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How will people living in Atlanta’s affordable housing fare during the second Donald Trump presidency?
Housing advocates told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution they fear what the next four years will bring, especially in light of the city’s rapid growth and soaring home prices and rents, which is pricing people out of their neighborhoods and worsening homelessness.
The new administration will shape the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the president’s image. Along with a Republican-controlled Congress, Trump could disrupt the flow of federal funds to the city for housing.
“We have an uphill battle ahead of us,” said Foluke Nunn, a community organizer with the Atlanta Economic Justice Program. “I don’t want to be totally pessimistic, but I think that we’re definitely going to lose some ground under this next administration.”
In Trump’s first term, the president appointed author and neurosurgeon Ben Carson to head HUD, even though he had no experience in housing policy. Trump proposed massive cuts to the agency’s budget every year he was in office, tried to increase rents on people living in subsidized housing, and impose work requirements for eligibility.
A bipartisan Congress rejected most of Trump’s efforts.
The president did sign a bill in 2020 providing $25 billion in emergency rental assistance and a nationwide ban on evictions that helped families keep roofs over their heads during the COVID-19 pandemic. But housing advocates still have a dim view of his first stint in office.
National Low Income Housing Coalition President and CEO Diane Yentel said in a statement on Nov. 6 that the group had “successfully defeated many extreme policies during President Trump’s first term, and we are prepared to do the same now.”
She said advocates would “look for potential areas of agreement with all policymakers to advance solutions that protect tenants, alleviate the housing crisis, and advance racial and housing justice.”
Though Carson was among the names floated to lead the agency for a second time, the president-elect chose former NFL player and Texas state Rep. Scott Turner.
Turner had previously headed the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council which was meant to direct private investment and promote growth and development in economically distressed areas.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens’ chief policy officer and senior adviser, Courtney English, is ready for the prospect of deep cuts to an agency. With billions of dollars in its budget, HUD funding flows into the city to combat homelessness, spur homeownership and affordable housing construction, and provide housing vouchers for low income families.
The city’s housing authority says it oversees more than 2,000 public housing units, administers more than 19,000 Housing Choice Voucher units, and manages more than 5,000 units of local, non-traditional housing through the Moving to Work demonstration program.
“We are thinking it will have some impact on the amount of vouchers we will have to deploy, as well as just overall funding from the federal government into urban centers,” English said.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
With the president promising to roll out a mass deportation program, Nunn said Trump could target some of Atlanta’s most vulnerable people. That could include sweeps of immigrant communities where people are already struggling to find safe and stable housing.
Meanwhile, Alison Johnson, CEO of Atlanta advocacy group Housing Justice League, said people in HUD-subsidized housing are “extremely nervous.”
“They don’t know if their lives are going to have to be uprooted because they will no longer have federal protections,” she said.
For other housing advocates, Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint published by The Heritage Foundation, casts a long shadow.
Though Trump has distanced himself from the document, calling parts of it “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” it includes a chapter on HUD that Carson authored.
In the political playbook, Carson suggests the next president should replace civil servants with political, non-career appointees. Elsewhere, the proposal suggests weakening fair housing laws and doing away with the Housing Trust Fund, according to The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
“These broad-based attacks on federal civil servants put us in danger of losing basic rights, services and protections that tenants have,” said Noëlle Porter, director of government affairs for the National Housing Law Project.
But David M. Dworkin, president and CEO of the National Housing Conference, played down the likelihood of wholesale changes, and said the foundation had been making policy recommendations for decades. He said Trump could still pick from the playbook à la carte.
“By no means do I expect all of the 2025 recommendations to be adopted. Many of them have never been adopted. That’s going to be the give and take of the political process,” he said.
Porter said if HUD’s budget is slashed, it could have severe consequences for Atlantans living in dangerous conditions. If the agency is understaffed, it would be more difficult to closely scrutinize landlords, like Millennia Housing Management, a company that has benefited from federal subsidies and owns the shuttered Atlanta apartment complex Forest Cove, she said.
“When HUD is not fully staffed to manage and watch how owners in the program are taking care of their property, then we lose that deeply affordable housing, and we don’t get it back. We need that oversight function so we’re not just handing out federal subsidies to bad actors,” Porter said.
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
Whatever happens, English said the mayor’s office is ready to hold the new administration to account. He said the mayor will not be distracted from his goal to build or preserve 20,000 units of affordable housing by 2030.
“We come from a world where you never put all your eggs in one basket. We’ve been able to keep a steady stream of housing flowing, regardless of what was going on elsewhere. So what folks should know is that this mayor, this administration, will be prepared, come what may.”
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