I would prefer to live in a world where the recent news that more than 146,000 New York City schoolchildren experienced homelessness during the last school year was regarded as a crisis demanding immediate changes in public policy. But if helping children isn’t enough to move New York’s political leaders to action — and, by all indications, it most certainly is not — they might consider doing it for the sake of the Democratic Party.
There is a straight line from homeless schoolchildren to Donald Trump’s election victory.
Homelessness is the most extreme manifestation of the nation’s housing crisis. America simply isn’t building enough housing, which has driven up prices, which has made it difficult for millions of households to keep up with monthly rent or mortgage payments. Every year, some of those people suffer at least a brief period of homelessness.
Popular anger about the high cost of housing, which is by far the largest expense for most American households, helped to fuel Mr. Trump’s comeback. He recorded his strongest gains compared with the 2020 election in the areas where living costs are highest, according to an analysis by the Economic Innovation Group, a nonpartisan think tank.
The results are more than a backlash against the party that happened to be in power. The animating principle of the Democratic Party is that government can improve the lives of the American people. The housing crisis is manifest proof that government is failing to do so. And it surely has not escaped the attention of the electorate that the crisis is most acute in New York City, Los Angeles and other places long governed by Democrats.
Republicans promise to cut taxes and they cut taxes. Democrats promise to use tax dollars to solve problems and one in eight public school students in New York experienced homelessness last year. It is the ninth straight year the number of homeless schoolchildren in New York topped 100,000.
The good news is that Democrats still have the power to do better. While the party will soon be sidelined in Washington, it is primarily local and state laws that impede home building, including zoning laws that limit development, building codes that raise costs and local control measures that give existing residents the power to prevent growth.
The most basic reason for Democrats to focus on removing those barriers is that their communities desperately need more housing. The high cost of housing in New York forces many people to leave the city, and it constrains those who remain. The federal government estimates that 30 percent of income is the most a household can comfortably spend on rent. In New York, more than half of tenants spend a larger share than that.
And, for a growing number of New Yorkers, a place to call home is simply beyond reach. The number of New York schoolchildren who experienced homelessness in the 2023-24 school year was up 23 percent over the previous year. Even brief periods of homelessness can be intensely disruptive, making it harder to stay healthy, to keep a job, to maintain relationships. Studies show children who experience homelessness become less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to fall back into homelessness as adults.
A focus on housing is a chance for Democrats to rebuild public confidence in the party’s ability to deliver on its promises. And housing could be a particularly fruitful issue because it will require the party to work through some of its fissures and hypocrisies.
The only way to address the housing crisis in places like New York is to build housing in communities where people — potential Democratic voters — absolutely do not want it. This is a microcosm of the party’s broader issues. To build support for its economic agenda, the party needs to convince voters that lifting up everyone ultimately benefits everyone. Democrats need to revive a sense of shared responsibility for societal problems. They need to persuade the comfortable and complacent that homelessness is their problem, too.
One challenge is that Republicans are only too eager to portray themselves as defenders of the single-family house. Last year, when Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York put forward a plan to allow apartment buildings around commuter railroad stations, Long Island Republican leaders responded as if she had proposed to build skyscrapers on their front lawns, denouncing what they described as an effort to create a “sixth borough.”
But Ms. Hochul’s plan didn’t fail because of a lack of Republican support; the State Legislature could have approved the reforms without a single Republican vote. It failed because of a lack of support among Democrats. And if some were afraid that voters would turn on the party, plenty of other New York Democrats are simply opposed to more housing.
That’s true in the city, too. New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, is backing a package of legal reforms to allow a little more housing construction, a set of small ideas with the big name “City of Yes.” The plan is expected to pass early in December, but it has already been whittled down by City Council members determined to protect their neighborhoods.
Democrats struggling to understand why voters turned away from their party might consider this gap between their language of inclusion and their politics of exclusion.
Building a consensus in favor of building won’t be easy, but it is necessary.
In this bleak moment, Democrats might take a note from President Jimmy Carter about how to behave after losing an election: Grab a hammer and start making houses.
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