How Donald Trump’s Project 2025 could worsen the US housing crisis

This is an adapted excerpt from the September 1st episode of “Velshi”.

Project 2025, the far-right’s playbook for a second Trump presidency, predictably targets government programs designed to help this country’s most vulnerable populations: the poor and low-wage earners, people of color, families that don’t fit the traditional two-parent model, and mixed-status families.

The attack on America’s most vulnerable is especially evident in Chapter 15, which focuses on the Department of Housing and Urban Development. One of the first lines of that chapter reads:

“The Secretary should create a HUD task force comprised of political appointees to identify and reverse all actions taken by the Biden Administration to promote progressive ideology.”

Now, what progressive ideology are they talking about? According to Project 2025, “progressive ideology” is anything that includes language referencing race, diversity, equity and inclusion, gender or sexuality, or environmental protection.

First, it’s important to understand why we need this “progressive ideology” in housing policy. In the 1930s, as the country was recovering from the Great Depression, the federal government implemented a program to help Americans struggling with their mortgages so they could avoid foreclosure.

In an attempt to prevent foreclosure, the Home Owners Loan Corp. sent representatives to assess homes and neighborhoods. They were tasked with determining value and identifying any “detrimental factors” that might influence which homes lenders would want to insure. It turns out that, for lenders, being black was a “detrimental factor.”

Inadequate federal policies allowed these lenders to refuse to insure mortgages in or even near black neighborhoods. This phenomenon became known as “redlining,” and its effects can still be felt in neighborhoods across America today. According to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, about 3 in 4 U.S. neighborhoods that were redlined in the 1930s are still low- to moderate-income, and about 2 in 3 are predominantly populated by people of color.

Government housing policies of the 1930s also provided subsidies to developers to build suburban communities and subdivisions, but made them available only to white people. In practice, this was forced segregation. It pushed black Americans into housing projects and reinforced systems that stagnated inequality, impeding upward mobility for nonwhite people.

Throughout American history, Black and Latino neighborhoods have been treated as “sacrifice zones.” For example, highways, interstates, and industrial zones were systematically built to isolate these neighborhoods from economic centers and opportunities, while exposing them to greater environmental and pollution risks.

For decades, there have been attempts to help the United States move closer to housing equity and undo some of the racist policies of the past. The Biden administration took several important steps to improve housing equity. Now, Project 2025 wants to undo all that progress.

Among other proposals, it recommends that the next conservative president “immediately end the Biden Administration’s Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity (PAVE) policies” and “repeal the Affirmative Furtherance of Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation reinstated under the Biden Administration.”

These policies were designed by the Biden Administration specifically to eliminate the decades of housing inequality that still plague communities today by preventing racial bias in home appraisals, actively undoing segregation, and allowing lenders to address the effects of our history of housing discrimination.

But Project 2025 doesn’t end there. On page 509, the mandate says the department should “prohibit noncitizens, including all mixed-status families, from living in all federally assisted housing.” That means tens of thousands of immigrant families, including those with spouses, parents, or children who are legal U.S. citizens, would face eviction. According to HUD, about 55,000 children would face eviction under that proposal.

Another policy within Project 2025 proposes putting strict limits on public housing residents by eliminating “housing first” assistance models. “Housing first” models have been widely studied and shown to be far more effective at reducing poverty and homelessness than “treatment first” models, which often require sobriety and mental health treatment. Those models have higher failure and recidivism rates, because, the fact is, if you’re trying to recover from addiction, you need housing. first.

On page 512, the mandate also recommends “maximum flexibility in directing sales of (Public Housing Agency) land involving the existing stock of public housing units. Congress should consider the future of the public housing model…where PHAs can sell land and put it to more economical use.” In other words, it recommends that Congress allow land currently used for public housing to be sold to private developers for the right price.

It is clear that Project 2025’s plans for a second Trump administration will only make it more difficult for low-income and already disadvantaged Americans to achieve stable, safe, and affordable housing, likely putting the American dream of homeownership even further out of reach.

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Allison Detzel Contributed.