Trump’s Housing Platform Is as Absurd as It Is Cruel — and That’s the Point

Build that wall, build that wall," cheered a sea of adoring fans, their faces bright red with excitement. We're going to build a wall. It will be a real wall," proclaimed the soon-to-be president of the United States. It's going to happen!"

The border wall is perhaps the most notorious electoral promise of the modern era, a symbol of the politics of racial division made corporeal. Throughout his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump promised to build a concrete wall along all 2,000 miles of the southern U.S. border. Crucially, the self-proclaimed deal-maker" said that Mexico would be picking up the check for the entirety of the project.

Nearly a decade after Trump descended a golden escalator spouting vitriol about immigrants, there is conspicuously not a 2,000-mile-long concrete wall along the border, nor did Mexico foot the bill for the estimated $15 billion Trump spent trying to make it happen.

Now, the former president is back with a new set of fantastical infrastructure policies - this time on housing.

Housing has surged as a top national electoral issue this year. Nearly a third of people surveyed by the real estate brokerage Redfin said that housing affordability was a top issue during this election. Another survey from Right to the City Action and Popular Democracy in Action found that housing was a top issue for swing-state voters this cycle, with many supporting policy initiatives like rent stabilization. There's good reason for that. A Harvard University report in May found that roughly 22.4 million households in the United States pay more than 30 percent of their income in rent. Home prices have reportedly risen 47 percent higher than they were in 2020.

Agenda47," Trump's policy platform, calls for a radical reimagining of our housing system, starting with constructing new freedom cities" on vacant federal land, where residents will travel around in flying cars. The absurdity of that plan is rivaled only by the cruelty of two other central planks: the forced relocation of unhoused people to tent cities," and the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants.

Housing experts say that Trump's plans are thin on details, detached from reality, and, in at least some cases, extend far beyond the powers of the presidency. That's not to say, however, that he wouldn't attempt to follow his rhetoric up with actions, especially when it comes to mass deportations. But as with his border wall, the outcome is in many ways besides the point. The proposals are just as much, if not more, about reinforcing who does and doesn't belong in Trump's America than tackling this country's worsening housing crisis.

For DaMareo Cooper, co-executive director at Popular Democracy In Action, Trump's aims are blatantly obvious. The former president is using these policies to create a wedge between who is and who is not: ... who gets to be treated like a human [and] who gets to be treated like they deserve the protection of the state."

Futuristic Cities for the Rich

In March 2023, Trump unveiled his Freedom Cities" proposal, which would open up vacant" federal land for developers to bid on and eventually build futuristic Freedom Cities" as the federal government pours money into developing Jetsons-style flying cars.

Tyler Haupert, an assistant professor of urban studies at NYU Shanghai, and other housing experts noted that the plan was likely modeled after Saudi Arabia's NEOM project. The $1.5 trillion planned futuristic city in the desert was the brainchild of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, a close ally of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, and has been beset by delays since its launch in 2017.

What's happening in Saudi Arabia is incredibly expensive, and already going over budget and delayed, running into all sorts of problems, also exploiting extremely cheap labor," said Haupert. So I think that using that as a model is not so realistic or desirable."

There are other reasons the project is not realistic. The majority of the country's vacant" land is located in the western part of the United States, often with no access to basic infrastructure. Our federal lands are located in places that are vacant, not just because they're federal lands, but they're places that lack water, that lack connection to transportation networks, that are on protected lands," said Haupert.

Even where Trump has made practical proposals to address the country's housing shortage, such as changing local zoning regulations to encourage further development, such actions are not really within the scope of the presidency, housing experts told The Intercept.

The federal government doesn't really have too much power to make decisions on where to build, what to build; it's also heavily influenced by the state and local-level zoning and land-use regulations," said Jung Hyun Choi, principal research associate at the Urban Institute's Housing Finance Policy Center. That's maybe one of the reasons that the Trump campaign wants to come out with bold ideas to shift attention from the kind of lack of power to actually implement."

Casey J. Dawkins, a professor of urban studies at the University of Maryland, agreed that Trump would be hamstrung by the federal government's limited ability to influence local land use regulations."

Dawkins added that lowering mortgage rates, another Trump promise, would be largely outside of his purview. Interest rates are set by the Federal Reserve, and though the president appoints the central bank's chair, it operates as an independent body. Obviously, reducing mortgage rates would be a great thing," Dawkins said, but the president's ability to influence that is pretty limited."

Criminalizing Homelessness

On the campaign trail, Trump has also vowed to develop tent cities," where unhoused people would be relocated or face arrest for camping." In a video debuting the policy, Trump claimed that it would rid the scourge of homelessness, the drug addicted, and the dangerously deranged," on top of solving veteran homelessness.

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The former president is in lockstep with the broader conservative movement when it comes to viewing unhoused communities as inherently criminal and a scourge" on our society. Over the last three years, reporting has found, conservative groups like the Cicero Institute have spearheaded camping bans in cities and localities throughout the United States. Just this year, three states passed laws banning public camping - effectively outlawing being homeless. In June, the conservative-majority Supreme Court ruled that cities could continue to arrest and fine people for sleeping outside, regardless of whether that's their only option.

Housing experts said that not only would creating tent cities not solve homelessness, but pouring money into a project like that could actually exacerbate the issue. The places that have made the most success have built permanent affordable housing units specifically earmarked for the homeless, and the most successful of them have also included things like social services on site. So diverting any funding that could potentially go to those sorts of solutions to, you know, building temporary tent cities, I think, could have actually a negative impact on this population," said Haupert.

The former president's proposals are of a piece with a long history of residential segregation" in this country, said Tony Samara, associate director of policy for Right to the City Action, a housing and racial justice coalition. Let's turn America into a collection of tent cities and freedom cities' - that to me is very much within the broad overarching narrative of segregation that has been central to housing in this country for a couple of centuries."

More Deportations

While Trump's freedom and tent cities may prove to be more talk than action, his threats of mass deportation are hardly idle. The executive branch oversees matters of immigration, and Trump used all the tools at his disposal during his first term as president. Should he be reelected in November, he would likely have even more influence over immigration if Republicans simultaneously win control of Congress.

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While Trump and vice presidential nominee JD Vance have avoided direct questions about how they might implement mass deportations policy, Trump has hinted at what levers he might pull. Earlier this year, Trump vowed to use the Alien Enemies Act to detain and deport millions of undocumented Americans. The act was infamously used to create incarceration camps for Japanese Americans during World War II.

There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, and any action Trump would take to round up and deport them would fulfill a far-right fantasy. What it would not do, experts cautioned, is make housing more accessible or affordable.

In Texas, for example, the large number of undocumented workers in construction may have helped the state avoid the worst of the affordable housing crisis by working to build thousands of apartments and homes in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

The claim that cracking down on immigration is going to reduce housing costs is simply not founded in empirical reality," said Dawkins. It actually would probably have the opposite effect of increasing construction costs because immigrants make up a large portion of the construction labor supply."

What's more, housing experts say, Trump's track record on housing thus far offers little reason to think he seriously cares about solving the crisis.

He's trying to get his friends extra resources at the expense of regular working people."

During his first term, Trump proposed massive cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, including large cuts to rental assistance programs. Project 2025, which Trump has distanced himself from but was notably drafted in part by his former HUD Secretary Ben Carson, would drastically scale back investments in affordable housing.

Project 2025 also calls for weakening the Fair Housing Act, a landmark civil rights law that seeks to prevent racial housing discrimination. While in office, Trump rolled back an Obama-era rule that helped enforce the act, arguing in not-so-coded language that the regulation was attempting to ruin the suburbs."

He's doing more of the same. He's trying to get his friends extra resources at the expense of regular working people," said Cooper. If somebody tells you who they are, believe him; I think we should interpret these plans and strategies as exactly what they look like."

Correction: October 21, 2024
The article was updated to clarify that Trump's Freedom Cities" proposal promises massive federal investments in developing flying cars, but it does not describe them as a primary form of transport.

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