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Housing

The COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly exacerbated America’s national housing crisis, which has been defined by rising rates of homelessness, a surge in evictions, and a large increase in housing insecurity among Black and Hispanic households. These trends have been compounded by the Trump Administration’s rollback of public housing policies and outright disdain for the enforcement of fair housing laws. The current crisis has also coincided with a decades-long neglect of the preservation and expansion of the nation’s affordable public housing supply by policymakers and a surge in real estate acquisitions by corporate landlords and private equity investors like Blackstone Group and NexPoint Residential Trust, resulting in skyrocketing home prices and rents across the country. Together, these trends have made the current housing crisis unlike anything America has seen since the Great Depression. 

The Revolving Door Project has taken a multifaceted approach to explain how the executive branch can respond to the national housing crisis. For one, we have documented the importance of personnel appointments and vacancies in housing policy at executive branch departments and independent agencies. We highlighted the hiring of Charles Yi, a Wall Street-friendly former BigLaw partner with a troubling record of advancing the interests of entrenched corporate power, at the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). We have also catalogued the mounting personnel vacancies at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that are undermining progress in key housing policy areas. 

RDP has also sought to document the ties between the real estate industry and the current administration. We have tracked political contributions from prominent real estate industry moguls to the Biden, Harris, and Buttigieg campaigns in our Presidential Power Map. 

Above all, the project has sought to demonstrate the nature of housing policy as a whole-of-government issue necessitating an all-of-government response, rather than a niche issue confined to one or two agencies. We have documented the various housing policies and powers held by various executive branch agencies and departments, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the Department of the Interior, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). 

In the coming weeks and months, the Revolving Door Project will work with affordable housing and tenants rights advocates to center tenants and struggling homeowners in national housing policy discussion. We will urge executive branch officials to make full use of their existing housing powers to serve the public interest, rather than corporate real estate investors, and call them out when they fail to do so. We will continue to keep watchful eyes on executive branch housing policy nominees and appointees, and will rigorously document executive branch and presidential housing policy powers that do not require legislative action to invoke. 

Below you will find some of the project’s writing and research on housing policy. This page will be continually updated with new articles and blog posts.

January 23, 2023

Andrea Beaty Vishal Shankar

Press Release

Housing

The White House Must Heed Tenants, Not Corporate Profiteers, To Enact New Tenant Protection Measures

The White House should not succumb to the real estate industry’s cynical lobbying efforts to block new federal tenant protections. These same developers and corporate landlords fueled the rental housing crisis in the first place by spiking rents and exploiting families, and now they are looking to defend their ill-gotten gains.

December 20, 2022

Kalimah Muhammad

Blog Post

2024 ElectionHousing

A Tenant Reckoning at the Polls: How Housing Played in The Midterms

While the Democratic Party celebrates holding on to the Senate, the 2022 midterms also tested the growing momentum around tenant’s protections with incredible success. In a survey of more than 12,200 Americans who voted in the 2022 election, polling revealed that across all racial and ethnic groups, inflation and the rising cost of living was the most important issue for the President and Congress to address. A key driver of inflation, per economic analysis by People’s Action and the Groundwork Collaborative, is sky-high rents – accounting for one third of the Consumer Price Index.