The Partisan Battle Lines on Housing are Clear
Democrats love affordable housing, Republicans hate it.
By Henry Kraemer
This week, affordable housing and residential segregation emerged as yet another stark contrast between the Democratic and Republican parties heading into the 2020 election.
Our sprawling public health and economic crises are accelerating an already festering housing crisis – with one-third of US households missing their housing payments in July. Meanwhile, presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden, and President Donald Trump are staking claim to diametrically opposed positions on housing. Biden is embracing inclusive, equitable, abundant housing solutions while Trump is hugging tight to racist segregation and elitist NIMBYism.
After decades of a bipartisan preference for federal inaction and local stagnation on housing policy, partisan battle lines that began to emerge in the past few years, deepened further in recent weeks.
In the decades following President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, housing policy largely disappeared from the national political debate. With little attention from the public, segregationists and free-market fundamentalists from Presidents Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton chipped away at federal support for affordable housing. NIMBYs (“Not In My Back Yard” types opposed to new development) seized control over housing decisions in cities, both large and small. They killed new housing project proposals and entrenched the century-old exclusionary zoning that first segregated communities in the early 20th century by banning lower cost forms of housing like fourplexes and garden apartments.
Yet in the aftermath of Trump’s election in 2016, as Democrats paid better attention to the ravages of corrupt capitalism and white supremacy – and housing cost burdens got bad enough to squeeze the middle class – housing started earning national attention again.
Every major Democratic candidate for president endorsed an explicitly pro-housing platform, calling for an end to exclusionary zoning, increased protections for renters, and a surge of federal funding for new housing. Democrats across the spectrum from Senator Amy Klobuchar to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) called for more aggressive national policies to spur more housing near jobs, transit, and in amenity-rich communities. Reversing residential segregation and expanding access to affordable housing became the consensus among Democrats.
As for Republicans, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Ben Carson has spent the past four years quietly dismantling fair housing policies on behalf of the Trump Administration and its club of crooked, racist landlords. But the white supremacists within the Republican Party could no longer hold their tongue after George Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis Police Department prompted a nationwide reckoning with public legacies of America’s racial caste system.
The far-right media complex goose-stepped into the housing debate on June 23, when Fox Nation correspondent Lara Logan used her appearance on The Ingraham Angle to connect the Black Lives Matter protests to recent municipal efforts to end exclusionary zoning. In progressive cities like Minneapolis and Austin, Logan said, “the city councils have been rezoning single-family areas and making them multi-family areas only...because minorities are disadvantaged and can’t afford a single-family home as much as white people can” and that Black Lives Matter protesters are using that agenda “to ignite a race war.”
Setting aside the absurdity of Logan’s race war fever dreams, her description of the Minneapolis and Austin housing reforms is wildly inaccurate. The cities legalized smaller, lower-cost middle housing like triplexes and small, affordable apartments. They certainly didn’t ban single-family housing anywhere. Yet Logan’s intent was never to accurately report facts; it was to blow a dog whistle to her fellow white supremacists – the Democrats are coming for your gated, whites-only communities.
Logan’s appearance sparked a chain reaction that led to Trump’s tirades. On June 30, the right-wing National Review ran an unhinged piece denouncing the evils of residential integration. On July 9, hoodless klansman Tucker Carlson declared that “Democrats want to abolish the suburbs [and] the Biden campaign has highly specific plans on how to do this...Towns will be ordered to abolish zoning for single-family housing because single-family homes, needless to say, are racist. Low-income federally subsidized apartments will go up in the suburbs.”
The far-right’s frothing defense of exclusionary zoning bubbled all the way to the top on Tuesday and Thursday, when Trump used a Rose Garden press conference to rant against the Obama Administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which was developed by then HUD Secretary Julián Castro to incentivize cities and towns to remove their exclusionary zoning laws and which Biden has promised to enforce.
“You're going to abolish the suburbs with this,” Trump raved on Tuesday, "I've been watching this for years in Westchester, coming from New York. They want low-income housing built in a neighborhood. Well, I'm ending that rule. I'm taking it out.”
In another Rose Garden rant on Thursday, Trump rambled that Democrats are “determined to eliminate single family zoning to destroy the value of houses and communities already built, just as they have in Minneapolis.”
Of course, Biden and Democrats don’t want to abolish the suburbs or destroy communities. What Biden has proposed – and which Democrats across the ideological spectrum support – is using federal housing and transportation funding as a carrot to convince communities, urban and suburban alike, to unwind their historically racist, exclusionary zoning policies and allow affordable and lower-cost housing options to integrate their neighborhoods. This proposal wouldn’t kick people out of their McMansions or ban new single-family homes. Rather, it would open up prosperous neighborhoods to modest, lower-cost “middle housing” options (townhouses, triplexes, courtyard apartments, etc.) and the middle-class and working-class families who can afford them. It would mean kids go to school with a diverse class of students and working parents get to spend less time commuting and more time with their children. It is a modest policy with support from centrists to democratic socialists and nonpartisan institutions like AARP.
Biden has also promised to go further. In the $2 trillion Clean Energy plan he announced on Tuesday, Biden committed to “spurring the construction of 1.5 million homes and public housing units to address the affordable housing crisis, increase energy efficiency, and reduce the racial wealth gap...drive additional capital into low-income communities to spur the development of affordable housing and small business creation [and] incentivize smart regional planning that connects housing, transit, and jobs, improving quality of life by cutting commute times, reducing the distance between living and leisure areas, and mitigating climate change.”
While not as bold as many of us on the left might have preferred, Biden’s housing vision is unambiguously progressive, goes much further than any previous Democratic nominee, largely matches the preferences of the average voter, and is broadly popular.
Trump, Republicans, and the far-right media complex fiercely oppose this vision because it would help to integrate communities around the country. They loathe any attempt to let Black and brown families live beside white families and blanch at the idea of working class people having the same access to amenities as wealthy Westchesterites. Republicans’ elitist, white supremacist vision simply cannot allow it. And they hope segregation can serve as yet another tool in the Race Baiting for Electoral Gain toolkit.
This has become the story of housing politics in the United States, circa 2020. It plays out at the local level as well as nationally. Democrats support expanding access to affordable housing and integrating communities through equitable zoning. Republicans support building bigger walls around their gated communities and keeping working people as far as possible from their local Ruth’s Chris.
Add affordable housing and neighborhood integration to the nearly endless list of reasons Republicans and far-right extremists must be removed from power. Trump’s failures on coronavirus are putting millions of Americans at risk of losing their homes. The far right has declared war on affordable housing and openly embraced segregation. Their white supremacist vision is incompatible with America in 2020. Every American needs a safe, affordable home and Democrats are the only major party trying to help.
Henry Kraemer (@HenryKraemer) is a writer and activist focused on housing, social democratic urbanism, and voting rights. He previously spearheaded the creation of America’s first automatic voter registration law in Oregon and its expansion across the country. He lives in Portland, Oregon and works a day-job in renewable energy.