From building futuristic cities to rounding up unhoused
and undocumented people, the plans send a message about
who does and doesn’t belong in Trump’s America.
***
Careful, GOPers...! Are you POSITIVE that you'll pass
muster for who's worthy of NOT BEING DISAPPEARED? You
might think you are...but are you, really? Are you sure?
Positive you could never be homeless? Or are you one of
those who's quietly anxious for this Great Clean Sweep of
Undesirables to take place? In the blink of an eye you
could become One Of Them.........
***
“Build that wall, build that wall,” cheered a sea of
adoring fans, their faces bright red with excitement.
“We’re going to build a wall. It will be a real wall,”
proclaimed the soon-to-be president of the United States.
“It’s going to happen!”
The border wall is perhaps the most notorious electoral
promise of the modern era, a symbol of the politics of
racial division made corporeal. Throughout his 2016
campaign, Donald Trump promised to build a concrete wall
along all 2,000 miles of the southern U.S. border.
Crucially, the self-proclaimed “deal-maker” said that
Mexico would be picking up the check for the entirety of
the project.
Nearly a decade after Trump descended a golden escalator
spouting vitriol about immigrants, there is conspicuously
not a 2,000-mile-long concrete wall along the border, nor
did Mexico foot the bill for the estimated $15 billion
Trump spent trying to make it happen.
Now, the former president is back with a new set of
fantastical infrastructure policies — this time on
housing.
Housing has surged as a top national electoral issue this
year. Nearly a third of people surveyed by the real
estate brokerage Redfin said that housing affordability
was a top issue during this election. Another survey from
Popular Democracy in Action found that housing was a top
issue for swing-state voters this cycle, with many
supporting policy initiatives like rent stabilization.
There’s good reason for that. A Harvard University report
in May found that roughly 22.4 million households in the
United States pay more than 30 percent of their income in
rent. Home prices have reportedly risen 47 percent higher
than they were in 2020.
“Agenda47,” Trump’s policy platform, calls for a radical
reimagining of our housing system, starting with
constructing new “freedom cities” on vacant federal land,
where residents will travel around in flying cars. The
absurdity of that plan is rivaled only by the cruelty of
two other central planks: the forced relocation of
unhoused people to “tent cities,” and the deportation of
millions of undocumented immigrants.
Housing experts say that Trump’s plans are thin on
details, detached from reality, and, in at least some
cases, extend far beyond the powers of the presidency.
That’s not to say, however, that he wouldn’t attempt to
follow his rhetoric up with actions, especially when it
comes to mass deportations. But as with his border wall,
the outcome is in many ways besides the point. The
proposals are just as much, if not more, about
reinforcing who does and doesn’t belong in Trump’s
America than tackling this country’s worsening housing
crisis.
For DaMareo Cooper, co-executive director at Popular
Democracy In Action, Trump’s aims are blatantly obvious.
The former president is “using these policies to create a
wedge between who is and who is not: … who gets to be
treated like a human [and] who gets to be treated like
they deserve the protection of the state.”
Futuristic Cities for the Rich
In March 2023, Trump unveiled his “Freedom Cities”
proposal, which would open up “vacant” federal land for
developers to bid on and eventually build futuristic
“Freedom Cities,” with Jetsons-style flying cars as a
primary mode of transportation.
Tyler Haupert, an assistant professor of urban studies at
NYU Shanghai, and other housing experts noted that the
plan was likely modeled after Saudi Arabia’s NEOM
project. The $1.5 trillion planned futuristic city in the
desert was the brainchild of Crown Prince Mohammad bin
Salman, a close ally of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner,
and has been beset by delays since its launch in 2017.
“What’s happening in Saudi Arabia is incredibly
expensive, and already going over budget and delayed,
running into all sorts of problems, also exploiting
extremely cheap labor,” said Haupert. “So I think that
using that as a model is not so realistic or desirable.”
There are other reasons the project is not realistic. The
majority of the country’s “vacant” land is located in the
western part of the United States, often with no access
to basic infrastructure. “Our federal lands are located
in places that are vacant, not just because they’re
federal lands, but they’re places that lack water, that
lack connection to transportation networks, that are on
protected lands,” said Haupert.
Even where Trump has made practical proposals to address
the country’s housing shortage, such as changing local
zoning regulations to encourage further development, such
actions are not really within the scope of the
presidency, housing experts told The Intercept.
“The federal government doesn’t really have too much
power to make decisions on where to build, what to build;
it’s also heavily influenced by the state and local-level
zoning and land-use regulations,” said Jung Hyun Choi,
principal research associate at the Urban Institute’s
Housing Finance Policy Center. “That’s maybe one of the
reasons that the Trump campaign wants to come out with
bold ideas to shift attention from the kind of lack of
power to actually implement.”
Casey J. Dawkins, a professor of urban studies at the
University of Maryland, agreed that Trump would be
hamstrung by the federal government’s “limited ability to
influence local land use regulations.”
Dawkins added that lowering mortgage rates, another Trump
promise, would be largely outside of his purview.
Interest rates are set by the Federal Reserve, and though
the president appoints the central bank’s chair, it
operates as an independent body. “Obviously, reducing
mortgage rates would be a great thing,” Dawkins said,
“but the president’s ability to influence that is pretty
limited.”
Criminalizing Homelessness
On the campaign trail, Trump has also vowed to develop
“tent cities,” where unhoused people would be relocated
or face arrest for “camping.” In a video debuting the
policy, Trump claimed that it would rid “the scourge of
homelessness, the drug addicted, and the dangerously
deranged,” on top of solving veteran homelessness.
The former president is in lockstep with the broader
conservative movement when it comes to viewing unhoused
communities as inherently criminal and a “scourge” on our
society. Over the last three years, reporting has found,
conservative groups like the Cicero Institute have
spearheaded camping bans in cities and localities
throughout the United States. Just this year, three
states passed laws banning public camping — effectively
outlawing being homeless. In June, the conservative-
majority Supreme Court ruled that cities could continue
to arrest and fine people for sleeping outside,
regardless of whether that’s their only option.
Housing experts said that not only would creating tent
cities not solve homelessness, but pouring money into a
project like that could actually exacerbate the issue.
“The places that have made the most success have built
permanent affordable housing units specifically earmarked
for the homeless, and the most successful of them have
also included things like social services on site. So
diverting any funding that could potentially go to those
sorts of solutions to, you know, building temporary tent
cities, I think, could have actually a negative impact on
this population,” said Haupert.
The former president’s proposals are of a piece with a
“long history of residential segregation” in this
country, said Tony Samara, associate director of policy
for Right to the City Action, a housing and racial
justice coalition. “‘Let’s turn America into a collection
of tent cities and freedom cities’ — that to me is very
much within the broad overarching narrative of
segregation that has been central to housing in this
country for a couple of centuries.”
More Deportations
While Trump’s freedom and tent cities may prove to be
more talk than action, his threats of mass deportation
are hardly idle. The executive branch oversees matters of
immigration, and Trump used all the tools at his disposal
during his first term as president. Should he be
reelected in November, he would likely have even more
influence over immigration if Republicans simultaneously
win control of Congress.
While Trump and vice presidential nominee JD Vance have
avoided direct questions about how they might implement
mass deportations policy, Trump has hinted at what levers
he might pull. Earlier this year, Trump vowed to use the
Alien Enemies Act to detain and deport millions of
undocumented Americans. The act was infamously used to
create incarceration camps for Japanese Americans during
World War II.
There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants
in the United States, and any action Trump would take to
round up and deport them would fulfill a far-right
fantasy. What it would not do, experts cautioned, is make
housing more accessible or affordable.
In Texas, for example, the large number of undocumented
workers in construction may have helped the state avoid
the worst of the affordable housing crisis by working to
build thousands of apartments and homes in the wake of
Hurricane Harvey.
“The claim that cracking down on immigration is going to
reduce housing costs is simply not founded in empirical
reality,” said Dawkins. “It actually would probably have
the opposite effect of increasing construction costs
because immigrants make up a large portion of the
construction labor supply.”
What’s more, housing experts say, Trump’s track record on
housing thus far offers little reason to think he
seriously cares about solving the crisis.
“He’s trying to get his friends extra resources at the
expense of regular working people.”
During his first term, Trump proposed massive cuts to the
Department of Housing and Urban Development, including
large cuts to rental assistance programs. Project 2025,
which Trump has distanced himself from but was notably
drafted in part by his former HUD Secretary Ben Carson,
would drastically scale back investments in affordable
housing.
Project 2025 also calls for weakening the Fair Housing
Act, a landmark civil rights law that seeks to prevent
racial housing discrimination. While in office, Trump
rolled back an Obama-era rule that helped enforce the
act, arguing in not-so-coded language that the regulation
was attempting to “ruin the suburbs.”
“He’s doing more of the same. He’s trying to get his
friends extra resources at the expense of regular working
people,” said Cooper. “If somebody tells you who they
are, believe him; I think we should interpret these plans
and strategies as exactly what they look like.”
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