Housing After January 20th, 2025

Staying steady and trying new approaches are not opposites

Photo by Angelica Teran on Unsplash

I will count it as a small blessing that we get two and a half months between a presidential election and the inauguration. I hope everyone got some rest, some family time, some time to wrap up 2024 and get 2025 started properly before we grapple with what tomorrow’s inauguration will bring.

In writing last week’s 2025 Hopes and Dreams edition, I kept finding myself slipping into thoughts and exhortations that had everything to do with the administration which is coming, and nothing really to do with my hopes and dreams for California Housing. Like many in this great and golden state, I had hoped that this moment would never arrive, much like I had hoped that the fires wouldn’t come back like they have. But here we are. Unlike the fires, I hope we are ready. Much like the fires, I hope that folks are not surprised that this moment has come.

Holding Ground and Pushing Forward

So what do I think team housing needs to keep in mind once the clock strikes noon on the 20th? How do we stay strong, stay sane, and keep doing our jobs faced with an avalanche of executive orders and misinformation? How do we work to house people or keep people housed in the face of so much ugliness in other areas of society and politics?

More than ever, we will need to keep going, to both hold strong and to push forward in new ways. If anything, that is what I am trying to focus on - how to simultaneously hold ground and push forward, to both resist terrible ideas and proposals whilst not ceding the ground of change, innovation, progress and the future.

Let’s not devolve into a debate between resistance and charting a new future. Both are always necessary.

The first few hours, the first 100 days, will be an avalanche of cruel executive orders and attempts to hold the budget process hostage. This will be on top of the brutal confirmation hearings that have already begun, a time where we will see just how bad it is going to get. This will all occur amidst horrible fights over federal disaster aid for Californians at a time when we should be worried about other things. My heart is with all the people who will be impacted, and all the federal workers and policy folks who will get caught up in the madness.

One thing that will be hard for team housing is that housing will not be anyone’s big priority in this phase - the HUD nominee will not be the big fight, and it won’t be housers with a target on their back from day one. The worst housing ideas won’t come from HUD or even be about HUD - they will be about tariffs and immigration and will impact us, our industry and our communities immensely, but nobody will ask us our thoughts.

As a houser, I take a few things with me into the new normal. The housing crisis is real. Everyone, regardless of who you voted for, can see the crisis that many of us have been talking about to deaf ears for a long time. Depending on who you ask, this is partially why the election went the way it did. The Democratic party ceded a lot of votes, at the root, in part because of bread and butter economic issues (rent, inflation, grocery prices). The housing crisis is now everywhere, and has so many faces. While the administration knows little of this crisis, and mostly wants to exploit it, members of Congress face pressure to take real action. This is even more true now that the housing and climate crisis have fully merged. Draw strength from the power and importance of what we work on and that its newfound salience in the minds of the voting public has not gone away, if anything, it has strengthened.

I think we as a community and an industry have the ability to take the innovative (high) road. Opposition and resistance will be necessary. Sometimes the answer is as simple as “No, don’t cut that or close that or tear that down.” But in so many areas, we have to fight for the high ground of innovation. So much of this Substack has been attempts to nudge team housing forward - on Social Housing, homeownership, on megaprojects, on doing big political deals, on both/and housing or on looking in the mirror. That has to continue. It can’t all be resistance, and just because the new administration finds its way to something does not mean automatic opposition. And just because they have terrible ideas and mostly know how to pour gasoline on fires does not mean that we don’t have work to do to rethink our own approaches. That is one of the key differences between those of us who would build and those mostly focused on destruction.

We will also have to find ways to take advantage of opportunities where they exist, without it creating internal battles over collaboration and cooperation. Land use reform, homeownership, and other areas where good ideas are needed may be placed where bipartisan support can be found, and some of these deals will need to be made. We owe it to ourselves and the people we serve to always put the system first - if some progress can be made, we must take it.

I think one thing that will be essential is to sift through the political noise and see issues for what they are. Sometimes it’s very much about housing, and when it is about housing we have to make noise. Tariffs are a terrible idea in general, but they are especially awful on Canadian timber and other building materials. People don’t die if their TVs cost more, but if we can’t build housing people will be homeless.

Immigrants build everything, but they especially build housing (they also maintain it). Both developers and unions know this deeply. Those who finance housing and have immense power in our system also know this, even if they may try to ignore it. Two central pillars of the new administration’s plan will be disastrous for housing production, and team housing has to make this very clear - even if nobody asks us. The wrong decisions about Fannie and Freddie and the FDIC can add a third whammy. Labor, economic and finance policy are housing policy, and there has to be a loud cry from the industry about just how bad these ideas can be.

Sadly, it isn’t always enough to be correct. Sometimes it is about finding the right housers as messengers. Having a well-researched argument is necessary but insufficient. The incoming administration will likely listen to nobody, but we have already seen that enough members of congress who voted for the administration will listen on certain issues - especially if it comes from the right messengers. Housing is one of those issues, and finding the right people to make it clear to them that what will be rolled out is a plan for a housing disaster, and that their voters and donors will notice. I am certain there are enough Republican builders and developers who also know that tariffs and deportations will make building housing even more hellish. I doubt many of them read this Substack, but I would guess that some of you are friendly enough with developers who might be able to say something and be effective. The same goes for academics and researchers who have friends at Cato and elsewhere. Yes, the fact that the right messenger matters is often painful and unjust, but that is a fight for another time.

It will be about finding reasons for hope at the local and state level. A lot of progress, even during a more favorable administration, on housing and related issues has happened at the local level. Just last summer, Minnesota passed a suite of tenant protections, from extending renter protections to survivors of domestic violence and undocumented tenants, protecting tenants' right to organize and addressing junk fees. A Dallas housing coalition won big on an affordable housing bond by building a big tent. Housers need to keep pushing on big ideas at the local and state level.

Sometimes it’s not about housing. Especially if you are in the Bay Area, hug your favorite transporter. Even though we lost a $1 billion in the budget and people are in all kinds of housing crises, our transport system may die. Let’s be good allies on this critical lifeblood of our jurisdictions and then partner with change makers in transport to enable real progress on fiscal issues, megaprojects and redevelopment 2.0, and to do what it takes in Washington to get something positive. We are all sad about BAHFA, but the path forward will alas be different than the one we had imagined. The true funding alliance with team transportation has long been elusive, and it’s especially hard doing this under severe duress (which will get more severe on January 20). But I am confident that this deal can get done, as it has to.

The same goes for renewable energy, water, food and other key systems that we depend on. All will be under attack, with the shift from equity to exploitation, from sustainability to short-termism made very clear. I hope that more and more, people can see housing as a system (and not just an area of policy), one that is very tied together with all the systems we depend upon for survival. This latter part is true technically, economically, physically and politically - with the latter being extra important while basic life is under attack. I am also convinced that any political future better than our current one runs through these systems. The fundamental arguement of my book the Spatial Contract isn’t just that we need a new social contract focused on these systems, but that these systems is where we can build a more functional politics, less defined by the madness of the current moment.

Finally, I do think it is critical that we as housers understand that sometimes it’s not about urban development at all. I can be a ‘housing is the center of the universe’ person as much as anyone. It terrifies me how much we had to fight to get this most basic and ancient of things on people’s radar - only when it got beyond horrible did it become a major issue.

But there are limits to even my housing focus. Starting in late January, even more families are going to be broken apart and many more people will be ripped from their homes, and this has nothing to do with housing. Our basic humanity will be tested, and I hope that folks are prepared to step up for immigrants and refugees when the time comes - and not just those that build and maintain our homes. If you’re looking for a place to put your money to good use, consider East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, which has been part of my life for 27 years. Few organizations do as much to both help people directly and fight at the highest level, and it will certainly take both.

The symbolism of tomorrow’s inauguration coming on Martin Luther King Jr. Day is not lost on me. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday, and that you can take a moment with friends, family or colleagues to reflect on what great leadership and deep humanity looks like. We will need that strength, both to hold our ground and to push forward into the future.