Liberal bureaucrats are up in arms after President Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development scaled back enforcement of the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
The left-leaning Guardian quoted multiple HUD whistleblowers in an article published Wednesday, including one who accused Trump’s appointees of “dismantling the capacity to protect people’s rights.”
Ironically, the same progressives who insist loudly on “housing justice” often fail to see how their own policies have made it harder for American families to keep a roof over their heads.
The FHA itself is a perfect example. At the time of its passage, the law was a necessary response to widespread housing discrimination. Since then, however, it’s metastasized into a permanent bureaucratic inquisition that rewards litigious behavior and imposes significant compliance costs and fines.
Current legal precedent doesn’t even require that lenders, homeowners associations, or property managers act with discriminatory intent. “Disparate impact” is enough to justify a costly court battle that discourages market entry and drives up prices for everyone.
Under Obama and Biden, FHA enforcement reached new heights of invasive social engineering. The 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule (which Biden brought back in 2023) forced all jurisdictions that received federal housing dollars to take “significant actions to overcome historic patterns of segregation,” “achieve truly balanced and integrated living patterns,” and “foster inclusive communities that are free from discrimination.”
This rule, which relied on a tortured reading of the FHA, actually disincentivized affordable housing construction in the poor areas that needed it most, since those projects would technically contribute to “segregation.”
“[L]ow-income areas were actually ‘red-lined’ out of affordable housing development plans and federal resources were redirected to high-income areas,” then-HUD Secretary Ben Carson noted in 2020, explaining why the first Trump administration rescinded Obama’s rule.
But civil rights enforcement is far from the only liberal policy exacerbating the housing affordability crisis.
Consider immigration. Progressives are constantly telling conservatives that around 1.4 million construction workers are “undocumented,” and that if we deport all the illegals there will be no one left to build houses. What they refuse to consider is that, while a significant share of illegal immigrants help produce housing, 100% of them consume it. According to one study, every 1% increase in immigration leads to a 3.3% rise in home prices.
New York City, which has been battling a chronic housing shortage for the better part of a century, estimated in 2018 that 560,000 illegal immigrants called the Big Apple home, accounting for nearly eigh percent of the population. And that was before over 200,000 additional illegals flooded New York state under Biden. New York City doesn’t need Zohran Mamdani’s socialist housing schemes. It needs mass deportations. If New York enforced the law and removed half a million illegal residents, rents would finally reflect supply and demand.
Liberals also tend to ignore the fact that the biggest obstacle to housing affordability is the mountains of “blue tape” they impose on new construction.
Progressive outlets (and even some right-wing commentators) frequently attack private investors for constructing and putting up single-family homes and apartments for rent. “Wall Street Is Buying Up Entire Neighborhoods,” a recent headline in left-wing magazine Jacobin reads. What these critics fail to acknowledge is that artificial limits on housing supply are the only reason these homes are attractive assets for institutional investment.
One single-family rental firm admitted back in 2021 that they intentionally buy up homes “in markets that we expect will exhibit lower new supply [and] stronger job and household formation growth.” In other words, at a time when housing shortages have hit nearly every part of the country, they are singlehandedly helping to ensure housing demand remains in line with supply.
Let home construction keep pace with demand, and the problem goes away. For proof, look no further than America’s two largest states.
California, which has been under Democratic one-party rule for decades, also has the most dysfunctional housing market in the country, thanks largely to strict zoning and mandatory environmental impact studies that make it almost impossible to build new homes. The state lost hundreds of thousands of residents during COVID and still saw the income needed to afford a typical house increase by over 60%. That’s exactly the kind of market private investors would find attractive.
Meanwhile, deep-red Texas saw an increase of less than 26% — the lowest of any state in the nation — despite seeing its population grow by around 1.5 million during the pandemic years. Thanks to state and local policies that established permissive zoning, a simple permitting process, and less burdensome environmental regulations, the Lone Star State built so much housing that prices have actually started to fall.
The new “Abundance” movement within the Democratic Party — which aims to increase housing construction in blue states and cities — offers a glimmer of hope. Unfortunately, the movement’s leaders remain tied to progressive climate ideology, which demands expensive and time-consuming environmental regulations.
Perhaps someday, liberals will realize that their sentimental approach to policy and preference for big-government solutions only worsen the problems they seek to address — including housing affordability. If they realized that, though, they wouldn’t be liberals anymore.
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