Trump and Housing: Three Reasons Not to Despair

Image by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

Last week, we reviewed Trump and Housing: The Three Most Frightening Possibilities. The scary prospects: poor people will be evicted from subsidized housing, public housing will be handed over to profiteers, and the safety net will be slashed. All of these would be horrible; all are quite possible under Trump’s second presidency.

But, as promised at the end of that post, here are three reasons we should not despair:

1. Our Affordable Housing System is Already Dominated by Trump-ian Profiteers

It is telling that, as we outlined in last week’s post, the first-term Trump alumni who drafted Project 2025’s housing chapter focused on attacking public housing and targeting it for privatization. That is because public housing is one of the last components of our federal affordable housing system that does not operate as a cash cow for for-profit corporations. (Although even many public housing agencies hand over a lot of government money to private, for-profit property management companies.) These corporations and those who benefit from them are largely Trump donors and supporters, and they expect Trump to protect their interests.

Consider that the big winners in the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, the largest U.S. financer of cost-limited housing, are not people in need of affordable housing. LIHTC benefits most the wealthy investors who receive tax breaks in return for creating housing priced at a level that is often unaffordable for the poor. Similarly, project-based subsidized housing funnels federal dollars to for-profit real estate companies, even when those companies force tenants to live in squalor. Housing choice vouchers, aka Section 8 vouchers, do the same. In fact, Project 2025’s housing chapter praises vouchers and says they should be a Trump administration priority.

And the far-and-away biggest housing subsidies of all, federal tax expenditures for wealthy homeowners and landlords, are enjoyed mostly by Trump supporters.

These programs do sometimes provide benefits to the poor and middle class, albeit indirectly and inefficiently. But what LIHTC, project-based subsidies, and housing choice vouchers do the best is enrich the already wealthy. And Trump is not about to bite the hand that feeds.

2. Not All Housing Policy is Federal

There is no denying the federal government’s enormous role in housing. But rent price controls, along with renter protections like requiring landlords to renew leases in most cases and providing a right to counsel for tenants facing evictions, are not federal law. Yet they exist at state and local levels.

Nearly 200 communities and multiple states have some form of rent control, and there are ongoing local and state-level campaigns to expand that number. Communities like Baltimore and St. Paul, Minnesota and states like Oregon and New Jersey require landlords to renew leases unless there is good cause not to renew, providing much-needed stability for renting households. Five states and 17 cities provide tenants with a right to counsel in eviction proceedings. Many communities and states directly fund affordable housing.

Local government’s impact on housing is sometimes proven in the breach. Consider my hometown of Indianapolis, where our mayor’s and city council’s neglect of our failing public housing agency has led to homelessness, dangerous living conditions, and a community struggling with an acute housing crisis.

Even if we expect nothing but bad things from the Trump administration on housing, we can and should organize in our states and local communities to create new rights, expand funding, and improve our all-important public housing agencies.

3. There Will Be Resistance

There has been some minimal Congressional resistance to Trump’s worst cabinet nominees. That offers hope that the next Congress, like lawmakers during Trump’s first term, will push back on some of the most damaging Trump proposals. As Kenny Stancil of the Revolving Door Project wrote in The New Republic, Congress rejected Trump 1.0’s efforts to slash affordable housing programs. Dylan Matthews in Vox predicts that Trump’s most drastic safety net cut proposals will be opposed in Congress.

If that happens, great. But more heartening to me is the growing tenant union movement continuing to push for housing justice, at the federal level as well as in states, cities, and even in individual complexes. Grassroots organizing like this is how social movements win. And tenant organizing is gaining its most traction among the working class, who Trump is very aware formed a critical part of his winning voting bloc in November.

When organized, people always have more power than politicians. Hopefully, our nation’s 44 million renting households will take the opportunity to prove this truth to President-elect Trump.