The Rent Is (Still) Too Damn High

As the United States’ economic woes continue to mount and the Democrats search for a way out of their electoral doldrums, the solution is staring them in the face. Trump’s narrow electoral victory in 2024 was the product of a confluence of many factors and can be interpreted in many different, equally valid ways, but it was primarily a repudiation of the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the economy. The Certified Financial Planner Board’s 2023 Consumer Sentiment Survey found that 63% of Americans were concerned about buying food and clothing, 55% worried about paying their rent or mortgage, 87% were worried about inflation and price increases, and 89% were disturbed by the cost of living.

Despite Trump’s promises that his administration would be good for the economy, a national Ipsos poll conducted in April 2025 found that 51% of Americans disapproved of his economic management (compared to a mere 37% who approved). A whopping 64% of Americans felt that the cost of living is on the wrong track. 28% of respondents felt the national economy was moving in the right direction, while 57% thought it was on the wrong track. 87% of Americans were troubled by inflation, 86% were concerned by the cost of living, and 76% feared a recession. Just 31% approved of how Trump is dealing with the cost of living; 57% disapproved. A poll from October 2025 found that 58% of Americans believe Trump’s tariffs are hurting the economy and 56% felt he is “losing the battle against inflation.”

All those numbers are practically the same as during the Biden administration and express profound discontent with the economic status quo. Trump’s tariffs have introduced enormous economic chaos and have increased prices for American consumers practically across the board, by one estimate, almost 7%. The appallingly wrongheaded war with Iran—which in its first six days alone has cost US taxpayers over $11.3 billion—has sent oil and gas prices soaring, roiling markets and bludgeoning an already weak US economy.

It’s no wonder that Americans are upset. Wealth and income inequality have reached stratospheric levels. The US now has 902 billionaires. The top 0.1% of Americans have 22.19% of national wealth—over five times as much as the bottom 50% (170 million people), who only have 4% total. The eight richest American billionaires have $1.52 trillion in total wealth, roughly 40% of the total wealth of the bottom 50%. Meanwhile, tens of millions of Americans are struggling with credit card, student loan, and medical debt, and an ever-increasing cost of living, which has led Democrats to denounce an affordability crisis.

One expense that has been hitting people especially hard, particularly members of Gen Z and millennials, is rent. The Census Bureau found that in 2023, over 21 million renter households—constituting about half of all renters—spent more than 30% of their income on housing, and over a quarter of all renters spent over half of their income on rent. Yet many buildings in large cities are unoccupied, owned by developers and large corporations engaged in real estate speculation. Russian oligarchs use vast real estate holdings in NYC and other large cities to squirrel away their ill-gotten gains, and in January 2025, the Department of Justice sued the software company RealPage and various landlords for colluding in algorithm-aided price-fixing of rents. Meanwhile, Blackstone and other Wall Street private equity firms have been buying housing units in alarming quantities—Blackstone now owns over 300,000 units—and increasing rents to extract maximum profits. Even as the number of affordable apartments and houses shrinks, since 1998, under the Faircloth Amendment, federal public housing nationwide has been artificially capped at the number of units that existed on October 1, 1999.

Unsurprisingly, we now confront a national homelessness crisis, a crisis that would not exist if housing were regulated and treated as a basic human right. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s 2024 report found that nearly 772,000 people are homeless nationwide—an all-time record—and that homeless numbers increased by 18% since 2023, also a record. Meanwhile, in May 2025, the Trump administration sought to cut HUD funding by $32.9 billion for 2026, and the team of hacks at DOGE tried to slash HUD staff by at least half. The final 2026 spending bill for HUD cut the Public Housing Fund by about $700 million and reduced the Eviction Protection Grant Program by $12.5 million. HUD personnel were cut 24%.

It is important for Democrats and the Left to attack the Trump administration’s neo-McCarthyism and blatant authoritarianism, no doubt; we cannot let their attacks on the most basic aspects of electoral democracy go unchecked. But the American people are suffering economically and need relief from their financial woes, and focusing on bread-and-butter issues is a wise strategy to protect democracy. As FDR commented in his 1944 State of the Union speech, “Necessitous men are not free men.” As the 1920s and 1930s demonstrated, fascism only takes root under conditions of economic insecurity; defusing economic insecurity lowers the risk of fascism. Nowadays, key segments of Trump’s 2024 election coalition are defecting, particularly among the working class and poor. And numerous studies have demonstrated that economic populism is a winning message. This offers us an opportunity for the 2026 and 2028 elections.

Bernie Sanders’ platform of Medicare for all, free higher education, an end to costly foreign wars, taxing the rich, canceling student debt, and providing universal childcare was immensely popular in 2016, 2020, and 2024 and would have offered the Democrats a clear shot at victory over Trump in 2016 and 2024 if only they’d been wise enough to embrace it. While Bernie is sadly too old to run in 2028, a younger leftist like AOC could easily take up his mantle, offering voters a genuine populist option instead of Trumpist anti-establishment kabuki and visionary policies like nationwide rent control, which has been demonstrated to work in large cities worldwide pace neoliberal economists’ arguments against it, and a debt jubilee, which would spur economic growth by relieving millions of their immense burden of medical and credit card debt.

Zohran Mamdani’s stunning and welcome victory in the NYC mayoral race confirms the wisdom of this approach. Mamdani ran a campaign that represented the interests and needs of renters. He focused relentlessly on the cost of living and quality of life for New Yorkers, campaigning on fare-free bus services, a rent freeze, cracking down on negligent and abusive landlords, a vast increase in housing stock (building 200,000 new units over 10 years), free childcare and “baby baskets” for newborns, low-cost publicly owned grocery stores, a tuition-free CUNY and more spending on libraries, increased access to affordable healthcare, and hiking the minimum wage to $30/hour by 2030. Although Mamdani has only been in office for a handful of months and has a way to go in realizing this ambitious agenda, he has made strides on childcare and rent control already and has been rewarded with approval ratings in the mid- to high 60s.

Gentrification and soaring rents are a global problem, and politicians in many countries are waking up to the need to help renters out and increase housing supply. In 2021, a referendum in Berlin to nationalize over 240,000 apartments owned by large corporate landlords passed, receiving 59% support. Unfortunately, the referendum was non-binding, and many obstacles remain to its implementation, but the fact that it passed by such a resounding margin is cause for hope for housing and tenants’ rights activists in Germany and demonstrates a widespread desire for change. In the United Kingdom, some Labour politicians and business leaders have called for the nationalization of part of the housing stock.

In July 2025, the Mexican government, run by the center-left Morena party, announced an ambitious plan to construct 1.2 million new homes around the country. And Vienna, which boasts an acclaimed social housing program consisting of 220,000 socially rented apartments and 200,000 cooperative dwellings, houses over half of its population in affordable, high-quality housing, demonstrating that it is altogether possible to be a world-class city with reasonable rents.

While housing is only one piece of the cost-of-living crisis, it is a major one given the proportion of people who spend enormous chunks of their income on rent. We on the Left would be wise to make it a central part of our activism and electoral campaigns. The Census Bureau estimates that there are at least 42.5 million renter households in the United States, which constitute about a third of the population —about 116 million people—not quite a majority, but unquestionably a large enough constituency to swing elections. And action on housing would be popular: a May 2025 poll by the National Alliance to End Homelessness found that 58% of Americans believe that their communities haven’t invested enough in affordable housing, and 71% of Americans believe their communities would be improved with more affordable housing.

Beyond pragmatic electoral considerations, decent, dignified housing is a human right. As anyone who lives in a large American city today knows, for far too many people, that fundamental right is not being honored. Just consider the appalling fact that, nowadays in Los Angeles, some people pay $750 a month to live in a backyard storage unit without running water or electricity. The National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates that the US lacks 7.1 million affordable housing units for very low-income renters. There is much work to do. Let’s hope that, after the Trump administration mercifully ends, the next administration will be ready to make homelessness and surrendering over half your paycheck to your landlord (as 12.1 million households do) a thing of the past.

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