This piece was produced by the nonprofit journalism publication fund & Main and is co-published here with permission  

Housing may not be dominating the rhetoric of this year’s presidential race, but the issue is a high priority for Americans.

At least 80% of voters surveyed by the real estate corporation Redfin said that housing affordability is essential to their vote.  The affordable housing crisis is particularly acute for low-wage workers — there is not a single state, metro area or county in the country where a renter working packed period at minimum wage can afford a modest two-bedroom rental home, according to the National Low income Housing Coalition.

In recent weeks, Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican candidate former President Donald Trump have begun to outline plans to address America’s housing woes. As with most issues, the candidates’ proposals are very different, as are their track records.

Soon after replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, Harris proposed $25,000 in down-remittance assistance for first-period homebuyers and the launch of a $40 billion local innovation fund to “provide state and local governments, and private developers and homebuilders, funds to invest in innovative strategies to expand the housing supply.” 

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Trump, by contrast, has vowed to open up vast areas of federal land for large-scale housing construction, telling The Economic Club of recent York that “these zones will be ultra-low responsibility and ultra-low regulations — one of the great tiny business job creation programs.” 

Harris has framed the crisis as a supply issue, while Trump has frequently defined it as a demand issue, blaming the housing shortage on immigrants.

At a rally in downtown Tucson, Arizona, in September, the Republican nominee said migrants disproportionately live in low-income rental properties, that he would force rental companies offering subsidized housing to require proof of citizenship from tenants and that he would ban mortgages for immigrants living in the U.S. without legal permission. 

The issue also came up during the vice-presidential debate when Republican nominee Sen. JD Vance argued that immigrants have driven up the expense of housing, an assertion that was undercut by several experts who pointed to studies that display that increased enforcement of immigration laws reduces the construction workforce and actually leads to higher housing prices.

Trump’s housing record and assignment 2025

In his first term, Trump proposed massive cuts to federal affordable housing programs and “undermined efforts to promote racial stake and reverse the country’s legacy of housing discrimination,” said Will Fischer, elder director of housing policy at the left-leaning Center on budgetary schedule and Policy Priorities. In budgetary year 2020, Trump proposed cutting the budgetary schedule for the Department of Housing and Urban advancement by $9.6 billion, 18% below its previous level. Congress rejected that cut and increased the agency’s budgetary schedule by 5.1%.

“During Trump’s first term, affordable housing was less emphasized than it was during the Biden administration,” said Robert Silverman, a professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning. “Rents were increasing at rates exceeding worth rise, and recent construction of affordable housing slowed.”

Some of the housing proposals outlined in assignment 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s political initiative and blueprint for a second Trump term, mirror some key actions taken by Trump during his first term. Ben Carson, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban advancement under Trump, wrote the HUD proposals in the Heritage blueprint, though the Trump campaign has attempted to distance itself from assignment 2025.

In his 2020 and 2021 budgets, Trump proposed eliminating the Housing endowment, which provides grants to states to preserve and produce affordable homes for low-income households. But the fund was retained by Congress and supported by the Biden administration. Taking another swing at ending the program is a objective of assignment 2025.

In his first term, Trump ended the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule that required HUD and states, counties and cities to pursue meaningful action to undo decades of housing discrimination. Soon after taking office in 2021, Biden reinstated the regulation. Terminating the rule again is one of assignment 2025’s recommendations.

In 2020, Trump’s HUD expanded the use of work requirements for community housing benefits. During Biden’s first year in office and at the height of the pandemic, the agency chose to keep the requirements but did not further expand them, saying that the program did not consider “economic realities and current needs of low-income families.” In assignment 2025, Carson recommended longer-term reforms of rental assistance programs, such as regulations that “seek to strengthen work requirements” and “limit the period during which households are eligible for housing benefits.” 

“We have a really excellent view of exactly the type of policies that [Trump] would pursue, and largely those are ones that would make the housing crisis worse or would boost the hazard of homelessness in communities,” Sarah Saadian, vice president of community policy at the National Low income Housing Coalition, told fund & Main.

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not reply to a request for comment.

Harris’ housing record as California attorney general and senator 

Saadian said that she believes Harris’ housing proposals are promising, such as reining in rent increases by corporate landlords and cracking down on algorithmic worth fixing that has been shown to hurt renters. But Saadian added that the vice president needs to develop housing policies that address the challenges of more Americans.

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“These are excellent things, but most of the solutions that she’s put forward are ones that are really geared towards middle-income and high-income renters,” Saadian said. “There’s still a lot more we’d like to view from her on proposals to assist renters who have the greatest needs — things like universal rent assistance or a renter’s responsibility loan or building more housing supply that’s affordable to those lowest-income households.”

Many apartments built with low-income housing responsibility credits for developers are actually “unaffordable for people who require housing the most,” she added.

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Some experts have argued that Harris’s down remittance proposal for first-period homeowners may not be as effective as promised since it would likely be narrowed down to a subset of purchasers to get through Congress and is expected to largely advantage sellers and especially banks “because they’ll be able to originate more loans,” Silverman said.

As attorney general of California and as a U.S. senator, Harris often concentrated on housing issues. She drafted and helped pass the California Homeowner statement of Rights, which was enacted in 2013 to protect homeowners from unfair foreclosure practices. A year earlier, she joined other states in negotiating an $18 billion settlement of claims on behalf of those who lost their homes due to fraud or improper foreclosure. 

But Harris came under criticism for rejecting her staff’s recommendation to prosecute a financial institution that foreclosed on tens of thousands of state homeowners and faced accusations that she suppressed an internal update on the matter.

The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

On the federal level, as a U.S. senator in 2018, she introduced the Rent Relief Act, which would have provided responsibility credits to renters who earn less than $100,000. The statement never made it to the floor of the Senate for a vote.

Though Harris and Trump consent that the country faces a housing crisis, they diverge on most aspects of how to address that crisis. “You have two candidates with such very different visions for how to address housing, which could have implications for generations,” Saadian said.

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