Housing may not be dominating this year’s presidential race, but the issue is a high priority for Americans. At least 80% of voters surveyed by the real estate company Redfin said that housing affordability is essential to their vote.
The affordable housing crisis is particularly acute for low-wage workers — there is not a single state, metro area or county in the country where a renter working full time at minimum wage can afford a modest two-bedroom rental home, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
In recent weeks, Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican candidate former President Donald Trump have begun to outline plans to address America’s housing woes. As with most issues, the candidates’ proposals are very different, as are their track records.
Soon after replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, Harris proposed $25,000 in down-payment assistance for first-time homebuyers and the launch of a $40 billion local innovation fund to “provide state and local governments, and private developers and homebuilders, funds to invest in innovative strategies to expand the housing supply..”
Trump, by contrast, has vowed to open up vast areas of federal land for large-scale housing construction, telling The Economic Club of New York that “these zones will be ultra-low tax and ultra-low regulations — one of the great small business job creation programs.”
Harris has framed the crisis as a supply problem, while Trump has frequently defined it as a demand issue, blaming the housing shortage on immigrants.
At a rally in downtown Tucson, Arizona, in September, the Republican nominee said migrants disproportionately live in low-income rental properties, that he would force rental companies offering subsidized housing to require proof of citizenship from tenants and that he would ban mortgages for immigrants living in the U.S. without legal permission.
The issue also came up during the vice-presidential debate when Republican nominee Sen. JD Vance argued that immigrants have driven up the cost of housing, an assertion that was undercut by several experts who pointed to studies that show that increased enforcement of immigration laws reduces the construction workforce and actually leads to higher housing prices.
Trump’s Housing Record and Project 2025
In his first term, Trump proposed massive cuts to federal affordable housing programs and “undermined efforts to promote racial equity and reverse the nation’s legacy of housing discrimination,” said Will Fischer, senior director of housing policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In fiscal year 2020, Trump proposed cutting the budget for the Department of Housing and Urban Development by $9.6 billion, 18% below its previous level. Congress rejected that cut and increased the agency’s budget by 5.1%.
“During Trump’s first term, affordable housing was less emphasized than it was during the Biden administration,” said Robert Silverman, a professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning. “Rents were increasing at rates exceeding inflation, and new construction of affordable housing slowed.”
Some of the housing proposals outlined in Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s political initiative and blueprint for a second Trump term, mirror some key actions taken by Trump during his first term. Ben Carson, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Trump, wrote the HUD proposals in the Heritage blueprint, though the Trump campaign has attempted to distance itself from Project 2025.
In his 2020 and 2021 budgets, Trump proposed eliminating the Housing Trust Fund, which provides grants to states to preserve and produce affordable homes for low-income households. But the fund was retained by Congress and supported by the Biden administration. Taking another swing at ending the program is a goal of Project 2025.
In his first term, Trump ended the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule that required HUD and states, counties and cities to pursue meaningful action to undo decades of housing discrimination. Soon after taking office in 2021, Biden reinstated the regulation. Terminating the rule again is one of Project 2025’s recommendations.
In 2020, Trump’s HUD expanded the use of work requirements for public housing benefits. During Biden’s first year in office and at the height of the pandemic, the agency chose to keep the requirements but did not further expand them, saying that the program did not consider “economic realities and current needs of low-income families.” In Project 2025, Carson recommended longer-term reforms of rental assistance programs, such as regulations that “seek to strengthen work requirements” and “limit the period during which households are eligible for housing benefits.”
“We have a really good view of exactly the type of policies that [Trump] would pursue, and largely those are ones that would make the housing crisis worse or would increase the risk of homelessness in communities,” Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told Capital & Main.
A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not reply to a request for comment.
Harris’ Housing Record as California Attorney General and Senator
Saadian said that she believes Harris’ housing proposals are promising, such as reining in rent increases by corporate landlords and cracking down on algorithmic price fixing that has been shown to hurt renters. But Saadian added that the vice president needs to develop housing policies that address the challenges of more Americans.
“These are good things, but most of the solutions that she’s put forward are ones that are really geared towards middle-income and high-income renters,” Saadian said. “There’s still a lot more we’d like to see from her on proposals to help renters who have the greatest needs — things like universal rent assistance or a renter’s tax credit or building more housing supply that’s affordable to those lowest-income households.” Many apartments built with low-income housing tax credits for developers are actually “unaffordable for people who need housing the most,” she said.
Some experts have argued that Harris’s down payment proposal for first-time homeowners may not be as effective as promised since it would likely be narrowed down to a subset of purchasers to get through Congress and is expected to largely benefit sellers and especially banks “because they’ll be able to originate more loans,” Silverman said.
As attorney general of California and as a U.S. senator, Harris often focused on housing issues. She drafted and helped pass the California Homeowner Bill of Rights, which was enacted in 2013 to protect homeowners from unfair foreclosure practices. A year earlier, she joined other states in negotiating an $18 billion settlement of claims on behalf of those who lost their homes due to fraud or improper foreclosure.
But Harris came under criticism for rejecting her staff’s recommendation to prosecute a bank that foreclosed on tens of thousands of state homeowners and faced accusations that she suppressed an internal report on the matter.
The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
On the federal level, as a U.S. senator in 2018, she introduced the Rent Relief Act, which would have provided tax credits to renters who earn less than $100,000. The bill never made it to the floor of the Senate for a vote.
Though Harris and Trump agree that the country faces a housing crisis, they diverge on most aspects of how to address that crisis. “You have two candidates with such very different visions for how to address housing, which could have implications for generations,” Saadian said.
