Affordable Housing

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Trump Officials Unveil Budget Cuts to Aid for Health, Housing and Research

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The new blueprint shows that a vast array of education, health, housing and labor programs would be hit, including aid for college and cancer research.The Trump administration on Friday unveiled fuller details of its proposal to slash about $163 billion in federal spending next fiscal year, offering a more intricate glimpse into the vast array of education, health, housing and labor programs that would be hit by the deepest cuts.The many spending reductions throughout the roughly 1,220-page document and agency blueprints underscored President Trump’s desire to foster a vast transformation in Washington. His budget seeks to reduce the size of government and its reach into Americans lives, including services to the poor.The new proposal reaffirmed the president’s recommendation to set federal spending levels at their lowest in modern history, as the White House first sketched out in its initial submission to Congress transmitted in early May. But it offered new details about the ways in which Mr. Trump hoped to achieve the savings, and the many functions of government that could be affected as a result.The White House budget is not a matter of law. Ultimately, it is up to Congress to determine the budget, and in recent years it has routinely discarded many of the president’s proposals. Lawmakers are only starting to embark on the annual process, with government funding set to expire at the end of September.The updated budget reiterated the president’s pursuit of deep reductions for nearly every major federal agency, reserving its steepest cuts for foreign aid, medical research, tax enforcement and a slew of anti-poverty programs, including rental assistance. The White House restated its plan to seek a $33 billion cut at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, and another $33 billion reduction at the Department of Health and Human Services.Targeting the Education Department, the president again put forward a roughly $12 billion cut, seeking to eliminate dozens of programs while unveiling new changes to Pell grants, which help low-income students pay for college.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Would the Housing Crisis Ease if Boomers Rented Out Their Empty Rooms?

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    Millions of single-family homes are underused, on spacious lots. Refitting them for “roommate houses” or backyard cottages could make a difference.Monte Anderson opened a broom closet in his kitchen and pointed to a door handle near a mop and a trash can. Somewhere on the other side lay one small solution to America’s affordable housing crisis.Mr. Anderson is a developer who rehabs commercial and residential buildings in and around Dallas, including the ranch-style house where he lives, for now, with three kind-of-sort-of roommates. The 2,400-square-foot home has been split into four studio apartments. Each has an outdoor entrance, but also connects to another unit through a door like the one in his kitchen closet.The connecting doors are locked and hidden because they’re designed to not be used. The main reason for their existence is that they allow Mr. Anderson to claim he lives in a single-family home, in accordance with local zoning codes, when in reality the home contains four apartments in a country that needs more of them.“This is a suburban retrofit,” Mr. Anderson, 66, said during the tour.Mr. Anderson spent about $1 million renovating the house, which was almost uninhabitable when he bought it. Desiree Rios for The New York TimesEconomists estimate that America needs between four million and eight million more homes. Their prescription is to build a lot of new houses and apartment complexes. It’s a remedy that politicians from both parties agree with in principle, but that is bound to take decades to accomplish.It takes money to buy land, time to secure permits. In the meantime, construction costs have exploded. That’s why most new homes tend to be luxury rentals or higher-cost houses, rather than something a person with a middle or lower income can afford. Those lower-cost units, however, are the ones in the shortest supply.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Blames Immigrant Surge for Housing Crisis. Most Economists Disagree.

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    The former president often implies that deportations will bring down housing costs. Reality is more complicated.Former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, regularly blame America’s housing affordability crisis on a recent surge in immigration. They point to their plans for mass deportations of undocumented workers as part of the solution.But most economists do not believe that immigrants have been a major driver of the recent run-up in housing prices. Rents and home costs started to surge in 2020 and 2021, before the flow of newcomers began to pick up in 2022 and 2023.And while immigrants could have kept housing demand elevated in some markets, past studies suggest that they are a small part of the overall story. Even the economist whose paper Mr. Vance had cited as evidence said in an interview that she thought that immigration’s recent impact on housing costs had been minuscule.In fact, a number of economists and housing industry experts said that one of the solutions Mr. Trump was proposing — large-scale deportations — could actually backfire and make the housing crisis worse.That’s because immigrants do not simply add to the demand for housing: They are an important part of the work force that supplies it. Foreign-born workers make up a quarter of the construction labor force, and they are especially concentrated in trades like plastering, hanging drywall and roofing.Across many booming housing markets, particularly in the South, the recent flow of migrants has helped residential builders meet demand for both skilled trades and relatively unskilled laborers, industry groups say and job market data suggest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Harris and Trump Have Differing Plans to Solve Housing Crisis

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    The two presidential nominees are talking about their approaches for solving America’s affordability crisis. But would their plans work?America’s gaping shortage of affordable housing has rocketed to the top of voter worry lists and to the forefront of campaign promises, as both the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, and the Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump, promise to fix the problem if they are elected.Their two visions of how to solve America’s affordable housing shortage have little in common, and Ms. Harris’s plan is far more detailed. But they do share one quality: Both have drawn skepticism from outside economists.Ms. Harris is promising a cocktail of tax cuts meant to spur home construction — which several economists said could help create supply. But she is also floating a $25,000 benefit to help first-time buyers break into the market, which many economists worry could boost demand too much, pushing home prices even higher. And both sets of policies would need to pass in Congress, which would influence their design and feasibility.Mr. Trump’s plan is garnering even more doubt. He pledges to deport undocumented immigrants, which could cut back temporarily on housing demand but would also most likely cut into the construction work force and eventually limit new housing supply. His other ideas include lowering interest rates, something that he has no direct control over and that is poised to happen anyway.Economist misgivings about the housing market policy plans underline a somber reality. Few quick fixes are available for an affordable housing shortfall that has been more than 15 years in the making, one that is being worsened by demographic and societal trends. While ambitious promises may sound good in debates and television ads, actual policy attempts to fix the national housing shortfall are likely to prove messy and slow — even if they are sorely needed.Here’s what the candidates are proposing, and what experts say about those plans.Harris: Expand Supply Using Tax Credits.Ms. Harris is promising to increase housing supply by expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, providing incentives for state and local investment in housing and creating a $40 billion tax credit to make affordable projects economically feasible for builders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump and Harris Embody a Stark Partisan Divide on Fighting Poverty

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    The two presidential candidates can both point to records of pushing poverty rates down, but their approaches could hardly be more different.Follow the latest updates on the Harris and Trump campaigns.The presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump presents the sharpest clash in antipoverty policy in at least a generation, and its outcome could shape the economic security of millions of low-income Americans.As the onset of the pandemic in early 2020 threatened to decimate the economy, Mr. Trump signed a large stimulus package that included substantial aid for the poor. When President Biden and Ms. Harris took office in 2021, their administration pushed more big aid expansions through Congress as part of their pandemic-recovery plan, driving the poverty rate still lower.But if the two candidates’ responses to that extraordinary period had elements in common, the lessons they took from it were very different.In the pandemic-era programs, now mostly expired or reduced, Ms. Harris and other Democrats found reinforcement of their faith in the government’s power to ameliorate hardship. If elected, she would seek to sustain or expand many of them, including subsidies for food, health care and housing, and revive a change to the child tax credit that essentially created a guaranteed income for families with children. Those policies helped temporarily cut the poverty rate by more than half from prepandemic levels.She backs a $15 federal minimum wage, which Republicans have fought, and is a vocal supporter of programs like subsidized child care and paid family leave meant to help balance work and family.Mr. Trump says little about his role in pandemic-era poverty programs, which many Republicans view as having been excessive and fraud-ridden. Instead, he touts his 2017 tax cuts, which he credits for boosting the economy and reducing poverty to a prepandemic low, and he has vowed to extend them when they expire next year. Most of the direct benefit from those cuts went to corporations and the wealthy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Economy

    What Kalamazoo (Yes, Kalamazoo) Reveals About the Nation’s Housing Crisis

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    A decade ago, the city — and all of Michigan — had too many houses. Now it has a shortage. The shift there explains today’s costly housing market in the rest of the country.For years, when Michigan politicians talked about the state’s housing problem, they were referring to a surplus: too many run-down houses, stripped of valuable copper, sitting empty and blighting neighborhoods. Now the message has flipped. In her State of the State address this year, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer lamented the housing shortage and landed one of her biggest applause lines with, “The rent is too damn high, and we don’t have enough damn housing. So our response is simple: ‘Build, baby, build!”If you want to know what the housing crisis for middle-income Americans looks like in 2024, spend some time in Michigan. The surplus-to-shortage whipsaw here is a mitten-shaped miniature of what the entire country has gone through.I’ve been writing about housing and the economy for two decades, and have watched as the nation’s housing market has made the journey from boom to bust to deficit, seemingly without pausing for a normal middle. There are lots of reasons this happened, but they center on a big one: the late-2000s housing bust, which the country has never fully recovered from. Or as Ali Wolf, chief economist at Zonda, a data and consulting firm, put it: “The Great Recession broke the U.S. housing market.”At first, rapidly rising housing costs seemed like a regional problem. It made sense that places like San Francisco, which was already expensive, filled with well-paid tech workers and hamstrung by stringent building regulations, would be in crisis. Much of the rest of the country was still affordable, however, so high-cost “superstar cities” were seen as an exception instead of a warning.Now California’s problem is everywhere. Double-income couples with good jobs are priced out of homeownership in Spokane, Wash. Homeless encampments sprawl in Phoenix. The rent is too damn high in Kalamazoo.The housing crisis has moved from blue states to red states, and large metro areas to rural towns. In a time of extreme polarization, the too-high cost of housing and its attendant social problems are among the few things Americans truly share. That and a growing rage about the country’s inability to fix it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Harris and Trump Offer a Clear Contrast on the Economy

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    Both candidates embrace expansions of government power to steer economic outcomes — but in vastly different areas.Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump flew to North Carolina this week to deliver what were billed as major speeches on the economy. Neither laid out a comprehensive policy plan — not Ms. Harris in her half-hour focus on housing, groceries and prescription drugs, nor Mr. Trump in 80 minutes of sprinkling various proposals among musings about dangerous immigrants.But in their own ways, both candidates sent voters clear and important messages about their economic visions. Each embraced a vision of a powerful federal government, using its muscle to intervene in markets in pursuit of a stronger and more prosperous economy.They just disagreed, almost entirely, on when and how that power should be used.In Raleigh on Friday, Ms. Harris began to put her own stamp on the brand of progressive economics that has come to dominate Democratic politics over the last decade. That economic thinking embraces the idea that the federal government must act aggressively to foster competition and correct distortions in private markets.The approach seeks large tax increases on corporations and high earners, to fund assistance for low-income and middle-class workers who are struggling to build wealth for themselves and their children. At the same time, it provides big tax breaks to companies engaged in what Ms. Harris and other progressives see as delivering great economic benefit — like manufacturing technologies needed to fight global warming, or building affordable housing.That philosophy animated the policy agenda that Ms. Harris unveiled on Friday. She pledged to send up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance to every first-time home buyer over four years, while directing $40 billion to construction companies that build starter homes. She said she would permanently reinstate an expanded child tax credit that President Biden temporarily established with his 2021 stimulus law, while offering even more assistance to parents of newborns.She called for a federal ban on corporate price gouging on groceries and for new federal enforcement tools to punish companies that unfairly push up food prices. “My plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules,” she said, adding: “We will help the food industry become more competitive, because I believe competition is the lifeblood of our economy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Surprising Left-Right Alliance That Wants More Apartments in Suburbs

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    The YIMBY movement isn’t just for liberals any more. Legislators from both sides of the political divide are working to add duplexes and apartments to single-family neighborhoods.For years, the Yimbytown conference was an ideologically safe space where liberal young professionals could talk to other liberal young professionals about the particular problems of cities with a lot of liberal young professionals: not enough bike lanes and transit, too many restrictive zoning laws.The event began in 2016 in Boulder, Colo., and has ever since revolved around a coalition of left and center Democrats who want to make America’s neighborhoods less exclusive and its housing more dense. (YIMBY, a pro-housing movement that is increasingly an identity, stands for “Yes in my backyard.”)But the vibes and crowd were surprisingly different at this year’s meeting, which was held at the University of Texas at Austin in February. In addition to vegan lunches and name tags with preferred pronouns, the conference included — even celebrated — a group that had until recently been unwelcome: red-state Republicans.The first day featured a speech on changing zoning laws by Greg Gianforte, the Republican governor of Montana, who last year signed a housing package that YIMBYs now refer to as “the Montana Miracle.” Day 2 kicked off with a panel on solutions to Texas’s rising housing costs. One of the speakers was a Republican legislator in Texas who, in addition to being an advocate for loosening land-use regulations, has pushed for a near-total ban on abortions.Anyone who missed these discussions might have instead gone to the panel on bipartisanship where Republican housing reformers from Arizona and Montana talked with a Democratic state senator from Vermont. Or noticed the list of sponsors that, in addition to foundations like Open Philanthropy and Arnold Ventures, included conservative and libertarian organizations like the Mercatus Center, the American Enterprise Institute and the Pacific Legal Foundation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How High Interest Rates Sting Bakers, Farmers and Consumers

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    Home buyers, entrepreneurs and public officials are confronting a new reality: If they want to hold off on big purchases or investments until borrowing is less expensive, it’s probably going to be a long wait.Governments are paying more to borrow money for new schools and parks. Developers are struggling to find loans to buy lots and build homes. Companies, forced to refinance debts at sharply higher interest rates, are more likely to lay off employees — especially if they were already operating with little or no profits.Over the past few weeks, investors have realized that even with the Federal Reserve nearing an end to its increases in short-term interest rates, market-based measures of long-term borrowing costs have continued rising. In short, the economy may no longer be able to avoid a sharper slowdown.“It’s a trickle-down effect for everyone,” said Mary Kay Bates, the chief executive of Bank Midwest in Spirit Lake, Iowa.Small banks like Ms. Bates’s are at the epicenter of America’s credit crunch for small businesses. During the pandemic, with the Fed’s benchmark interest rate near zero and consumers piling up savings in bank accounts, she could make loans at 3 to 4 percent. She also put money into safe securities, like government bonds.But when the Fed’s rate started rocketing up, the value of Bank Midwest’s securities portfolio fell — meaning that if Ms. Bates sold the bonds to fund more loans, she would have to take a steep loss. Deposits were also waning, as consumers spent down their savings and moved money into higher-yielding assets.Higher Interest Rates Are Here More