Listen, this uphill battle for housing is daunting
Reflecting on the tax reconciliation bill and other federal actions
Looking through my drafts folder, it’s clear there is so much opportunity to create the housing and cities we want. I have half-finished posts on public housing and its cousin social housing, on the promise of modular construction, on small homes, on pedestrian safety, e-bikes and climate resilient home design.
It’s also clear to me, this week in particular, how steep the hill in front of us is. The tax reconciliation bill passed by House Republicans is brutal. As I’m sure you’ve read, it proposes to strip away healthcare and food assistance from many millions of our neighbors, cuts student loan forgiveness and education grants, attacks our trans community, erodes gun violence prevention measures and dramatically increases the size of ICE to continue its plain-clothes, masked kidnapping and unlawful deportations. All to make room for $1 trillion in tax cuts for the rich.
You already know this. I’m not a journalist or pundit, and I don’t like getting in the habit of only sharing bad news.
But I am a housing advocate and I can tell you that this coordinated attack on the poor, the working class and the middle class will worsen our housing crisis.
When assistance for food and healthcare is eliminated, economic stability will be shattered. Families will have even less money available to afford rent. Even with health insurance, it often takes just one medical emergency to throw a family into financial instability. One extended hospital visit or serious diagnosis before rent or a mortgage payment is missed. Now imagine the precarity our federal government will impose on families who are cut off from Medicaid, Medicare, preventative cancer screenings and reproductive healthcare.
The administration has a goal of cutting federal housing staff by half, including targeted cuts at departments that administer vital programs, coordinate homelessness response across the federal government and collect housing data. It eliminated the department that helps low-income families keep their heat on in the winter. They have threatened to eliminate dozens of fair housing laws even though the executive branch can’t legally do so. In its proposal for the FY26 budget, the administration wants to eliminate entire programs including HOME, CDBG, the Fair Housing Initiative Program and the Self-Sufficiency Program in addition to calling for drastic funding cuts to Section 8 vouchers, homelessness funding, Native housing, CDFI funds, NeighborWorks and AmeriCorps. They’ve already taken steps to eliminate the Energy Star program and they’ll drive up home electric bills with cuts to clean energy investment. (The expert reporters at Shelterforce are keeping a running list of federal housing actions here.)
To add fuel to the housing fire, they’ve also delayed implementation of Biden-era renter protections, threatened to kick off any mixed-status families from housing assistance and are trying to ender protections for trans and gender-nonconforming people to access shelters that are appropriate to their gender identity.
I won’t even go into detail about the effects of the president’s trade war on housing supply, except to say that the construction industry will suffer alongside just about every other business.
This attack on our human right to housing is cruel and calculated.
We all need shelter. We all need a safe, secure place to call home. Most of us believe that housing is a human right, that shelter is a basic need and that we ought to ensure this need is met for our neighbors.
I know there is a lot of opportunity ahead of us — earlier this week I gathered with colleagues from around the state to better understand how off-site construction strategies might help significantly increase our ability to meet community housing need, amazing! exciting! — but the work feels daunting in the face of these political battles and attacks.
Lately I’ve been buoyed by:
Rallies for New York for All and Dignity Not Detention
Local mayoral candidates with the vision and experience to lead our capital city
The fight and leadership of New York’s AG
There are many ways to speak up right now, including sending a non-partisan and non-confrontational email your senators if that’s your speed because it will take all different ways of communicating and building bridges to enact housing justice.
To quote Garrett Bucks, from a post that is worth reading in full:
You’re always allowed to say no. You don’t actually have to throw anybody under the bus. You can in fact say that the laid-off auto worker deserves sympathy, but so does the single mom on welfare and the trans teenager who loves volleyball and the Venezuelan family at the border.
Stay in the good fight.
As always, well said.
“The price of light is less than the cost of darkness.” - Arthur C. Neilson.