Ahead of Midterms, Tenants Call Trump’s Housing Policy a “Catastrophic Failure”

As voters facing rising living costs head to the midterm polls, the nation’s largest federation of tenant unions has released a damning report on the Trump administration’s “catastrophic failure” to rein in greedy landlords and address a housing crisis that threatens to displace millions of working people from their homes.

In fact, housing justice advocates say the few housing policies proposed by officials working under President Donald Trump — a billionaire who inherited a family real estate business that was accused of discriminating against Black families in the 1970s — would further empower landlords while squeezing already struggling tenants.

The United States faces a shortage of 7.1 million housing units that low-income renters can actually afford, according to The State of the Nation’s Tenants, a report released by the Tenant Union Federation (TUF) on October 26. After years of inflation, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $1,572 across the 50 largest metro areas. With the federal minimum wage stuck at $7.25 an hour, the average minimum wage worker must work 116 hours per week to pay for a modest two-bedroom apartment..

Additionally, zero states or major cities in the U.S. even have an adequate housing supply to meet the needs of lower-income residents. From 2014 to 2024, developers primarily constructed luxury rentals, and the number of units renting for less than $1,000 per month dropped by 9.3 million. The nation’s chronic shortage of truly affordable housing is a major driver of poverty, according to Pew Research.

“The breaking point is in the rearview mirror. The breaking point was many years ago for some of the tenants we are talking about,” said TUF Founder and Director Tara Raghuveer in an interview.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has moved to gut protections for low-income renters living in federally subsidized housing to make it much easier for landlords to evict people. The administration has also put forth a proposal to eliminate housing support for mixed-status immigrant families. Along with disasters such as floods and wildfires, evictions are the major driver of homelessness in the U.S., which increased by 33 percent from 2020 to 2024, according to the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“The administration is hoping to distract the public from its inability to solve the affordable housing crisis by blaming scapegoats, and one of those is immigrants,” Hannah Adams, a senior attorney for the National Housing Law Project, told Truthout. “Rather than solve the housing crisis, or deal with the fact that everything is too expensive for working families right now, they are just trying to kick people out of affordable housing.”

Raghuveer said she frequently talks with people who work multiple jobs but are unable to make rent and stay housed due to a combination of inflation and a predatory housing market that Congress and the White House have failed to regulate.

“People don’t know where they are going to turn to next. The only options available to them are their car, an extended-stay hotel, or the street,” Raghuveer told Truthout.

Democrats and liberals have increasingly focused on the housing supply, arguing that removing regulatory red tape to make it easier for developers to build would increase supply and drive down prices. That argument is famously at the heart of Abundance, a book published in March 2025 by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. However, tenants organizing on the ground see big holes in that framework.

“Why is ‘abundance’ the dominant idea? It’s because it benefits the very same profiteers for us to believe that the only solution to this crisis is to put more money in their pockets to build more housing,” Raghuveer said.

Instead of looking at the housing market in terms of simple supply and demand, Raghuveer said policy makers must address the number of affordable units lost each year due to an unregulated market. Developers and landlords consistently refuse to build affordable rental homes unless incentivized by public funding. When it comes to public housing in particular, Congress also provides subsidies, such as the Public Housing Operating Fund for building maintenance and other costs without holding landlords to account for living conditions and unfair evictions.

According to Raghuveer, this focus on building more supply at the exclusion of regulations makes little sense to people organizing tenant unions to challenge abusive landlords in communities beyond the hyper-wealthy and highly regulated metro areas of New York City and San Francisco.

“The story we have been told by mainstream economists is that this is a crisis of under-production, but that is not true,” Raghuveer said. “We have been building a lot of multifamily housing in the last several years … but it’s under-regulated. We are not preserving the truly affordable housing supply that already exists, and failing by not regulating the landlords who hike rents and displace tenants willy-nilly.”

From 2014 to 2024, the number of rental units that cost more than $2,000 a month increased by 5.8 million while the number of units costing less than $1,000 fell by more than 9 million, according to TUF’s report. Meanwhile, corporate landlords have gobbled up rental properties and colluded to raise rents. Private equity firms have acquired 1.4 million rental units since 2018. Data from the National Multifamily Housing Council show that the top 50 U.S. landlord firms now control 2.5 million units nationally.

Kenny Loth, a member of Tacoma Tenants and Newcastle Tenant Union in Washington State, said he has experienced homelessness in the past and knows what it feels like when “someone else holds all the power over your home.” As prices rise, landlords across the country are raising rents on tenants in buildings they fail to maintain, Loth said, pointing to his own “ultrawealthy slumlord” in Tacoma. After 90 percent of his fellow tenants agreed to form a union at the apartment building, Loth said the landlord retaliated by raising rents.

Now, voters in Tacoma are preparing to vote on a citywide ballot question that would allow tenants to report landlords that violate a Tenant Bills of Rights that was approved by voters in 2023. Landlord and real estate groups have raised more than $590,000 to defeat the measure.

“We’ve got nothing left to give, and now a cabal of landlords wants to buy up Washington’s elections to serve their interests,” Loth told Truthout in an email. “That’s why we’re building tenant unions across the country. We’re done letting landlords decide the future for the tenant class.”

Federal and other subsidies provide incentives for developers and landlords to build housing for lower-income people — and also can offer an opening for lawmakers and regulators to put guardrails on how public money is spent. After all, funds not spent on upkeep and repairs can easily fall into a landlord’s pocket. However, lawmakers have largely failed to put those guardrails into place, particularly at the federal level, Raghuveer and Adams both said.

For example, Raghuveer said affordable housing programs in many cities provide subsidies for building affordable housing but require landlords to rent out only 10 percent of the new units at prices considered “affordable.” Less than 13 percent of new apartment buildings built since 2020 are fully restricted to only low-income tenants, according to the TUF report.

Under federal policy, housing is considered unaffordable when people pay more than 30 percent of their income. Thirty percent is a considerable chunk of a paycheck to spend on rent at a time when 60 percent of people with annual household incomes under $50,000 in the U.S. report living paycheck to paycheck due to inflation, wage stagnation, and other factors.

The federal government could further regulate real estate companies and landlords that benefit from public subsidies in order to improve housing conditions and push more affordable units into the market, but the Trump administration has gone in the opposite direction. For example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is moving to revoke a federal rule that requires landlords to notify tenants about unpaid rent and other charges at least 30 days before an eviction. Industry groups representing landlords and corporate real estate have applauded the proposal.

When advocates sued to prevent the rule from taking effect after the Trump administration attempted to push it through without public comment in February, the National Apartment Association filed a brief in support of revoking the eviction protections, which were established under President Joe Biden.

“When you kick a bunch of people out of subsidized housing, they end up flooding the rental market and also burdening local governments, who need to figure out a place for them to live. And that burdens local shelters and medical establishments in addition to law enforcement,” Adams said. “So it does have a huge ripple effect.”