The U.S. housing marketplace has been ensnared in a rising affordability disaster for many years.
The issue has gotten dramatically worse lately. Since 2019, house costs are up 60% national. A record-high 22 million renters are “cost-burdened” – spending greater than 30% in their source of revenue on housing.
In the meantime, stagnant wages, restricted housing provide and lagging federal help have helped go away greater than 770,000 American citizens homeless.
In spite of those various causes, Vice President JD Vance has blamed the housing affordability disaster on undocumented immigrants. In August 2025, he attributed emerging housing prices to immigration: “You cannot flood the United States of America with … people who have no legal right to be here, have them compete against young American families for homes, and not expect the price to skyrocket.”
Deportations, he argued, would decrease housing costs. “Why has housing leveled off over the past six months? I really believe the main driver is … negative net migration.”
In spite of Vance’s claims, analysis displays that immigration isn’t a considerable reason behind unaffordable housing. If truth be told, research have discovered that deportations exacerbate housing shortages via discounts within the building group of workers, which result in decrease manufacturing of housing devices and better costs.
From this standpoint, its arduous to peer the management’s deportation coverage as an actual effort to resolve the housing disaster. Slightly, it’s the usage of the housing disaster to be able to justify mass deportations to the general public.
The present management’s anti-immigrant housing coverage displays an extended historical past of xenophobia in housing. As a sociologist of housing, I’ve traced the historical past of racial segregation in housing in Los Angeles County. I’ve discovered that the similar far-right teams that sought to defeat public housing building and care for racially restrictive agreements in post-International Struggle II Los Angeles additionally advocated to prohibit immigrants from U.S. housing methods.
Previous anti-immigrant housing plans
A few of the leaders of those efforts used to be the far-right flesh presser and activist Gerald L.Ok. Smith. Described in 1976 via historian John Morton Blum as “the most infamous American fascist,” Smith helped bridge the American correct’s Forties conspiratorial and isolationist The united states First technology and its Sixties anti-civil rights technology.
Smith traveled the rustic advocating a Christian nationalist imaginative and prescient for American society, providing a non secular justification for anti-communism and opposition to civil rights. He additionally ran for president unsuccessfully in 1944, 1948 and 1956.
Gerald L.Ok. Smith speaks in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 7, 1936.
Library of Congress, CC BY
After settling in Los Angeles in 1953, Smith led Pink Scare campaigns – pushed via hostility to communism – around the nation.
In my analysis, I discovered that Smith used to be an early proponent of anti-immigrant housing coverage. His 10 rules incorporated a choice to “Stop immigration in order that American jobs and American houses may be safeguarded for American citizens.” In other places he known as to “Release housing units occupied by aliens in order that they may be occupied by veterans and other American citizens.”
Smith wasn’t by myself. His efforts have been a part of a broader surroundings during which public officers and native media labored to forestall building of public housing in Los Angeles within the Nineteen Fifties, accusing its proponents of communism.
Contemporary anti-immigrant coverage in housing
State and federal policymakers have additionally integrated anti-immigrant stances into American housing coverage over the last half-century.
The 1980 Housing and Group Construction Act used to be the primary federal regulation to particularly bar undocumented immigrants from public housing methods. Welfare reform in 1996 additional limited public housing help to simply criminal everlasting citizens and the ones with asylum or refugee standing.
Echoing the alien land regulations of the overdue 1800s that prohibited international belongings possession, policymakers within the 2000s in states reminiscent of Pennsylvania and Texas handed regulations forcing landlords to test immigration standing as a situation of apartment – regardless that this used to be struck down via the courts.
These days, immigrant tenants revel in fewer housing rights than electorate. Those inequalities fall specifically arduous on unauthorized immigrants who revel in excessive charges of housing value burden, crowding and deficient housing stipulations.
The Trump management targets to make bigger restrictions on immigrants in public housing even additional. The Division of Housing and City Construction is within the strategy of adopting regulations that may evict complete households if even one member is ineligible for help in accordance with immigration standing. Present regulation permits the ones households to are living in public housing, whilst prorating their advantages to account for an ineligible member.
From Smith to Vance, anti-immigrant housing insurance policies had been solid as some way for electorate to get extra housing. However they fail to stop or clear up the housing scarcity riding the disaster.
For instance, the Trump management’s effort to evict blended standing households from public housing will impact more or less 25,000 families. Atmosphere apart the truth that the ones households might then be made homeless, that quantity is handiest one-tenth the quantity of housing that the U.S. has misplaced because of the defunding and demolishing of public housing since 1990.
Research display that deportations can scale back the housing building group of workers, which lowers the choice of devices constructed and will increase prices.
AP Picture/Laura Rauch
Certainly, lots of the Trump management’s immigration and financial insurance policies are prone to exacerbate the housing disaster. The Trump management has made deportation a concern and has considerably higher deportation charges in comparison to contemporary years, whilst instituting traditionally excessive price lists on imports.
Deportations scale back the housing building group of workers, reducing the choice of devices constructed and lengthening prices. And price lists lift costs on construction fabrics reminiscent of lumber, metal and aluminum. The Nationwide Affiliation of House Developers estimates that contemporary price lists have raised construction prices via US$10,900 in step with house.
In early 2025, the Division of Executive Potency canceled or behind schedule a chain of HUD grants for housing help methods. And the Trump management has introduced plans for extra cuts to the country’s already inadequate housing help finances.
Vance, like Smith ahead of him, items the problem like a pie, the place electorate can get a bigger slice handiest via deporting immigrants. However the truth is that the pie may also be larger: The federal government can absolutely fund the housing wishes of all American citizens for not up to it has spent on its different priorities. The not too long ago handed “big, beautiful bill,” as an example, allocates extra investment to frame and inside enforcement in step with yr than key apartment help methods, public housing and Housing Selection Vouchers allocate for housing.
In Smith’s time, on a regular basis American citizens resisted this gambit, talking out to protest his perspectives. These days, as Smith’s anti-immigration housing concepts have ascended to the nationwide level, the housing justice neighborhood is talking out towards anti-immigrant housing coverage and providing another imaginative and prescient of ways the U.S. can give housing for all.
