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housing
Trump-GOP Tax Bill a Gift to 'Predatory Landlords' That Will Worsen Already Dire Housing Crisis
"Housing programs are among the important public services being targeted for significant cuts to fund tax giveaways for billionaires and their wealthy donors," warned one group.
May 15, 2025
House Republicans' proposed budget reconciliation package will make mortgages expensive and harder to obtain, a progressive tax policy group warned Thursday, while over 30 advocacy groups sounded the alarm over the Trump administration's gutting of federal agencies and programs, moves that are exacerbating the U.S. housing crisis.
Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) said that the proposed permanent extension of expiring portions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) signed into law by President Donald Trump during his first term would grant massive tax breaks to big corporations and the ultrawealthy, "wasting trillions of dollars that could help solve our country's affordable housing crisis."
"The deficit-financed tax cuts would also increase interest rates, making housing less affordable," ATF added. "To the extent the tax cuts are not added to the deficit, housing programs are among the important public services being targeted for significant cuts to fund tax giveaways for billionaires and their wealthy donors."
"They are paving the way for more predatory landlords to jack up rent."
ATF's assertion is supported by a report published in February by the Economic Policy Institute finding that "large, deficit-financed tax cuts would put upward pressure on inflation and interest rates, slowing growth and causing pain to households," including by making borrowing for a home more expensive.
ATF noted that extending the TCJA's weakened low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) could result in 235,000 fewer affordable housing units over 10 years.
"Trump's tax scam reduced the financial incentive for corporations—the largest LIHTC investors—to make equity investments in the tax credits by slashing the corporate tax rate to 21%, and adopting a stingier measure of inflation," the group said.
"One of the most regressive provisions in the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law is the so-called 'opportunity zone' tax break," ATF contended. "While proponents claimed it would encourage investment in low-income neighborhoods, it has instead been ruthlessly exploited by wealthy real estate investors."
"In fact, this program has failed to deliver the promised economic opportunity to underserved communities, instead turning many of these neighborhoods into what can more accurately be described as exploitation zones," the group added.
The Lever's Luke Goldstein and Katya Schwenk reported Tuesday that the reconciliation package's proposed restrictions on state governments passing new regulations on artificial intelligence technology "could kill crackdowns on real estate management company RealPage for raising rents and contributing to the country's housing crisis."
RealPage is accused of price gouging renters via AI-powered surveillance pricing and automated insurance denials and management systems.
"Not only are House Republicans giving their billionaire donors and large corporations a massive tax handout, they are giving RealPage and bad actors like them a free pass to rip off working families," Lindsay Owens, executive director of the economic justice group Groundwork Collaborative, said Wednesday.
"They are paving the way for more predatory landlords to jack up rent, more apps to drive down gig worker wages, and more retailers to hike prices on consumers," Owens added. "The GOP tax bill tells you everything you need to know about the Republican Party's priorities and how unserious they are about lowering costs for working families."
More than a dozen states have joined a class action lawsuit accusing RealPage of using AI to artificially inflate housing prices across the nation.
Also on Thursday, more than 30 housing, consumer, and civil rights groups warned that the Trump administration's deep cuts to federal agencies and programs—spearheaded by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency—"are worsening the nation's housing crisis."
"Our families, neighbors, and communities deserve better than these untenable and unconscionable proposals."
"The Trump administration promised to address the high cost of housing, but so far has proposed policies that will increase the cost of rent, shred the nation's housing safety net, and push more people into homelessness," National Low Income Housing Coalition interim president and CEO Renee Willis said in a statement.
"At a time when more people than ever are struggling to afford the cost of rent and a record number of people are experiencing homelessness, rolling back fair housing protections and cutting funding for rental assistance, homelessness services, and affordable housing development—and gutting the workforce responsible for administering these programs—will only create more hardship," Willis added. "Our families, neighbors, and communities deserve better than these untenable and unconscionable proposals."
In a wider critique of Trump's policy proposals, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Thursday on social media: "Wages are stagnant. Housing costs are soaring."
"Many young people will never be able to afford their own homes, but Trump wants to increase the bloated military budget by $150 billion," Sanders added. "WRONG. That money should go toward building the affordable housing that we desperately need."
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Instead of ‘Abundance,’ Let’s Have a Conversation About ‘Shared Prosperity’
“Abundance” without an eye for who the abundance serves runs the risk of exacerbating the problem at the core of our economic challenges—the hoarding of power and wealth by the people that already have a lot.
May 09, 2025
Those of us who care about building a healthy, thriving, and prosperous future are reeling. The Trump administration’s attacks on our people and our planet plus the outright evisceration of government by Elon Musk and his corporate army are forcing us to reflect on how we got here and to ponder how we move forward.
As believers in the government’s ability—and in fact responsibility—to do good, we are having to face the extremely uncomfortable fact that the government does not work for the majority of people. So, it makes sense that many are talking about how government can work better to create “abundance”—and the recent release of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book of the same name—as the solution to our despair. Klein and Thompson argue that America’s inability to build and the reason why liberals are losing is the result of excessive red tape, deliberate policy decisions, and bureaucratic inertia, which must be eliminated.
For over a decade I have worked to craft, implement, and evaluate strategies that leverage private, public, and philanthropic investments to deliver tangible and substantial benefits to formerly “redlined” communities. In plain terms, I’ve been fighting like hell to get resources—actual dollars—back into communities of color. And I’ve borne witness to the growing frustration with the perceived inability of all levels of government to deliver results. All too often, regulations have become the scapegoat that some argue drive up the cost or slow the development of essential infrastructure like housing, renewable energy, and transportation networks.
What shared prosperity requires is a shift away from profit maximization and toward affordability.
Don’t get me wrong, I completely agree that we have to urgently build more housing, transportation networks, and clean energy—the ingredients that people need to live healthy and prosperous lives. But just building more by eliminating regulations is not the silver bullet. “Abundance” without an eye for who the abundance serves runs the risk of exacerbating the problem at the core of our economic challenges—the hoarding of power and wealth by the people that already have a lot of, well, abundance.
Just building more—“abundance” as a goal in and of itself—will not allow us to deliver solutions to the thorniest and extremely interconnected challenges we face, like climate change, a widening racial wealth gap, extremely low levels of confidence in the public sector, eroding governance structures, and dwindling public financing due to rising costs and constraints on raising new revenue.
These problems were not created because we don’t build things; rather, they are the outcomes of an economic system built on fabricated scarcity and the doctrine of maximizing profit, exploiting communities of color, and concentrating political and economic power.
It's our inability to share in abundance, our over consumption, and the belief that in order to have more abundance you need to hoard as much of it as possible that truly hurts our planet and our people.
Take this example. Several years ago, California’s investor-owned utilities were planning to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in charging infrastructure to support the state’s transition to electric vehicles. But the majority of the investment was planned for wealthy communities where electric vehicles were already being used. The utilities claimed that low-income families would not use the chargers because they didn’t own electric vehicles, but we argued that investments in charging infrastructure at multifamily housing and in low-income communities were essential to creating the conditions for families to consider switching to clean vehicles. In the end, the utilities agreed that a percentage of chargers should be deployed to low-income communities and over the years those percentages have continued to increase as the stigma that low-income communities would not use chargers was dispelled.
And this lesson is replicable. By focusing on who the benefits of vehicle charging stations were going to, we were able to scale the clean energy transition even faster by opening the option up to more Californians—not just those who already had access.
And so, I propose that to really tackle our complex challenges we must not work toward “abundance,” but instead work toward the goal of “shared prosperity,” of which abundance is a key strategy to achieving that goal.
Shared prosperity first and foremost is rooted in people, not markets, and meets the needs of all people, including those who have suffered the most under our current paradigm, creating an economy in which all communities can thrive. It ultimately recognizes that we are part of an interconnected system and that we are only as strong as our ability to care for the most vulnerable among us.
What shared prosperity requires is a shift away from profit maximization and toward affordability. By definition, it’s prosperous for all, meaning that jobs with good benefits and worker protections are ubiquitous, and so are opportunities to build generational wealth and community resilience to climate, social, health, and economic crises.
The most vulnerable among us need to know that they can count on being able to bounce back. And to do so, our governments, our community-based organizations, and our people must have the capacity and resources to meet the call for support when needed.
Reading Abundance I get the sense that the authors think that people are often the obstacle to progress. Government, community leaders, environmental justice advocates, and environmentalists are not antagonists toward a healthy and prosperous future; they are the force that will ultimately help us achieve it.
Let me give an example of how a pivot from an “abundance” to a “shared prosperity” paradigm can function.
Take the Transformative Climate Communities (TCC) Program, a California state program which has delivered 400 units of affordable housing, planted 13,000 trees, installed over 600 solar panels on homes, deployed 26 electric buses, and placed people into approximately 800 jobs—all thanks to the vision and voices of the communities and their local governments who have been at the center of decision-making that impacts their daily lives. The eight communities—notably formerly redlined communities—where this work is taking place previously had an “abundance” mindset, they just needed the right support and government interventions. TCC is successful precisely because it shifted from this abundance mindset and toward a shared prosperity mindset, putting communities in the driver’s seat to determine how best to build thriving neighborhoods, fight climate change, and determine their own economic futures.
The challenge before us is to design a government that has new and better tools to scale our progress, from financing mechanisms that generate the revenue necessary to do this work, to governance practices to steer our progress, to, yes, revisiting the laws and regulations that govern our built environment to eliminate those that no longer fit our moment and to update those that require retooling.
Above all, we must focus our attention on building abundance and prosperity where it is hardest to achieve, where decades of disinvestment and a legacy of injustice have locked in poverty and pollution. Otherwise, “abundance” is just a new version of trickle-down economics, which not only never trickled-down but continued the grotesque hoarding of wealth and power among the people that already had it to begin with.
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A Different 'Abundance Agenda': Avoiding Delusions and Diversions
If there is to be a decent human future—perhaps if there is to be any human future—it will be fewer people consuming less energy and creating less stuff.
Mar 30, 2025
For the next few weeks, the buzzword in US debates on the liberal/left about economics and ecology will be “abundance” after the release of the book with that title by Ezra Klein (New York Times) and Derek Thompson (The Atlantic magazine).
The book poses politically relevant questions: Have policies favored by Democrats and others on the political left impeded innovation with unnecessary red tape for building projects? Can regulatory reform and revitalized public investment bring technological progress that can solve problems in housing, infrastructure, energy, and agriculture? The book says yes to both.
Those debates have short-term political implications but are largely irrelevant to the human future. The challenge is not how to do more but how to live with less.
All societies face multiple cascading ecological crises—emphasis on the plural. There are many crises, not just climate change, and no matter what a particular society’s contribution to the crises there is nowhere to hide. The cascading changes will come in ways we can prepare for but can’t predict, and it’s likely the consequences will be much more dire than we imagine.
If that seems depressing, I’m sorry. Keep reading anyway.
Rapid climate disruption is the most pressing concern but not the only existential threat. Soil erosion and degradation undermine our capacity to feed ourselves. Chemical contamination of our bodies and ecosystems undermines the possibility of a stable long-term human presence. Species extinction and loss of biodiversity will have potentially catastrophic effects on the ecosystems on which our lives depend.
Why aren’t more people advocating limits? Because limits are hard.
I could go on, but anyone who wants to know about these crises can easily find this information in both popular media and the research literature. For starters, I recommend the work of William Rees, an ecologist who co-created the ecological footprint concept and knows how to write for ordinary people.
The foundational problem is overshoot: There are too many people consuming too much in the aggregate. The distribution of the world’s wealth is not equal or equitable, of course, but the overall program for human survival is clear: fewer and less. If there is to be a decent human future—perhaps if there is to be any human future—it will be fewer people consuming less energy and creating less stuff.
Check the policy statements of all major political players, including self-described progressives and radicals, and it’s hard to find mention of the need to impose limits on ourselves. Instead, you will find delusions and diversions.
The delusions come mainly from the right, where climate-change denialism is still common. The more sophisticated conservatives don’t directly challenge the overwhelming consensus of researchers but instead sow seeds of doubt, as if there is legitimate controversy. That makes it easier to preach the “drill, baby, drill” line of expanding fossil fuel production, no matter what the ecological costs, instead of facing limits.
The diversions come mainly from the left, where people take climate change seriously but invest their hopes in an endless array of technological solutions. These days, the most prominent tech hype is “electrify everything,” which includes a commitment to an unsustainable car culture with electric vehicles, instead of facing limits.
There is a small kernel of truth in the rhetoric of both right and left.
When the right says that expanding fossil energy production would lift more people out of poverty, they have a valid point. But increased production of fossil energy is not suddenly going to benefit primarily the world’s poor, and the continued expansion of emissions eventually will doom rich and poor alike.
When the left says renewable energy is crucial, they have a valid point. But if the promise of renewable energy is used to prop up existing levels of consumption, then the best we can expect is a slowing of the rate of ecological destruction. Unless renewables are one component of an overall down-powering, they are a part of the problem and not a solution.
Why aren’t more people advocating limits? Because limits are hard. People—including me and almost everyone reading this—find it hard to resist what my co-author Wes Jackson and I have called “the temptations of dense energy.” Yes, lots of uses of fossil fuels are wasteful, and modern marketing encourages that waste. But coal, oil, and natural gas also do a lot of work for us and provide a lot of comforts that people are reluctant to give up.
That’s why the most sensible approach combines limits on our consumption of energy and rationing to ensure greater fairness, both of which have to be collectively imposed. That’s not a popular political position today, but if we are serious about slowing, and eventually stopping, the human destruction of the ecosphere, I see no other path forward.
In the short term, those of us who endorse “fewer and less” will have to make choices between political candidates and parties that are, on the criteria of real sustainability, either really hard-to-describe awful or merely bad. I would never argue that right and left, Republican and Democrat, are indistinguishable. But whatever our immediate political choices, we should talk openly about ecological realities.
That can start with imagining an “abundance agenda” quite different than what Klein and Thompson, along with most conventional thinking, propose. Instead of more building that will allegedly be “climate friendly,” why not scale back our expectations? Instead of assuming a constantly mobile society, why not be satisfied with staying home? Instead of dreaming of more gadgets, why not live more fully in the world around us? People throughout history have demonstrated that productive societies can live with less.
Instead of the promise of endless material abundance, which has never been consistent with a truly sustainable future, let’s invest in what we know produces human flourishing—collective activity in community based on shared needs and reduced wants. For me, living in rural New Mexico, that means being one of the older folks who are helping younger folks get a small-scale farm off the ground. It means being an active participant in our local acequia irrigation system. It means staying home instead of vacationing. It means being satisfied with the abundant pleasures of this place and these people without buying much beyond essentials.
I’m not naïve—given the house I live in, the car I drive, and the food I buy from a grocery store, I’m still part of a hyper-extractive economy that is unsustainable. But instead of scrambling for more, I am seeking to live with less. I know that’s much harder for people struggling to feed a family and afford even a modest home. But rather than imagining ways to keep everyone on the consumption treadmill, only with more equity, we can all contribute ideas about how to step off.
Our choices are clear: We can drill more, which will simply get us to a cruel end game even sooner. We can pretend that technology will save us, which might delay that reckoning. If we can abandon the delusions and diversions, there’s no guarantee of a happy future. But there’s a chance of a future.
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