Struggling Tenants Tell Our Next President: Here is How You End Our Housing Crisis

There is an outstanding plan for the next Presidential administration to fix our housing crisis. This plan would go a long way toward helping the nine million households behind on their rent and nearly 700,000 people living unhoused. But the plan does not come from either of the two major presidential candidates.

It is not that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are ignoring housing. They are well aware that three-quarters of swing-state voters say that housing costs are the biggest economic stressor in their lives, and that young voters rank housing costs as their number one issue. So both candidates have housing plans.

Of the two, Harris’s is far better, of course. Trump, who has a long and sordid history of discrimination and unlawful behavior as a landlord, mostly uses the housing crisis as a platform for demonizing immigrants, pledging that his plan of mass deportation will reduce housing demand and costs.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan for another Trump presidency proposes catastrophic housing ideas like privatizing public housing, gutting the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and undermining fair housing protections.

Harris’s plan features proposals to increase the supply of housing through expanded and new tax credits and relaxing regulations on home building. Harris also proposes down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers and limiting tax breaks now enjoyed by corporate landlords.

That’s all OK, as far as it goes. The problem is that it doesn’t go very far.

Every week, my students and I represent low-income tenants being forced from their homes in Indianapolis eviction courts. Building more market-rate housing, especially since most of that new building is focused on higher-end housing, doesn’t help them at all. They are facing eviction because low wages, disability, family crises, child care obligations, etc. mean they already can't afford market rate housing.

This is true across the country. “The most effective housing assistance for low-income households is not found in building more units but in helping low-income households afford the units that already exist,” Alex Schwartz, New School professor and author of the seminal Housing Policy in the United States, and Kirk McClure, professor emeritus in urban planning at the University of Kansas, have written. Alan Mallach, senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress and the National Housing Institute, agrees, bluntly titling one of his articles, “Rents Will Only Go So Low, No Matter How Much We Build.”

The good news is that there is a serious, detailed plan that our next president and Congress can implement to address the needs of our clients and the millions of others like them. It comes from the tenants themselves. Specifically, the plan is provided by the national Tenant Union Federation, which includes local unions like Bozeman Tenants United, the Louisville Tenants Union, and KC Tenants, the latter of which is currently engaged in an historic rent strike.

As Tara Raghuveer, Tenant Union Federation director says, “We can build, build, build as much as we want, but without federal rent caps and protections for tenants, people will continue to be priced out of their homes and the economy will continue to suffer.”

Social movement historians would not be surprised that tenants are taking the lead. Time and again, the most impactful reforms are the ones pushed not by elected officials but by those directly affected by the targeted injustice.

So the tenant union proposal for the next presidential administration, a twelve-page, 59-footnote Tenant Policy Agenda supported by three dozen other housing advocacy organizations, includes:

• Building and preserving twelve million units of permanently affordable housing
• Rent caps imposed as a condition of landlords receiving federal financing
• A Tenant Bill of Rights to guarantee both safe and healthy housing conditions and tenants’ rights to organize
• Reinvestment in existing public housing and the Section 8 voucher program

These needed housing reforms won’t be cheap, but the Tenant Union Federation rightly points out that we already use our tax code to generously reward corporate landlords, speculative homebuying practices, and uber-wealthy home purchasers. The next iteration of Washington leaders can change that. “Congress should ensure that the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share while raising significant revenue for robust public investments in permanently affordable, decommodified, climate resilient housing,” the Agenda states.

One hundred million people in the U.S. live in renting households. We can tell you first-hand that many of them are struggling right now. For now, the most complete and compelling plan to address that struggle is coming from the tenants. But hopefully the plan will be embraced by the next president.