How Housing and Community Development Advocates Are Preparing for Trump

Advocates are looking for common ground to work with the new administration, but are also prepared to defend critical policies and programs that could come under attack.

By Miriam Axel-Lute
January 17, 2025

As the new presidential administration takes power, leaders at national affordable housing and community development organizations seem torn between treating this as a normal presidential transition and acknowledging that things might be headed in unprecedented directions. Although they all signal readiness to work with the incoming administration on areas of common ground, everyone is also expecting tough times.

Many leaders told Shelterforce they are trying to focus on potential positives, or at least not borrow trouble. “For every 10 ideas that get thrown out there [in the campaign], there are only two or three of them that actually move forward,” says Shamus Roller, executive director of the National Housing Law Project, reflecting on the previous Trump administration. This “doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention,” he clarifies, but “you should temper your reaction to some of the ideas that come out.”

On the optimistic side, many people pointed out that housing affordability has risen so high on the list of the public’s concerns and priorities that the new administration will be pressured into acting in some way whether they like it or not. “There’s this narrative [that] the Trump administration is going to come in and pick up where they left off,” says Sarah Brundage, president and CEO of the National Association of Affordable Housing Lenders. “But I think the world is different today . . . in that voters have made it clear that housing affordability is a top issue. . . I do think this next Trump administration will have to take a slightly different approach than they did their first time. Renters and homeowners are really in need of relief and are expecting solutions.”

(Of course, whether the solutions the administration proposes actually will improve housing affordability remains to be seen. So far Trump has emphasized the red herring of immigration, which is not particularly related to housing costs.)

But at the same, most of the field leaders we spoke to showed an awareness that this time around the attacks might be more extreme, or less easily mitigated. “I do think the tone from some of the allies of the incoming administration has been starker,” says Doug Ryan, vice president of housing policy at Grounded Solutions Network. “It seems to be harsher than it was in 2017, 2018.”

Leatrice Moore, executive director of the Black Community Developers Group (BCDG) says that while historically, increases in funding for affordable housing “may not have flown as much during traditional Republican administrations . . . this seems a lot different.” And not in a comforting way. “We’re having much more radical conversations around lots of topics,” she says delicately, in ways “that, I think would heighten anyone’s senses.”

“What we learned from the Trump administration the first time around was that when they say they’re going to do something, we need to believe them,” says Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center. “On Truth Social, Trump has talked about a desire to round homeless people up and put them into detention camps. He has talked about the desire to forcibly commit people to psychiatric institutions, and he has talked about a desire to pass a nationwide camping ban. None of those things are going to solve homelessness . . . [but] we should not take these threats as hyperbole.”

Business as Usual

Many national housing organizations are, outwardly at least, treating the upcoming administration as fairly normal. Historically, during less friendly administrations, the worst proposed cuts and changes—from zeroing out the CDFI Fund to slashing vouchers—have often been mitigated by organized constituent pressure pointing out to their Republican members of Congress how these programs actually support their own districts. And so, advocates are currently gearing up to organize constituent visits, or to support local groups in doing so. Several leaders pointed out that the Republican majorities are slim, and will not necessarily all vote together.

“It’s really talking to the staffers,” says Dawne Troupe, People & Places Collaborative advocacy director for the Community Opportunity Alliance. “You might have people who are new and they just don’t have the background of why these things are important, or [are] not exactly sure how these mechanisms and vehicles work in their community.” She suggests that organizations should have conversations within the first quarter of the year about which things are most important to them to defend, so that when appointees are in place and it’s more clear what’s happening next, they’ll be ready to act.

“There might be a couple of members of the president-elect’s party that say, ‘You know, we’re not going to eviscerate our local housing authority,’” for example, says Ryan. “I am not fully confident in that, but that’s something that we have to work on.”

Community development leaders are also leaning into legislative priorities and programs that traditionally have had bipartisan support. Many advocates hope that the Neighborhood Homes Investment Act will finally be passed. NHIA would create a homeownership tax credit to that would apply to single-family construction and rehab in places where there is still a gap between construction costs and final market value. NHIA’s combination of homeownership and tax credits helps it appeal across the ideological spectrum, and the bill has “some really notable Republican support,” notes Brundage. “The House Republican lead [on NHIA] is Representative Mike Kelly (R-PA), who also chairs the tax subcommittee. We have Senator [Todd] Young (R-IN) championing in the Senate, but recently, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina also co-sponsored the bill.” (Sen. Scott will chair the powerful Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.)

NHIA is often discussed as a complement to the Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act, a long unpassed reform bill that would increase the amount of low income housing tax credits available and make various improvements to the program. Both of these bills have been introduced in Congress several times. If there is a major tax bill this year, supporters hope that will be the way to get both AHCIA and NHIA through.

Given the role that Scott Turner, the current nominee for HUD secretary, played in overseeing Opportunity Zones in the last Trump administration, advocates are also assuming there will be a return and expansion of that program. They are discussing not only how to participate in the program in whatever form it appears, but whether they will be able to advocate for changes in it that will close some loopholes, better target it to areas that really need investment, and increase its positive impact. “If there are loopholes in the policies, in the program design, who’s in leadership makes the difference,” says Seema Agnani, executive director of the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development (National CAPACD).

Housing advocates are also hoping that they can get support for zoning reform as a deregulatory and property rights measure, despite the administration’s professed desire to preserve single-family zoning. “While zoning and land use rules won’t solve the housing problem for every demographic, we have so much bottled-up capacity because of poor land use and exclusionary zoning. That’s something that I think we can get our arms around,” says Ryan, pointing to the state of Montana, which recently accomplished some significant zoning changes in the name of affordable housing under a Republican administration.

“With any administration, we always look for opportunities where there’s alignment,” says Sarah Saadian of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “President Trump has talked a lot about reducing the barriers that prevent housing from being built, or opening up federal land that could be used for housing development. . . Depending on what that looks like, that could be something where NLIHC could support the policy changes.”

Knowing that the new administration won’t have the attention or time to change everything at once, many leaders are also hoping that rules and programs that are not so high profile—such as the recently released HOME program rules, or the housing programs located at the USDA—might fly under the radar.

Playing Defense

Of course, the potential for bipartisan cooperation doesn’t mean anyone thinks there won’t be fights. At the very least, people in the field are bracing for attacks on immigrants, homeless people, fair housing, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, and domestic funding that benefits lower income people.

Several organizations are adding staff or otherwise preparing to play defense, especially in areas where the incoming administration has clearly signaled an intention to take harmful actions. Fair housing and mixed-status families in subsidized housing are two that come up frequently in Republican messaging. NHLP is expecting to take the lead on defending mixed-status families, and is staffing up a whole litigation team on the issue, as well as preparing to train legal aid attorneys and others on that and similar issues.

Nikitra Bailey of the National Fair Housing Alliance says, “Our intention is to work with the next administration and Congress to help people access fair and affordable housing and lending opportunities, and we’re also prepared to hold them accountable to ensure the promise of the Fair Housing Act for everyone is upheld.”

“We also remain steadfast in pushing back on what we see as being harmful and cruel proposals,” says Saadian.

Going Local

Regardless of how bad leaders expect the outcomes to be on the federal level, many in the field plan to lean into state and local policy advocacy, both to try to replace regulations removed or weakened at the federal level, and to take on the work the federal government abandons in terms of housing people and building healthy communities. “Because we don’t expect to see good things happening on the national level . . . [that] makes it even more important for state and local leaders to do their job and focus on what works,” says Rabinowitz.

In early December, Consumer Federation of America published a call for state legislatures to pass laws to protect various rulings made by the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau that might be rolled back.

An obvious downside, of course, of having to take advocacy to the state level is that residents of states with leadership that takes the same position as the presidential administration, or states with a weaker housing and community development advocacy sector will likely not benefit as much. But, leaders said, the effort was still going to be necessary, and better than nothing.

Language Shifts

Beyond seeking hope in specific bipartisan priorities, there is a significant amount of discussion about language. Not so much about using it to win popular support for housing priorities, as about adjusting messaging to defend priorities and programs by aligning them with the interests of those coming into power. Some leaders are, for example, discussing centering populations that the incoming administration is likely to be more sympathetic to in their messaging, including rural residents, suburban seniors, and small business owners. (They suggest using these populations as the face of campaigns for programs that will support a wider range of people.)

Others are adjusting their language (and in some cases even their program priorities) to match professed concerns about efficiency and streamlining, deregulation, and housing supply.

“We, probably like a lot of people, are thinking about how we frame [our programs] differently,” says Priya Jayachandran, CEO of the National Housing Trust. “Maybe using different words. . . putting things in more market terms or [referencing] how we can leverage capital markets.”

“The watchword is ‘build,’” said another organization’s representative. “How can we show we’re finding a solution to the supply problem?”

In terms of trying to defend the housing first approach to reducing homelessness, which has been disparaged by those in Trump’s circles, Ryan notes that not housing people first is “counter to the evidence, and it’s also counter to efficient government, because it’s much more efficient to solve the problem working with people in their own homes than it is to arrest, jail, ticket.” This also applies to allowing housing discrimination, he notes. “It’s also not efficient. Again, I hate to use that word ‘efficient,’ because it’s kind of cold blooded. But you know, to get the most out of the population, you need people to do their best, and discrimination holds people back.”

These alignments are not always just framing, either. “To be honest,” says Troupe, “there are things that are administrative burdens . . . for instance . . . if you already built a home and you have to put in a wheelchair ramp, you need to do another environmental review. That hurts organizations.” She suggests community development organizations be proactive about being part of those conversations and offering places where red tape can be removed.

In a Jan. 12 post, David Dworkin, president and CEO of the National Housing Conference, included implementing the recommendations of a 2021 HUD report on removing regulatory barriers to affordable housing as one of four potential wins that the new administration could secure on housing.

Roller says the politically volatile climate could bring with it opportunity: “There are lots of things wrong with the way that we regulate and think about housing in the United States. So there might actually be some opportunities to sort of fix something. . . Chaos produces its own kind of opportunity.”

Jayachandran agrees: “Sometimes having fresh sets of eyes on programs and new ways to do things isn’t a bad idea.”

More worryingly, there is also a heightened concern across the field about not saying the wrong thing. Concern about speaking on the record, even about simple expectations of what’s to come, has skyrocketed. And several leaders mentioned a move to deemphasize certain words that may trigger backlash, such as “equity.” While few organizations will admit to removing core language like this themselves, many have heard of others doing it, and some appear to be getting pressure from funders to do so.

“There’s a lot of concern amongst our member organizations,” says Moore of BCDG. “People [are] reclassifying names of positions and roles to appease what we anticipate coming down the pipeline. . . Everyone’s really tap dancing . . . around language [more] now than ever before. There is lots of conversation with funders about what their legal department is concerned about, which is new [and] can be very daunting, and I think takes away from the actual work that you’re doing.”

Preparing for Uncertainty

National leaders of associations that represent smaller organizations say their members are aware that some sources of funding may disappear in the coming years, even while support programs that they offer, such as housing counseling services, might well be in greater demand. “We’re all just watching our budgets very closely,” says Moore, “and being mindful of what things could change, what hits [we] could take.” She adds, though, that “What we do hope and anticipate is that philanthropy will step up and fill in the blanks,” as it did during the first Trump administration.

Aside from specific housing policies, there is a quiet awareness that housing organizations will likely be trying to do their work in, at best, a highly divisive atmosphere, and more likely one where attacks on both scapegoated populations and the organizations that stand up for them are rampant.

But they also don’t know exactly what it will look like yet. Will mass deportations collapse local economies? Or will tariffs apply economic pain more broadly? Will nonprofits themselves be targeted for taking positions contrary to the administration? “The word of the day is ‘uncertainty,’” says Moore.

What is certain is a need to build partnership infrastructure, reinforce shared values, and emphasize unity over division. “I think there’s a lot of danger of communities being pitted against each other because of the types of threats that are emerging,” says Nahida Uddin, director of communications at National CAPACD, suggesting that maintaining organizational relationships, coalitions, and solidarity will be key.

“We understood the importance of being stronger together before,” says Moore. “But now it’s even more relevant to be sure that we are all creating this ecosystem for ourselves to take care of each other during these times.”

Additional reporting by Shelterforce’s Lillian M. Ortiz, Lara Heard, and Shelby R. King.