by right-wing media, and that they simply did not realize how good the economy under Biden-Harris is. To this, Washington Post political reporter  Sabrina Rodríguez called B.S.:

Talked to easily a few hundred voters this year — many working class — and the precision with which some people could tell me how much a pound of steak, carton of eggs, gallon of milk had gone up (not to mention the price of rent) tells a very different story.

That certainly lines up with what we see and hear in eviction court. Every tenant is keenly aware of every dollar in rent increase, and can describe in detail the sacrifices that come with those higher costs.

Very unfortunately, despite the cost of rent helping Trump at the voting booth, there is zero reason to believe costs will drop under his second administration. In fact, his vague statements about affordable housing foretell more harm than good. The National Housing Law Project issued a statement from its executive director Shamus Roller that nicely summarizes the challenges at hand. An excerpt:

“The incoming Trump-Vance administration has falsely claimed that immigrants caused the housing crisis when the real culprit is a rigged housing system designed by speculators and the real estate industry to serve their needs. We need deep investments in affordable housing and a real plan to address the housing crisis. Trump has promised to exacerbate the crisis by decimating HUD and its critical programs and further privatizing the housing market. . .

There are tough fights ahead, and we’ll do everything we can to make our housing system work for everyone, not just billionaires and speculators.”

Agreed. The struggle continues, because it must. Hopefully, the election results will inspire more public officials and future candidates to be bold about lowering the cost of rent.