Post-Election Insights: A Hope for New Opportunity for Rural Housing
On November 5, a majority of American voters returned Donald Trump to the White House, along with a Republican majority in the Senate and—it now seems likely—the House of Representatives. Rural voters were a big part of his constituency. In fact, rural America gave President Trump more votes than urban America gave Vice President Harris.
The Housing Assistance Council is one of the only national housing organizations that focuses 100% of our work on small towns and rural places. All HAC loans, research reports, training programs and policy work are intended to help rural American communities address their affordable housing needs. So as you might guess, the election results prompted plenty of calls from friends in the housing industry asking versions of the same question, “Have rural and urban drifted further apart?” It may surprise you that my answer is an emphatic, “Nope, the gap just narrowed.”
Initial post-election analysis points to the economy as the decisive issue. Millions of suburban and urban Americans joined rural voters to send a message that the current economy is failing them. This is a familiar refrain for those of us who have spent years working in rural America. While the country is undoubtedly deeply divided on many fronts, perhaps this broader expression of economic pain provides an opportunity for progress toward an American future where working families in every geography have an opportunity not just to survive, but to get ahead.
Notably, because high housing costs are at the center of so many families’ economic struggles, for the first time in recent memory, housing took center stage throughout the campaign. This included an awareness that rural families earning rural wages can’t afford homes in their own hometowns. The day before the election I authored an op-ed in HousingWire that offered a set of bipartisan housing policy initiatives that would address the unique shape of the housing crisis in rural America.
With roots deep in rural communities, HAC has over 50 years’ experience providing elected officials data on rural conditions and nonpartisan analysis of public policies. We stand ready to share our expertise with the Trump Administration and 119th Congress to ensure that rural communities fully benefit from efforts to address the current housing crunch. The White House and Congress have the tools to reverse our current course. Homeownership and rental markets can be turned to meet the needs of ordinary Americans. Indeed, our nation’s history includes numerous examples in which the federal government boldly responded to housing crises with game-changing legislation, uniformly enacted on a bipartisan basis, from the National Housing Acts of 1934 and 1949 to the creation of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit.
So with a broader voicing of economic discontent across rural, suburban and urban voters in this election, I expect the calls for changes to our economy and our housing markets will only grow louder. As we love to do at HAC, let me close with a couple of maps to illustrate the issue at hand. The map on the left is 1980. The one on the right is 2021. You can see the economy of the last forty years has left few places in which local wages allow local families to afford a place to live.
In fellowship,
David Lipsetz, President & CEO
Housing Assistance Council
