Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor
Since many immigrants work in the construction industry, mass deportation would make the cost of building new homes go up.
This article is part of a Prospect symposium on tackling the housing crisis in America.
I want you to meet my friend Carlos. Carlos grew up in Chicago, but had to move when housing prices for renters like him went through the roof. He’s visually impaired, so needs a familiar environment he can navigate with his cane, and supportive services. He found none of these in his new city but can’t move home, because there’s nothing he can afford, even in neighborhoods plagued with gun violence. Chicago is just too expensive now.
“I wish they’d make housing more affordable, so people don’t have to pay an arm, a leg, and their whole body in rental fees,” he told me. “They need to make things affordable for people with disabilities.”
Carlos’s dilemma is far from unique: Millions of us live on the brink of eviction and homelessness as we struggle to pay our rent or mortgage. We are in the midst of our country’s worst housing emergency since the Great Depression. Many of us have to choose daily between housing and basic necessities like food and health care.
So when Carlos heard Tim Walz say during the vice-presidential debate that we need to stop treating housing as a commodity, it gave him hope. He volunteered to make calls with People’s Action Power to help Walz and Kamala Harris get elected, as one of the thousands of volunteers who joined us to make more than four million calls to battleground states.
A Homes Guarantee would ensure everyone has a safe, accessible, sustainable, and permanently affordable home.
Despite these efforts, voters ultimately directed their frustrations with the cost of living at the incumbent party instead of the true villain behind rising prices: unbridled corporate greed. So now we face the reality of a second, even more heartless Trump term, with trillions of dollars in potential cuts to social services and more giveaways to the billionaires and corporations that got us into this mess.
Trump’s solution for housing? Deport millions of immigrants. Trump blames immigrants for driving up housing prices. We have lived through eras of mass deportation before, particularly in the George W. Bush administration, and they did not have any meaningful effect on housing prices. In fact, since many immigrants work in the construction industry, deportation will make the cost of building new homes go up. A weaker economy with fewer immigrants will also be terrible for people struggling to afford housing today.
The blaming of immigrants diverts our attention from the corporate landlords who’ve been buying up properties since Trump gave $2 trillion in tax cuts to the richest of the rich in 2017. Trump’s tax cuts didn’t just throw away money that could have been invested in housing solutions; they concentrated wealth so much that speculators began to seek out apartment buildings and single-family homes as new assets to commodify. From small towns to big cities, these investors are now buying up real estate, driving up the cost to rent or buy a home. Corporate landlords have even pushed rental prices upward by coordinating as a cartel through the RealPage algorithm.
Things got worse when the Trump-appointed conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court gave municipalities free license to criminalize people for having nowhere to go, in their 2024 Grants Pass decision. Many local and state governments, led by Democrats and Republicans alike, now sweep encampments and enforce anti-loitering and anti-camping ordinances to keep people from sleeping on the street, even when a municipality has no alternatives to offer.
Throwing our fellow human beings in jail simply for being poor, mentally ill, or having substance use disorder is no solution for them, or for us. People feel abandoned by elected officials and despair for any change, while local governments lack the resources to fix this crisis on their own.
Evicting immigrants and jailing the homeless does nothing to help you, me, and Carlos afford homes. Our housing crisis is not going away. But the good news is that neither are we: My organization, People’s Action, will continue to organize and fight for the most effective solutions to this crisis.
At People’s Action, we always believe that the people closest to a problem are closest to its solution. So our member organizations and their leaders, who include tenants, unhoused people, and homeowners from across the country in urban, rural, and suburban areas, came together to come up with a strategy.
Their solution? A Homes Guarantee, which would ensure everyone has a safe, accessible, sustainable, and permanently affordable home. It’s long past time the United States acknowledged that housing is a right, not a privilege. And there’s no reason why we, the richest country in the history of the world, can’t do this.
People’s Action has been organizing for housing justice for decades. One of our founders, Gale Cincotta, was a Chicago housewife angered by the discrimination she saw in her neighborhood in the 1970s, when banks refused to lend to Black and brown families in a practice known as redlining. The nationwide movement Gale started with her neighbors spurred passage of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) and Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which forced banks to end redlining and to reinvest in long-neglected neighborhoods.
The Reagan Revolution chipped away at these victories, while the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008 brought new challenges. That time, the big banks whose risky lending practices prompted the crisis got a big bailout from the federal government, while the victims of their predation simply lost their homes.
Yet despite these setbacks, People’s Action and our member groups have never, ever given up our fight to win protections for homeowners and tenants, and we have succeeded. We are as committed to organize for the safe and secure homes you, Carlos, and we all deserve.
There is no question that this election represents a fundamental setback in our ability to win the federal investments our country needs to create a system where everyone has a high-quality home. Yet even in this bleak moment, we see signs of hope: We celebrate the victories of lawmakers who advance housing solutions like U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
Rep. Omar authored the Homes for All Act, which would authorize construction of 12 million new public-housing and private, permanently affordable rental units. This would drive down costs throughout the market and create a new vision of what public housing looks like in the United States. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) introduced a great social-housing bill called the Homes Act.
These bills include the kind of bold investments in building and restoring homes our country needs, which must include repairing and converting old buildings into public housing and other forms of social housing. We must also organize to ensure that Trump and congressional Republicans do not reauthorize the trillions in tax cuts that are set to expire next year.
While the Homes Guarantee represents the North Star vision for our campaign, solving our housing crisis will require a comprehensive approach. We’ll fight and win stepping stones at the state and local level that bring us closer to this vision, even when we face an uphill climb. People’s Action member groups will organize to win tenants’ rights like the right to counsel to address the immediate needs of getting people housed and keeping people in their homes, while we demand investments in new, permanently affordable housing where people can live with dignity.
Gale Cincotta never gave up her fight for housing justice for people like Carlos, and neither will we. Gale’s last words to People’s Action before she died in 2001? “Get the crooks!” Yes, Gale, we will.
