Will ‘Good Trump’ or ‘Bad Trump’ prevail on housing?

Anger about inflation was a central driver of Donald Trump’s election, which is part of why housing policy will be so important in the next administration. For most Americans, housing costs represent their single biggest household expense, and those costs have been rising rapidly.

What will Donald Trump and his new nominee to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, former NFL football player and Texas State legislator Scott Turner, do to address the issue?

The answer is wide open. In the first administration, there was a struggle between a “Good Trump,” who wanted to take steps to build more housing, and a “Bad Trump,” who endorsed Not in My Backyard or "NIMBY" forces. Both had their moments in Trump’s first go around, and there will be a battle over which prevails in the second.

Economists across the political spectrum recognize that the housing affordability crisis is primarily driven by a lack of supply. Too many buyers and renters are chasing too few housing units. The primary reason for the housing shortage, in turn, is that local snob zoning laws and NIMBYism prevent private developers from building the types of housing people want, where they want it.

Local laws that forbid construction of any multifamily housing and require large lot sizes, for example, artificially constrain housing supply, driving up prices. Providing carrots and sticks to encourage localities to reduce exclusionary zoning constitutes the single most important way the federal government can moderate price increases.

Early in the first administration, Good Trump recognized this. In June 2019, Trump created a White House Council to lay out ideas on how to reduce regulatory barriers, including “overly restrictive zoning and growth management controls."

That same month, HUD Secretary Ben Carson traveled to Minneapolis and lauded local officials for becoming the first major city to end exclusionary single-family zoning by legalizing duplexes and triplexes.

"The correlation seems very strong: The more zoning restrictions and regulations, the higher the prices and the more homeless people," Carson said.

But a year later, Bad Trump emerged and completely reversed course. As the 2020 campaign began to heat up, Trump and Carson wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing Minneapolis and said they wanted to save single-family exclusionary zoning. Trump tweeted that he wanted to protect “Suburban Housewives of America” from an invasion of undesirable neighbors.

Which of the two Trumps will prevail in the new administration? Bad Trump is probably the best bet. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 recommended that the new administration “oppose any effort to weaken single-family zoning.” And during the 2024 campaign, Trump's and JD Vance’s central answer to housing costs was to claim that mass deportation of undocumented immigrants would reduce demand for housing and moderate prices.

But breaking up families, many of which have made America their home for years, would not only be cruel, it could also backfire if the goal is moderating housing prices. Undocumented immigrants constitute more than one-fifth of the construction workforce, and so deportations will increase housing construction costs.

On the other hand, Turner leads a group that calls for “deregulating local housing markets.” Moreover, Trump is driven by self-interest above all, and there are two powerful political reasons for the administration to embrace a pro-housing agenda that reduces exclusionary zoning.

To begin with, fundamentally, Trump was elected because inflation averaged 5 percent under Biden versus 1 percent during his first term. And there is no better way to tame housing prices than to increase supply.

Researchers at Pew, for example, found that Minneapolis built housing at a greater rate than the national average and had much lower rent increases. Pointing to the zoning reforms, Bloomberg CityLab praised Minneapolis for becoming “the first American city to tame inflation.”

Moreover, attacking exclusionary zoning would allow Trump to show that he is genuinely on the side of his multiethnic base of working-class voters and wants to stick it to liberal metropolitan elites. Researchers have found that so-called "snob zoning: is most prevalent in politically liberal regions of the country.

For example, Scarsdale, N.Y., which consistently supports Democrats for the presidency, has built its own “border wall” through exclusionary land use policies. Working people understand this, which is why, in Oregon, California and elsewhere, fascinating multiracial working-class coalitions have emerged in favor of state-level land use reforms that curtail snob zoning.

At the federal level, it would be in the interests of Trump and of Democrats, who want working-class voters back, to get behind an Economic Fair Housing Act. The legislation, which the Equitable Housing Institute and I have drafted, would give working-class people the same right to sue municipalities that discriminate against them through land use policies as the 1968 Fair Housing Act provides to racial minorities.

The Fair Housing Act has helped reduce racial segregation by 30 percent. But new tools are needed to reduce economic segregation, which has doubled since 1970. The Economic Fair Housing Act idea has been endorsed by a leading Democratic congressman on housing issues, Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), who said the law’s passage would represent a monument to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Under the Economic Fair Housing Act, the free market in housing prices would continue to operate precisely as it does today, but the legislation would target government laws that discriminate based on income. If a local policy, such as a minimum lot size of half an acre, or a ban on duplexes and triplexes, were found to be discriminatory based on income, the burden would shift to the municipality to prove it’s “necessary” to achieve a set of valid goals.

If Bad Trump prevails on housing, then Democrats will have a political opening. While for decades, NIMBYs prevailed in political debates, the tides are shifting.

A 2024 Progressive Policy Institute/You Gov poll of non-college-educated voters found that 64 percent agreed that “we should cut unnecessary zoning regulations so we can build more multifamily housing and drive down the costs of housing for working families,” while just 36 percent instead believed “we should preserve zoning regulations that protect neighborhood character even if it means higher housing costs.”

A recent analysis by the Sightline Institute found that state legislators who supported loosening land use restrictions paid no political price for it.

To support an Economic Fair Housing Act, Democrats would have to go up against some special interest groups on the left that want fair housing to be seen strictly as a racial issue and are leery of laws that include economically disadvantaged people of all races. But as Ezra Klein has noted, the recent election exposed an important reality: Working-class Hispanic and Black people don’t necessarily agree with inside-the-beltway groups that claim to speak on their behalf.

If Democrats want to recapture working America, there are few better ways than to stand up for them on the bedrock issue of housing.

Richard D. Kahlenberg is Director of Housing at the Progressive Policy Institute and the author of “Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See” (Public Affairs, 2023).

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