Trump’s a Developer, But Don’t Expect Him to Solve the Housing Crisis
The incoming president’s messaging on housing has been muddled by his support for tariffs and deportations, which would make it costlier to build.
A construction site in unincorporated Orange County, California.
Photographer: Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register/Getty Images
Donald Trump is walking into a housing crisis. Since the 1960s, the price of homeownership has risen twice as fast as inflation, and rents have climbed five times faster than wages. A collapse in housing construction has squeezed supply, and homelessness has reached record highs. Voters this year consistently named housing as one of the top financial issues they face.
Given his background as a real estate developer, the president-elect might seem like a logical ally of the nationwide push to reduce barriers to new housing. The YIMBY movement (for “Yes in My Backyard”) started about a decade ago, when Sonja Trauss, a math teacher with a master’s degree in economics, started organizing renters in San Francisco to show up at planning commission meetings to support proposed housing, countering the powerful voice of the NIMBYs, residents who were hostile to new development, often because they had home values to protect.