By Talia Grossman, Fellow, Income Security
You just got your lease renewal and are shocked at how much your rent skyrocketed. Now you have to make a hard decision: whether to stay and pay too much for housing or leave your home. Moving is expensive, too, because it means new application fees and a potential security deposit on top of first month’s rent – plus moving costs.
Whether you’ve faced this situation personally or someone you know has, the truth is millions of renters are facing the sticker shock of increased rent. And extremely low-income (ELI) renters face the harshest impacts. Despite accounting for about a quarter of all renter households nationwide, ELI renters face the largest shortage of affordable and available housing. This greatly impacts women, as they are more likely to be in the lowest paying jobs, which do not pay enough to afford housing costs. In fact, in 2022 single women of every race were more likely than single white, non-Hispanic men to spend over half of their income on housing costs.
As large corporations buy up more and more properties, it is becoming harder and harder for women, LGBTQIA+ people, and families to find affordable housing. Between 2018 and 2021, private companies purchased over 75,000 single-family homes—and that doesn’t account for multi-family rental properties that have been snatched up. These corporations are nothing but greedy—they needlessly raise rents, which prices people out and contributes to our growing housing affordability crisis.
You may recall that Donald Trump was one of these corporate landlords – and one of the worst ones at that. In 1973—under a Republican administration—Donald Trump and his company were hit a federal lawsuit with discriminating against Black tenants in one of his housing developments. And a few years later, he made millions by trying to force out rent-controlled tenants in New York City.
In the White House, he and then-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson—someone with no prior housing experience–tried to implement multiple racist, sexist, and xenophobic policies like banning mixed-status families from federally assisted housing and attempting to gut the Fair Housing Act. Based off his past, it’s not surprising that presidential candidate Trump is not someone who is very sympathetic to the plight of working class people in this country.
And guess what!? Ben Carson wrote the housing chapter of Donald Trump’s Project 2025, which in addition to reviving the horrific proposals from before, calls for overturning other progressive policies, promoting marriage—particularly heterosexual marriages—in housing programs, and implementing work requirements. This overhaul would let greedy corporate landlords rake in even more money at the expense of women, especially women of color, and their families.
Thankfully, there is another presidential candidate in this race who actually understands the harms that corporate landlords (including her opponent) have placed on renters, as well as the desperate need to drive down housing costs. In the Senate, Kamala Harris introduced legislation to increase assistance for renters and people experiencing homelessness through a range of programs. She also supported legislation to combat sexual harassment in housing.legislation to combat sexual harassment in housing.
As Vice President, Harris cast the tie-breaking vote for the American Rescue Plan Act, which included critical emergency rental assistance, and she has fought for expansions to rental assistance in the federal budget.
On the campaign trial, she has pledged to build on the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to expand rental assistance, as well as tackle corporate greed in the rental system by combatting rent gouging and stopping investors from buying up mass amounts of single-family homes.
Her plan to tackle this corporate greed and provide down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers (particularly first-generation homebuyers) will reduce racial and gender homeownership gaps. Homeownership rates for Black, non-Hispanic women and Latinas have not recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. Providing down payment assistance can help women of color receive the funds they need to own their own home and, hopefully, set up their families for generations to come.
It is clear that Kamala Harris knows corporate landlords and Wall Street investors are the problem.
Meanwhile, as a corporate landlord, Donald Trump was the problem—and he’ll continue to be a problem for affordable housing and discrimination if elected president.