Ali Velshi: Donald Trump and Project 2025’s plan to crush the American dream
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This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 1 episode of “Velshi.”
Project 2025, the far-right playbook for a second Trump presidency, predictably takes aim at government programs designed to help the most vulnerable populations in this country: poor and low-wage folks, people of color, families that don’t fit the traditional two-parent model and families of mixed legal status.
Project 2025 takes aim at government programs designed to help the most vulnerable populations in this country.
The attack on America’s most vulnerable is especially evident in Chapter 15, which focuses on the Department of Housing and Urban Development. One of the first lines in that chapter reads:
“The Secretary should initiate a HUD task force consisting of politically appointed personnel to identify and reverse all actions taken by the Biden Administration to advance progressive ideology.”
Now, what progressive ideology are they talking about? According to Project 2025 “progressive ideology” is anything that includes language that refers to race, diversity, equity and inclusion, gender or sexuality, or environmental protection.
First off, it’s important to understand why we need this “progressive ideology” in housing policy at all. In the 1930s, as the nation was reeling from the Great Depression, the federal government implemented a program to help struggling Americans with their mortgages so that they could avoid foreclosure.
In an attempt to prevent foreclosure, the Home Owners Loan Corp. sent representatives to appraise homes and neighborhoods. They were tasked with determining the value and identifying any “detrimental factors” that would inform which homes lenders would want to insure. As it turns out, to lenders, being Black was a “detrimental factor.”
Inadequate federal policies allowed these lenders to refuse to insure mortgages in or even near Black neighborhoods. This phenomenon became known as redlining, and its effects can still be felt in neighborhoods across America today. According to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, about 3 out of every 4 neighborhoods in the U.S. that were redlined in the 1930s are still of low-to-moderate income and roughly 2 out of every 3 are predominantly populated by people of color.
Throughout America’s history, Black and brown neighborhoods have been treated as “sacrifice zones.”
The government’s housing policies of the 1930s also provided subsidies for developers to build suburban communities and subdivisions, while allowing them to be available only to white people. It was effectively forced segregation. It pushed Black Americans into housing projects and reinforced systems that stagnated inequality, preventing upward mobility for nonwhite people.
Throughout America’s history, Black and brown neighborhoods have been treated as “sacrifice zones.” For example, interstates, highways and industrial zones were systematically built to cut these neighborhoods off from economic and opportunity centers, while, at the same time, exposing them to higher environmental and pollution risks.
For decades, there have been attempts to help America inch closer to equity in housing and undo some of the racist policies of the past. The Biden administration made several important steps toward improving housing equity. Now, Project 2025 wants to undo all of that progress.
Among other proposals, it recommends that the next conservative president, “Immediately end the Biden Administration’s Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity (PAVE) policies” and “Repeal the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation reinstituted under the Biden Administration.”
These policies were designed by the Biden Administration specifically to chip away at the decades of housing inequality still affecting communities today by preventing racial bias in home appraisal, actively undoing segregation and allowing lenders to address the effects of our history of housing discrimination.
But Project 2025 doesn’t end there. On page 509, the mandate says the department should “prohibit noncitizens, including all mixed-status families, from living in all federally assisted housing.” That means tens of thousands of immigrant families — including those with spouses, parents or children who are legal U.S. citizens — will face eviction. According to HUD, about 55,000 children would face eviction under that proposal.
Another policy inside Project 2025 proposes putting strict limits on public housing residents by scrapping “housing first” models of assistance. “Housing first” models have been extensively studied and found to be far more effective at reducing poverty and homelessness than “treatment first” models, which often require sobriety and mental health treatment. Those models have higher rates of failure and recidivism, because, the fact is, if you are trying to recover from addiction, you need housing first.
On page 512, the mandate also recommends, “maximal flexibility to direct the [Public Housing Agency] land sales that involve the existing stock of public housing units. Congress must consider the future of the public housing model…where land can be sold by PHAs and put to greater economic use.” In other words, it recommends that Congress allow land currently used for public housing to be sold to private developers for the right price.
It’s clear Project 2025 plans for a second Trump administration will only make it more difficult for low-income, already-disadvantaged Americans to achieve stable, safe, affordable housing — likely putting the American dream of home ownership even further out of reach.
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Allison Detzel contributed.
