Unreal Estate: The Ominous MAGA Housing Proposals

Mass deportation and "freedom cities" on federal land: Trump's Hitlerian proposals to address the housing crisis are worse than the housing crisis itself.

At the VP debate that was somehow only a week ago today, Margaret Brennan addressed “the top contributor to inflation, the high cost of housing and rent,” asking the candidates, Tim Walz and JD Vance, what they’d do about the “shortage of more than 4 million homes in the United States… [that] contributes to the high housing crisis.”

There are any number of factors influencing the real estate market in 2024: high interest rates, low inventory, high construction costs, aftereffects of the pandemic, Airbnb decimating the rental market, private equity firms snatching up houses, Zillow’s failed attempt to apply algorithms to home sales, climate change affecting insurance premiums, and so on.

It’s not all bad news. The homeownership rate is not, as I feared watching the debate, in freefall. On the contrary, it’s in the same two-thirds-give-or-take range it’s occupied for my entire lifetime, as this Federal Reserve chart shows:

This is significantly higher than the less-than-half rate of homeownership during Donald Trump’s beloved McKinley Administration. This HUD summary from 1994 provides interesting historical context:

The decennial census of 1890 was the first to ask basic housing questions and, in particular, whether one owned or rented. The census data since 1890 show three distinct eras of homeownership in America.

In the 1890-1940 period, the homeownership rate fluctuated in the 43- to 48-percent range. From 1890 to 1920, the homeownership rate fell as immigration and urbanization offset the rise in income. Income growth increased the homeownership rate during the 1920s, but the Depression more than wiped out this gain so that the rate had fallen to a low of 43.6 percent by 1940.

During the 1940-1960 period, the homeownership rate rose by over 18 percentage points, from 43.6 to 61.9 percent. This remarkable transformation was facilitated by higher incomes, a large percentage of households being in prime homebuying age groups, the FHA-led revolution in mortgage financing, the GI bill of rights, improved interurban transportation, and development of large-scale housing subdivisions with affordable houses.

For the middle class, homeownership is a critical metric. We don’t want too many Americans living in rentals owned by private equity firms, and at the mercy of rapacious Wall Street speculators.

But that’s only part of the picture. There is a shortage of housing—and the gap is a lot more than the number Brennan suggested. According to a study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the U.S. real estate market is plagued by

a shortage of 7.3 million rental homes affordable and available to renters with extremely low incomes—that is, incomes at or below either the federal poverty guideline or 30% of their area median income, whichever is greater. Only 34 affordable and available rental homes exist for every 100 extremely low-income renter households. Extremely low-income renters face a shortage in every state and major metropolitan area. Among states, the supply of affordable and available rental homes ranges from 14 affordable and available homes for every 100 extremely low-income renter households in Nevada to 57 in South Dakota. In 12 of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the country, the absolute shortage of affordable and available homes for extremely low-income renters exceeds 100,000 units.

At The Home Front, the organization’s blog, Tushar Kansal (Pew Charitable Trusts), Andrew Aurand (NLIHC), and Sarah Saadian (NLIHC) report:

Households throughout the country, particularly those with the lowest incomes, are struggling with the high cost of housing because of decades of underbuilding, high construction costs, and the resulting shortage of homes for sale and for rent, all combined with inadequately funded housing assistance.

So, yes, this is a big problem.

In the debate, Tim Walz proposed rolling out a down-payment assistance plan similar in concept to the GI Bill that helped increase the homeownership rate after the Second World War, as well as incentivizing new construction—boilerplate New Deal-style solutions that will almost certainly work, if Congress could be swayed to vote for them.

But it was JD Vance’s answer to Brennan’s question that gave me pause. The Ohio Senator and eyeliner enthusiast expounded on Donald Trump’s concepts of a plan to tackle the national housing crisis. There were two proposals, if we can call them that, the Republican VP nominee advanced, both of them bone-chilling.

Let’s look at them more closely:

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1. Mass deportation of tens of millions of “illegal aliens” to create more housing inventory

“We don’t want to blame immigrants for higher housing prices,” Vance said. “But we do want to blame Kamala Harris for letting in millions of illegal aliens into this country, which does drive up costs, Tim. Twenty-five million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country. It’s why we have massive increases in home prices that have happened right alongside massive increases in illegal alien, alien populations under Kamala Harris’s leadership.”

First—and I only say this because a lot of people who watched the debate are probably unaware of how the federal government works: as Vice President, Kamala Harris has zero authority to do fuck-all. She can break a tie in the Senate, and she can succeed the President Biden if he croaks. That is the comprehensive and unabridged list of her constitutional powers. Can she suggest? Sure. Can she propose? Absolutely. But POTUS is under no obligation to listen to her at all, let alone act on what she says. One can mount an argument that Biden is responsible for the housing crisis, but the idea that Harris is to blame is objectively untrue. So, yeah, Vance lied.

Second: it is troubling to me that the alleged number of “illegal aliens” in the United States seems to rise every time Trump opens his mouth. It was 15 million, then 18 million, then 22. Now it’s 25 million, Vance says. Bear in mind that the total U.S. population is something like 333,000,000. Thus, Couchfucker claims that 7.5 percent of the residents of this country—about one in 13—is here illegally, which is preposterous. The actual number, according to Pew Research, is closer to 11 million:

Are Trump/Vance and their surrogates exaggerating the undocumented population to play up the MAGA fear of a border invasion? Or—and this is the scary part—is that how many U.S. residents they intend to round up and deport? Because, like, 25 million is more people than just those here illegally. A lot more. Over twice as many.

But you gotta give the MAGA braintrust credit. Displacing one thirteenth of the entire U.S. population would indeed make available a lot of housing. The Trump/Vance plan would absolutely work. We know it would work, because that’s literally what the Nazis did in Poland in 1939.

In her incredible and horrifying book The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, Lynn H. Nicholas explains Hitler’s attitude toward the Poles:

In an extraordinary speech to his highest commanders, delivered on August 22 [1939] just after he had agreed to sign the Russian treaty, Hitler had urged his forces to “act brutally…be harsh and remorseless,” and had encouraged them to “kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish descent or language” in the coming “invasion and extermination of Poland.”

For Poland was to become Germany’s creature totally. Its culture and peoples were to be eliminated and replaced by Hitler’s “New Order.” The Nazis were only too eager to put their racial theories into actual practice in a place where resistance could be countered with total brutality. They believed without any qualms that Slavs, Christian or otherwise, were so inferior they could not be considered human. They, along with the Jews, were the “degenerate art” of the human race.

The Nazis rounded up anyone they considered undesirable and sent them to the concentration camps, and then they took their suddenly vacant homes—and everything in those homes—for themselves. Housing crisis solved!

I trust that by this point, we’ve all heard enough of Trump’s dehumanizing invective about immigrants—a hateful and fascistic theme of his campaigning since he came down the escalator in 2015—to make pointing out its similarity to stuff Hitler said about the Jews unnecessary. In spirit, Donald is a Nazi.

After the debate, CBS showed a graphic comparing the two housing proposals. Walz: “$25,000 Down Payment Assistance; Tax Incentives for Builders.” Vance: “Changing Regulations & Making Federal Land Available; Mass Deportation to Ease Demand.”

This led the attorney who goes by NYC Southpaw to remark on BlueSky: “This is one that I genuinely think will be printed in history books one day to show how insane American media culture has become. CBS News presenting ethnic cleansing as a housing policy to be compared with home construction tax incentives.”

And if Donald’s housing policy being eerily reminiscent of the Third Reich’s weren’t bad enough, when we consider that Hitler modeled the Nazi conquest of Poland on what the United States did to the Native Americans in the 19th century, that makes the second part of the MAGA plan seem even more ominous:

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2. Building new cities on federal land.

“Well,” Vance said, “what Donald Trump has said is we have a lot of federal lands that aren’t being used for anything. They’re not being used for national parks. They’re not being used. And they could be places where we build a lot of housing. And I do think that we should be opening up building in this country. We have a lot of land that could be used. We have a lot of Americans that need homes. We should be kicking out illegal immigrants who are competing for those homes, and we should be building more homes for the American citizens who deserve to be here.”

And it’s true that Trump has said this, as Politico reported in March of last year:

A former celebrity real estate developer and TV personality, Trump has a long history of outlining audacious new initiatives that are heavy on imagery and light on details. The latest offerings come with a few explanations for how they will be executed.

Trump says he would host a contest for the public to design and then build “Freedom Cities” on a small portion of federal land to “reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact, the American Dream.”

(A contest? Everything is a reality show with this ass-clown.)

As Gil Duran points out in the wonderfully-named blog The Nerd Reich, “Freedom Cities” is the Trumpified version of “Network Cities,” a libertarian tech bro initiative—basically Ayn Rand’s wet dream, Atlas Shrugged IRL—that

calls for the creation of new tech-controlled sovereign cities that would essentially act as miniature countries. These independent territories can be created in one of two ways.

The first is called Voice. This route entails using the political system to take over existing city governments through elections. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan is currently trying the “voice” method in San Francisco, where he is spearheading a tech-funded campaign to capture control of City Hall. (How do I know this is a Network State project? Because Tan has described his project as such.)

The second method is called Exit. The “exit” method involves finding a bare piece of land that can be built up into a new tech city, ideally with tax breaks or other exemptions from “host governments.”

Próspera, on the island of Roatan in Honduras, is an example of this: a tech-run Special Economic Zone where certain rules don't apply. Próspera has become a mecca for unregulated gene therapy experiments.

And then there’s our local version: California Forever. This proposed tech city in Solano County was supposed to go to voters for approval on November's ballot, but it has been delayed due to massive community opposition. California Forever denies being a Network State project, but [libertarian tech bro Marc] Andreessen is one of its investors.

In addition, Balaji Srinivasan—the main evangelist of the Network State idea—has strongly suggested that California Forever is a Network State project. (Note: Srinivasan has clearly derived his ideas from J.D. Vance associate Curtis Yarvin, who calls these tech-governed dictatorships “patchworks” or “realms” rather than network states.)

This is an important detail because Andreessen, Srinivasan and Thiel are working closely together to make the Network State a reality.

Peter Thiel, of course, is the very same Sauron-like billionaire who funded JD Vance’s Senate campaign, and before that, his venture capital enterprise. We can safely assume that Vance is nothing more than his whoremaster’s mouthpiece.

To me, this “freedom city” proposal looks less like a solution to the dearth of low-income housing and more like the 21st century version of a medieval stronghold, where well-to-do residents can simply wall off the starving, unhoused hoi polloi: out of sight, out of mind.

Furthermore, the creation of new “network states” run by MAGA puppets would inevitably lead to the creation of new actual states—further gerrymandering the Senate to establish a more permanent minoritarian rule.

Then there’s this vague “federal land” suggestion. Here is a map of all extant federal land:

Most is in Alaska, or in the Western states. The sections in brown are managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Is “federal land” a euphemism for “American Indian reservations?” Donald Trump, remember, hung in the Oval Office a portrait of Andrew Jackson—maniacal conqueror of Native lands, driving force behind the Indian Removal Act of 1830, author of the Trail of Tears, and arguably the most anti-Native American president in U.S. history. Is confiscating more Native American territory how Donald Sr. plans to Make America Great Again?

These MAGA proposals are not just bad policy. They are dangerous, they are Hitlerian, and if implemented, they are sure to bring woe upon tens of millions of human beings.

“That’s never going to happen,” the non-MAGA Trump voters insist. To which I reply: That’s what the Germans said in the 1930s. The only difference is that the Germans in the 1930s didn’t have the Germans in the 1930s as a precedent to learn from.

We have no such excuse.

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Photo credit: Lazy Artists Gallery via Pexels.