Project 2025 and Housing Policy

2024 is of course an election year, and the conservative Heritage Foundation has sought to take advantage of this by issuing Project 2025, a 900-page set of proposals covering most of the federal government. The stated purpose of this document is to “pave the way for an effective conservative Administration” — that is, to give guidance to the next Republican Administration. Since President Trump now claims that he “know[s] nothing about Project 2025,” it is unclear how effective Project 2025 will be in achieving this goal. 

But even if Trump himself knows nothing about 2025, numerous former Trump appointees have been involved with it, so some Project 2025 ideas might find their way into the Trump Administration's regulatory or legislative agenda. Perhaps the most widely publicized element of Project 2025 is its proposals to increase Presidential control of the civil service.* But Project 2025 also addresses less emotional issues such as housing; in particular, Chapter 15 focuses on the Department of Housing and Urban Development.**  

Three parts of this chapter were especially interesting to me: its overall discussion of the housing crisis, its focus on home ownership, and its attitude toward public housing.

I.   More housing or less?

Conservatives have often struggled to address housing issues; they tend to favor less government (and thus less local zoning) and local control over government (which typically means more regulation, since local governments often favor very restrictive zoning). Project 2025 illustrates this tension.

Parts of Chapter 15 seem to endorse less regulation. Heritage*** writes that regulation “has been estimated to account for about 40 percent of new housing unit costs“ (footnote 29), that “[h]ousing supply does remain a problem in the U.S.” (footnote 32) and that localities “can consider revising land use, zoning and building regulations that constrict new housing development” (id.).

But what Heritage giveth, Heritage taketh away. Chapter 15 adds that “It is essential that legislation provides states and localities maximal flexibility to pursue locally designed policies and minimize the likelihood of federal preemption of local land use and zoning decisions.” (p. 511). 

But the interests of individual localities are not always the interests of the nation as a whole: each individual locality has an incentive to increase property values to make homeowners happy and increase the municipal tax base, but states and the nation have an interest in making housing more affordable to increase homeownership rates and reduce homelessness.

Finally, Heritage writes that although housing supply is a problem in the United States, “constructing more units at the low end of the market will not solve the problem.” (footnote 32) —  on the other hand, developers “can deliver at more efficient cost new units that will allow for greater upward mobility of rental and ownership housing stock and better target increased construction of mid-tier rental units” (id.). I am not sure what this means: is Heritage trying to say that new supply will reduce prices as long as it isn’t too cheap?

II.  More homeowners or fewer?

Heritage involves the virtues of homeownership as a justification for the status quo, writing that homeownership is “the most accessible way to build generational wealth for millions of Americans” and that “a conservative Administration should oppose any efforts to weaken single-family zoning.” (p. 511). 

In fact, single-family zoning (that is, zoning that only allows one house per lot) means less homeownership, not more. Why? Because if government limits the for-sale market to single-family houses, only people who can afford single-family houses can own housing. 

By contrast, a for-sale market that also includes condominiums and “Missing Middle” options such as duplexes will have less expensive housing units available for sale, keeping prices down and ensuring that more people can become homeowners. For example, in Atlanta's 30327 zip code (where my late mother lived) some condo units sell for less than $200,000, while single-family houses start at around $700,000. If multifamily housing had never been allowed in this zip code, some people who currently own condos would have had to stay in the rental market. In other words, you can have an ownership society or you can have a society where government micromanages what is built — but you can’t have both.

III.  Public housing 

Heritage suggests that public housing programs are too generous, calling for reforms that “seek to strengthen work requirements [and] limit the period during which households are eligible for housing benefits.” The goal of these reforms would be to encourage able-bodied beneficiaries of government rental assistance programs to “move towards self-sufficiency."

This would perhaps make sense if housing costs were low enough that government beneficiaries could easily become self-sufficient: that is, they could easily obtain market-rate housing. But as noted above, local zoning limits the supply of housing, which increases rents and housing prices,**** limiting the ability of lower-income persons to become self-sufficient. Thus, Heritage’s language defending such zoning seems inconsistent with its goal of limiting the number of persons benefitting from government subsidies.

IV.  What does it all mean?

Project 2025's housing chapter seems to me to endorse inconsistent goals: more housing and less government subsidy for lower-income housing, but also local regulation that reduces housing supply and makes housing less available for everyone. Why is this document not more coherent?  Only a Heritage insider would know for sure, but I suspect that Chapter 15 was either a) drafted by a committee of people with very different views; or b) idrafted to appeal to readers with widely varying views (such as Heritage donors or future Trump Administration officials).

So how would these conflicting statements affect professional planners?  My sense is that the authors of Chapter 15 have very little interest in fighting local governments or changing local zoning — good news for planners who fear federal intervention, bad news for planners who wish that the federal government would encourage their cities to adopt more enlightened policies.  Planners who work for public housing agencies might have their lives affected more by a Project-2025 influenced Trump administration, because Trump appointees might seek to make public housing more difficult to obtain or hold onto.

For more on this topic from Planetizen, check out "Project 2025 Could Change Housing in America Forever" our YouTube channel.

*For a more complete discussion, including responses to some myths about Project 2025, I also suggest snopes.com and placing “Project 2025” in its internal search engine.  

**Readers of this blog might also be interested in its transportation chapter; however, Alon Levy has thoroughly discussed the public transit element of Project 2025, and I have nothing to add to his work.

***Technically, the author of Chapter 15 is former HUD Secretary Ben Carson.  But Heritage claims that over 400 experts worked on Project 2025, so I suspect that each author (including Carson) had plenty of assistance.

****I am assuming, of course, that the law of supply and demand does apply to housing- an assumption that I realize not all readers of this blog will share. I have addressed this issue in numerous Planetizen blog posts, as well as in my scholarship.