IYesterday, Vice President JD Vance decided to wade into the affordability discourse. Speaking at a Uline warehouse in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Vance talked the cost of living, including rents. He said the cost of renting apartments was still too high, but he also said they were starting to drop, and steadily, and for a specific reason.
"Why have rents gone down for four consecutive months? Because we're starting to get those illegal aliens out of the USA,” he said. He went on to say that criminals, “those people that are taking homes that ought by right go to the people in this room,” were the ones being removed and that was freeing up apartments and contributing to declining rental costs. He called it simple economics.
This was the same day the White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles labeled him a conspiracy theorist. Except the idea he is pushing here is one widely embraced by the administration and one that has somehow received very little pushback in the public.
Vance is wrong. The cost of living remains high. The people being snatched up by the state and deported are by and large not criminals. And what Vance is saying here is heinous and not a housing policy. But it is an idea Vance and Donald Trump continue to push. What they’re advocating for is an American lebensraum.
It’s not that removing people from the country could lower rents — that’s not how this works — it’s that they’re advocating for theft. This isn’t building more housing, pushing for rent caps or eviction moratoriums or any method that might actually help ease the burden of housing costs. It’s a policy of seizing existing housing units and somehow redistributing it to the “good” people. And if it sounds familiar, it’ s the kind of material theft that has helped fuel several genocides in history, from Europe to Africa.
Vance isn’t alone in this idea, it was a central part of the Trump 2024 campaign. As I wrote about during the election last year for the New Republic, Trump and Vance were pushing mass deportation as a housing strategy. The fact that it was entertained at all by the press in 2024 is an indictment to the news industry; the fact that the administration is still pushing that framing nearly a year in power is galling.
The administration’s argument has one one root in reality, that there isn’t enough housing. That’s a fact. The supply is limited, particularly because so much of the rental housing that has been built in recent years is “luxury,” and most people can’t afford that. Rents can be lowered by building more, mandating affordable housing, capping rent and many other options. Reducing demand by forcibly removing people from the country accomplishes none of those options.
Housing — and I shouldn't have to type this out and yet here we are — needs to be affordable for people to get it. That’s the “simple economics” that Vance fails to grasp. When rents rise, or new housing enters the market at a starting rate so expensive it has no real impact even as it adds to the supply, people cannot afford the units. Or they’re priced out. It’s the driving reason for homelessness in this country. Not drugs, not mental illness, the cost of living. Chronic, long-term homelessness is an issue in this country, but the vast majority of homelessness is actually short-term. Think people who miss a rent payment, families forced out due to domestic issues or other factors, people who have to stay with family or are trying to find hotels for a few days before they can get pull together the money to get back on their feet. Tens of thousands of Americans experience this kind of homelessness each year, and by and large, they are able to get back to being housed, however precariously.
And keep in mind that the administration (with state allies) are pushing for the creation and opening of large-scale internment camps with no clear way to exit for anyone who is homeless. Outside of the moral and legal questions there, think about the practical implementation of that. If one of those thousands of people who loses housing briefly gets priced out of their home, they end up on the street and need help, what is more likely? That they get rounded up and sent to these camps, or a suddenly-vacated apartment magically opens up that they can afford because the tenants were deported? And that is assuming that every single person who lives in such an apartment is deported.
The rental market theory Vance is suggesting is absurd. Landlords, a group I have zero sympathy towards, for the record, would suddenly have paying tenants vanish, their belongings still presumably in the apartments. They’d be trying to get paid. Why would they suddenly put units back on the market, and at a reduced rate? It is stupid to even entertain the theory Vance is putting forward but looking at how it presumably would play out makes it clear how absurd it is.
As for some mass reallocation of rental units in the past few months, I can’t find anything to suggest it’s happening. There’s no doubt that the people taken by the state, moved out of their homes and forced out of the country or shipped off to a cruel detention center have lost their apartments. It’s fair to say many have likely been put back on the market. But some large-scale redistribution that comes with cheaper rents isn’t happening.
Renters are often ignored in this country, both in politics and in the media covering politics. It’s unfortunate, as home ownership becomes harder to achieve and the affordability and cost of living crisis is intertwined with rent. The United States is a deeply rent-burdened nation. Using that burden as an excuse to pursue mass deportation and the violence tied to that is cruel. And it’s not a housing policy.