Kimberly Diaz called it “chaos.” As reported by The New York Times on July 26, 2025, Diaz was trying to raise her two young daughters in a Brooklyn apartment where nine people, including siblings, in-laws, and their children, were crammed into a single bedroom.
“I had a lot of anxiety; I had panic attacks,” she said. “We were a can of sardines.” Diaz eventually fled to a homeless shelter, saying, “My babies need more than just a bed. They need freedom.”
She is one of thousands caught in what Times reporter Sarah Maslin Nir described as New York’s “dirty little secret”—a housing crisis that has rendered people technically housed, yet forced to live in doubled-up and overcrowded homes.
Dave Giffen, executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, told the Times, “Nobody calls them homeless, but they are.”
Overcrowding in New York has surged as the city’s rental vacancy rate plummets toward record lows. According to the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, 27 percent of families with children earning less than $100,000 live in overcrowded apartments.
The vacancy rate for units under $1,100 is under half a percent. Sean Campion of the Citizens Budget Commission told the Times, “The lack of available housing essentially traps people in place.”
Into this crisis steps the Trump administration—not with a plan to expand housing, but with a strategy to dismantle the very programs that keep vulnerable families sheltered.
In late February, the Department of Housing and Urban Development abruptly canceled funding for 78 nonprofit organizations that investigate housing discrimination.
As Mother Jones reported, this included groups like Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid and the Fair Housing Council of Orange County.
David Levy of the Orange County organization told Mother Jones reporter Katherine Dailey that the canceled funds make up “around 60 percent of their funding,” and without it, “they will have to lay off nearly half of their 10-person staff.” He added, “We’re not going to have the resources to be as assistive in filing complaints as we’ve been able to be in the past.”
Courtney Arthur of Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid told Mother Jones that her office was able to intervene in a potential eviction of a family with an autistic child whose landlord was reacting to noise complaints.
“They’re not really disturbing anyone, but they’re being discriminated against,” she said. “99.9 percent of the time,” her office can stop those evictions—if it has the funding to function.
The termination notices issued by HUD to dozens of organizations used the same boilerplate language: “HUD is terminating this award because it no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” That phrase, repeated in dozens of memos, came at the direction of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Trump-era agency tasked with downsizing the federal government.
The Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal would slash HUD’s funding by $33 billion—a 43.6 percent reduction—according to Mother Jones.
The plan includes eliminating the Fair Housing Initiatives Program entirely, capping rental assistance at two years for able-bodied adults, and shifting funding responsibilities to the states via block grants. The Associated Press estimated that 1.4 million people would lose their housing subsidies under this plan.
Kim Johnson of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition warned in a written statement to Mother Jones, “Millions of people who rely on rental assistance to pay rent every month will be at immediate risk of eviction, and, in worst cases, homelessness.”
Johnson also said, “Even the uncertainty of continued funding acts as a disincentive to participate in HUD programs.”
Will Fischer, director of housing policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, added, “What this means also is that owners, people in the real estate industry, will know that there’s less enforcement, so it will just kind of embolden bad actors to be more likely to discriminate than they would be today.”
All of this comes at a time when, as Mother Jones reports, “over 770,000 Americans experienced homelessness in 2024, a rise of nearly 200,000 people in just the last two years.”
And while homelessness is visible, the quieter epidemic of overcrowding continues to grow. Giffen of the Coalition for the Homeless said, “The increased numbers of low-income households, decreasing number of affordable apartments—the laws of physics demand that they exist somewhere in physical space. Where are they going to go?”
As Matthew Desmond wrote in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, “We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.”
His research showed that eviction is not just a symptom of poverty—it causes it. “Eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty,” he argued. “Eviction is to poor women what incarceration is to poor black men.”
Desmond’s work underscores how the loss of housing derails entire lives. Jobs are lost, school attendance is disrupted, and families are displaced over and over again. “Without stable shelter, everything else falls apart,” Desmond wrote. In a country where nearly half of renters are cost-burdened, cutting housing support is not just unwise—it is devastating.
Meanwhile, HUD’s ability to process discrimination complaints has collapsed.
Mother Jones reports that regional complaint hotlines have been shut down and replaced by a dysfunctional national 1-800 number, which only processes accommodation requests—not actual complaints. The online form, once a central way to file cases, has been plagued with error messages, frozen pages, and character limits.
Bailey of the National Fair Housing Alliance said in a letter to HUD that the process is now so broken that people facing discrimination may have no way to reach help. “It’s very fear-driven the way that information has been delivered,” she told Mother Jones, describing the current state of fair housing enforcement as “very dysfunctional.” She added, “They’re not getting notice that the places that they could potentially go to address cases of housing discrimination are being impacted.”
And while some of the canceled grants were temporarily restored by a federal judge, the damage was already done. Project Sentinel in Santa Clara, California, was told that HUD would not reimburse them for expenses incurred during the cancellation. “We will be operating on fumes,” one employee told Mother Jones, “unless we’re able to find external sources of funding.”
This is not simply bureaucratic mismanagement. It is an intentional campaign to gut the nation’s fair housing infrastructure. And the rationale is explicitly ideological. The White House budget proposal justifies defunding fair housing by claiming that some nonprofits “advocate against single-family neighborhoods and promote radical equity policies inconsistent with the Administration’s efforts to eradicate DEI programs.”
That position is echoed in the Project 2025 policy blueprint, which argues that fair housing law has been corrupted by “affirmative race-based policies” and should be decentralized to states—many of which have no history of strong enforcement.
But as Nikitra Bailey of the National Fair Housing Alliance stated clearly, “Fair housing is the national policy of the United States, and HUD’s obligation and the federal obligation is to comply with the Fair Housing Act. It has to do that. It’s not dependent on who’s in office.”
This country has long debated how to build more housing. As Fast Company reported in July, even among pro-housing advocates, “Socialists and capitalists have economic worldviews that are incompatible with each other.”
Some, like New York Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, advocate for “decommodifying” housing, while others push for deregulating zoning to unleash the market. But as the article noted, both agree on one thing: the need to “get rid of the local regulatory barriers that are preventing anyone from building a granny flat, a townhouse, a duplex.”
What neither side supports is doing nothing—yet that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing. Worse, it is dismantling what little infrastructure exists to protect tenants from discrimination, displacement, and despair.
Housing is not a privilege. It is a basic necessity.
As Desmond reminds us, “The home is the center of life.” When that center is hollowed out by policy, deregulated by decree, and handed over to profit and predation, what’s left is a shell of justice.
This is a war on poor people. And it’s being waged through budget lines and bureaucratic memos. The question now is whether anyone will fight back.
From Vanguard article: “Where are they going to go?”
Cleveland? (In reference to article, below.)
“Yes, I buy crack houses”.
“Your house is trash? I pay cash.”
(Not an endorsement, but the guy does buy run-down houses, fixes them up, and rents them (specifically?) to recipients of Section 8 vouchers, I understand). Or sells them to investors who do so. So I doubt he’s discriminating against anyone, at least. One might conclude that he’s taking advantage of a government program, itself.
https://www.clevescene.com/news/his-ubiquitious-home-buying-billboards-around-cleveland-have-drawn-backlash-but-john-williams-says-hes-not-a-predatory-investor-46962556
This is a pretty serious misunderstanding. The example of a Cleveland landlord buying up dilapidated homes and renting them to Section 8 tenants might look like a solution, but as Matthew Desmond argues, poverty isn’t just endured—it’s exploited. Desmond argues that low-income housing is often a profitable business built on scarcity, desperation, and public subsidies. Landlords may not discriminate, but they do extract value from vulnerable tenants with few choices. That’s probably worse. The people on the other end, end up in a worse position than they started because of these practices.
David says: “Landlords may not discriminate, but they do extract value from vulnerable tenants with few choices.”
Well, one could argue that John Williams is actually giving them “more” choices. He does fix up the properties, as well.
David says: “The people on the other end, end up in a worse position than they started because of these practices.”
It could be that the “program” (e.g., Section 8 itself) is trapping them. Also, John William’s “solution” wouldn’t even exist if the government program didn’t exist in the first place.
I’m not sure what “practices” you’d propose that would work better than this type of thing. (Other than perhaps universal basic income.)
Overall, I’d conclude that what John Williams is doing is better than nothing – both for the individuals who then live in those houses, and the community at large. He’s providing people with a decent place to live, at a price/subsidy that they can afford.
I’ve watched a few of his videos, and was surprised to see how decent some of those neighborhoods are in the first place (e.g., he points out that there’s often no bars on the windows, etc.).
He purchases houses at far-below their replacement cost. He apparently targeted Cleveland for that reason.
In any case, I’d call this capitalism supported by a government program. (Is that an oxymoron?)
While landlords like John Williams may appear to expand choices for low-income renters, the deeper issue is that Section 8 operates within a rigged and underfunded system that leaves tenants vulnerable by design. Only one in four eligible households receives a voucher, and even those who do often face poor conditions, rent gouging, and instability because the private market holds all the power.
Well, here’s what AI has to say about increasing the amount of rent for those receiving Section 8 vouchers:
“No, Section 8 landlords cannot raise rent to whatever they want. Rent increases for Section 8 tenants are regulated by both federal and state laws, and are subject to approval by the local Housing Authority. Landlords must adhere to specific procedures and limitations on how much they can raise the rent, and they cannot exceed the fair market rent for the area.”
So, that doesn’t sound like the “private market holds all the power”. But if you are arguing that it does, what’s your solution? Public housing? You’re aware of the problems that have occurred regarding that, I assume.
Regarding housing being a “right”, I’m not seeing that in the Constitution, nor do I see it regarding food, healthcare, or a college education for example. (That’s not a judgement regarding whether or not some of those things “should” be a “right”.)
Of course, being a “right” probably wouldn’t ensure that it is a “right” in Tiburon, for example. Nor would it ensure that it’s “adequate” in some other, subjective manners.
Some people, for example, aren’t satisfied if the housing provided (as what they think is a “right”) might be classified as a “shelter”, or if it was in what they describe as a “non-opportunity” zone. Sometimes, I view those people as not being satisfied unless it also includes a “large order of fries” at no cost. :-)
Yes and no. While Section 8 rent increases are technically regulated, landlords still hold considerable market power because voucher recipients have so few options—forcing them to accept poor conditions, inflated rents at the Fair Market maximum, and limited recourse if landlords retaliate or refuse to renew. Regulation doesn’t eliminate exploitation when the system is structured around scarcity and desperation. Therein lies the real problem.
Well again, someone like John Williams is EXPANDING the options. (I don’t think one can even argue that he isn’t).
But what you’re ultimately getting at is the “unfairness” (in your view) of those with assets/income, vs. those without. Again, that’s true in all aspects of life (shelter, food, medical care, college education, adequate legal representation, adequate transportation, etc.).
The reason that you’re focused on housing (rather than food, for example) is probably because it is one of the largest expenses for anyone other than perhaps the ultra-wealthy. But as I recall, food (and perhaps medical care) has been rising faster than most other categories. (And for that matter, there’s ways to get “free” food and “free” medical care, even if it’s not consistent. But what that REALLY means is that someone else pays for it.)
The costs ASSOCIATED with housing have also been significantly-increasing – e.g., insurance, maintenance, taxes, etc.