‘New York City Will Have to Defend a Lot of Programs We Rely On’

Donald Trump’s housing proposals are vague and sometimes nonsensical. During the course of his 2024 campaign, he talked about deregulation, cutting taxes, building on federal land, and cutting mortgage rates (which the president doesn’t control). He also said that he’d clear up the housing crisis by deporting immigrants — an idea that, in addition to its obvious malice and the fact that the crisis predates the most recent immigration surge, has been widely debunked as a potential solution by housing experts, who pointed out that immigrants don’t only live in housing but also build a lot of it.

But come January, he will reclaim the Oval Office and, with it, the nation’s housing crisis. So what will actually happen when Trump assumes the presidency for the second time? We talked to Matthew Murphy, the executive director of NYU’s Furman Center, to try to make sense of what we could.

What do you think Trump will actually try to do? While it’s difficult to pin down what his housing policy is going to be, there are a few areas we can look to for clues: his goals during his first term, his broader vision of slashing bureaucracy, and Project 2025. Even though he’s distanced himself from Project 2025, the housing section was written by Ben Carson, the HUD secretary he appointed.

What are some of the big things that happened last time?
One of the largest things was with Section 8 — they proposed a rule change where you could take away voucher funding if there was a noncitizen in the household; for example, if there is a woman who’s a citizen with a Section 8 voucher, but her nephew, who’s not a citizen, is living with her. Only citizens are eligible for Section 8, anyway, but they really tried to limit it. They were very focused on how immigrants use public-housing vouchers and federal funding. You can see a world where they try to bring a version of this back: How do they try to change immigration policy under the guise of housing policy?

One of the other big things that really affected homeowners was capping SALT, the state- and local-tax deductions, at $10,000. [Previously, there was no cap, so Trump’s tax bill ended up raising taxes on people in high-tax states like New York and New Jersey.] It was a huge hit for New Yorkers. The next time, will they eliminate it or put it back up because they’re trying to get New York seats?

Project 2025, the policy playbook created by the Heritage Foundation, focuses a lot on public housing and housing vouchers: limiting who can get them and for how long, redirecting who they’ll go to, prioritizing single-family homeownership over programs for low-income renters. What do you think will happen there?
A lot of the housing policies we rely on today are either Republican-created or bipartisan. Housing vouchers are all about moving away from public housing and giving people choices. Now Section 8 serves so many elderly households, it benefits so many people in red states, and the payments go to landlords. The politics are actually in favor of not cutting Section 8. Even though Trump always proposed cutting these programs, in reality, during his first term, we didn’t see a lot of budget cuts. That might change, but it might not be in his favor to cut all these programs.

What about housing supply?
Looking at Project 2025, at least, it’s very clear there’s going to be a tension: They don’t want to add housing supply to the suburbs — they explicitly say that the American Dream is to own a single-family home and that has to be preserved. And then it says we need to add housing at the high end, not the low end, of the market. And that’s a tension because in order to meet the nation’s housing needs, you’re going to have to add multifamily homes and townhomes to suburban environments. Texas and Florida, places that have added a lot of homes — those are not all single-family homes. A single-family home may be the American Dream, but if it’s about increasing home-ownership and building wealth, it can’t all be single-family homes.

And for New York City, specifically?
It feels like it could be a pretty chaotic time and New York City will have to defend a lot of programs we rely on. The biggest risk is that we lose federal funding, which shifts the burden to the state and city to fill the gap. Examples would be cuts to HUD programs like the Community Development Block Grants, Section 8, or public housing. Also, if there are changes to the value of the low-income-housing tax credit. And then more broadly, changing public-housing and housing-choice-voucher rules in order to punish households where immigrants reside.

That sounds grim.
As a direct example, the Community Block Development Grant in New York City covered most of the funding for our housing-code-enforcement inspectors. So if that were cut, NYC would have to come up with the funds or you’d have fewer inspectors responding to heat, hot water, and other complaints. I’ll also be watching the CRA [the Community Reinvestment Act, which prevents redlining], and Frannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which there is some speculation he may try to privatize, and opportunity zones.

What about renters?
Besides deregulation and building on federal land, it’s hard to find a proposed strategy here. And federal land is his way of, is really a campaign mode, to talk about building more housing without having people say, “No, don’t do it here.”

How does any of this get implemented?
A lot of housing policy actually ends up happening through the tax code — how they fund tax cuts or tinker with it. The last time they came up with opportunity zones that changed the way real estate could be invested in. There were also proposals to completely eliminate the low-income-housing-tax credit [which funds the construction and renovation of affordable rental housing]. But it’s hard to know if they’ll expand it because it has broad support or eliminate it because they don’t like poor people or because they want that money to pay for something else.

Some of the biggest changes will probably be to fair housing. Trump has been very unsupportive of making places disclose their segregated housing patterns — cities and towns won’t have to report it. During the Obama era, HUD made a lot of data available on housing and health disparities, and cities would say, “This is how we’re going to confront our segregation.” Biden has yet to put a new fair-housing rule in place, and it’s something that Trump is definitely going to move away from.

What will happen with all the suburban towns fighting to avoid building affordable housing?
I think the long-standing cases will continue, but if a town in Long Island says “no” to an affordable-housing development that would have been for families, they won’t step in to say, “No, that’s discriminatory.” The state will still be able to step in, but it will mean losing all the resources HUD could make available — legal resources, data — and that’s a big loss.

So it doesn’t sound like Trump will be good for the YIMBYs.
[Laughs] I don’t think so. It’s not like he’s embracing a libertarian vision of zoning, which is basically that we should abolish it and embrace market-based solutions. The Biden administration was working on things to incentivize innovation, giving money to people willing to take on zoning challenges. I don’t think the Trump administration is going to do that.

Is there anything good, even accidentally, that might happen?
It could be good to have less bureaucracy and more delegation to the state and local level. Once we start seeing how they’re going to deal with public housing, multifamily housing, housing in tax reform, and tax vouchers, we’ll know more.