Trump and Housing: The Three Most Frightening Possibilities

This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right

When Donald Trump retakes the presidency on January 20th, low-income people in the U.S. will face the same challenges they do today. In fact, many analyses of the 2024 presidential election results attribute Trump’s surprising success with low and middle-income voters to the fact that rent prices, evictions, and cost-of living struggles all spiked during the Biden-Harris administration. The rent has been “too damn high” for years, and that won’t change on Inauguration Day.

But it might get worse.

Trump’s first administration and its alumni’s Project 2025 blueprint for the second one spell out the dangers. Trump will try to slash the budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, unravel fair housing initiatives, and raise rents on the poorest households. He will promote developer-enriching boondoggles like opportunity zones—a favorite of Trump’s proposed HUD secretary. Tenant-protecting initiatives like attacking rent price-fixing and tying corporate landlords’ federal financing to rent limits are less likely to succeed.

There is a lot to worry about.

But, from the perspectives of our law school clinic clients who face eviction and/or struggle with horrible conditions in both market-rate and subsidized housing, there are three Trump possibilities that could hurt the most:

1. Poor People Will be Evicted from Subsidized Housing.

Project 2025’s chapter on housing, with Trump’s former HUD secretary Ben Carson listed as the author, features a call for imposing both work requirements and time limits on residents of subsidized housing.

On the surface, work requirements may sound justified: if people are going to get the benefit of a government subsidy, shouldn’t they be pitching in, too? But work requirements ignore the reality that the vast majority of adults in subsidized housing who can work already do so. Almost all of those not working are living with disabilities that prevent them from taking available jobs.

The most profound impact made by work requirements for social programs is by imposing red-tape demands that kick eligible people off the programs. Of course, Project 2025’s time limits for residents in subsidized housing are overtly designed to do just that. No matter that casting many of these households into the for-profit rental market will guarantee they become homeless.

A disproportionate share of the evicted households will be made up of people of color. That is no accident. Work requirements have a long, sordid history of racist intent and impact. In case the racism animating the work requirements and time limits proposals was not clear enough, Project 2025 also includes a call to revise housing waiting lists to prioritize two-parent households. “What they’re saying here is that the government should take vouchers from poor Black women and give them to married couples,” Noëlle Porter, director of government affairs at the National Housing Law Project, told Shelterforce’s Shelby King in an excellent September article examining Project 2025’s plans for HUD.

Democrats in the next Congress are not in a majority position to stop these plans. Even if they had the votes, history calls into question whether they can be counted on to step up when the time comes. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 fulfilled Democrat Bill Clinton’s promise to “end welfare as we know it.” Clinton and Congress brewed up this same victim-blaming stew of time limits and work requirements, applied it to desperately-needed benefits like support for low-income families with children, and plunged working families into deeper poverty as a result.

2. Public Housing Will be Handed Over to Profiteers.

Multiple examples from across the world and our own U.S. history show us a clear path out of our housing crisis: we should build and maintain more and better public housing. For the people we see lined up in eviction court, and many of the 22 million rental households who can’t afford market-rate rent, public housing is the answer. But three of every four households eligible for rental assistance can’t get it because we shamefully underfund the programs.

Trump wants to go backwards. Project 2025’s housing chapter demands increased flexibility to sell public housing to the private market. In fact, it explicitly states, “Congress must consider the future of the public housing model.” This echoes generations of slandering and underfunding public housing in order to justify destroying it.

That strategy has paid big dividends for private developers like Trump himself, along with corporate landlords who get rich from the vouchers or project-based rental assistance that Trump et al. want to fully replace public housing. Meanwhile, our clients can’t find private landlords to accept vouchers if they can get them, or their for-profit landlords make millions in government subsidies while forcing tenants to live in squalor. Turning even more of our subsidized housing programs over to profiteers would be disastrous.

3. The Safety Net Will be Slashed.

The saying goes, “the rent eats first.” For many of our clients and millions of others, that is no exaggeration. Almost 40% of Americans report skipping meals to afford their housing payments. Many others don’t fill prescriptions or go without other needed medical care.

Housing is far and away the most expensive monthly expenditure for our clients and most households, especially low-income households. Right now, nine million households are behind on their rent, and thus at risk of joining our clients in eviction court very soon. When we talk to those who struggle, we find that they have spent years performing a remarkable juggling act. They have managed to get some food on the table while usually keeping the lights and heat on and, for as long as possible, eviction notices off their doors.

Without housing subsidies, those households rely heavily on SNAP benefits aka Food Stamps, school meals, utility assistance, and often Medicaid for health care costs. These programs are keeping people alive. During the first years of pandemic, they did even more. Maximized benefits and enhanced eligibility for SNAP and other programs caused U.S. poverty to drop to record lows.

Project 2025 wants to cut them all. Vox’s Dylan Matthews has written a comprehensive overview of possible Trump safety net cuts . It is grim stuff, but Matthews also provides several reasons to hope Trump proposals can be defeated, or at least the damage limited.

Which, for now, is a good place to end the discussion. Because fear of these possibilities is appropriate; resignation to their inevitable occurrence is not. There will be many ways to resist horrible Trump proposals, and reason to be optimistic that resistance will be successful. In fact, the next post here will feature “Trump and Housing: Three Reasons Not to Despair.