As Americans cast their votes in an election dominated by debates over inflation and the cost of living, a ballot measure in Vice President Kamala Harris’ home state is dividing the Democratic Party on the issue of how to address skyrocketing rents.
Proposition 33—dubbed the Justice for Renters Act—would repeal the state’s controversial Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which for decades has restricted local governments’ ability to cap rent increases. Currently, Costa-Hawkins blocks counties and cities from imposing rent controls on apartments, condos, and single-family homes built after a certain date—1995 in much of the state, but years earlier in some cities, such as San Francisco. It also prohibits vacancy control, meaning that even landlords who are subject to rent controls can raise rents up to the market rate when a new tenant moves in.
Some cities have already enacted new rent control plans in anticipation of Prop. 33 passing. In October, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve legislation that would expand rent control to approximately 16,000 additional units if the initiative passes.
In some ways, Prop. 33 is similar to President Joe Biden’s proposal this past summer to cap annual rent increases at 5 percent over the next two years for large landlords who want to obtain federal tax breaks. Two weeks after it was rolled out, speaking to a crowd in Atlanta, Harris appeared to voice support for the president’s plan, vowing to “take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases.” But since then, according to the Nation, she has largely left promises for direct tenant protections out of her public statements. The outlet observed that instead of renters, Harris seemed to be focusing on homeowners, pushing policies like tax incentives for developers to build for first-time homebuyers.
Harris’ reluctance to embrace rent control may mark a small victory for YIMBYs, the “yes-in-my-backyard” pro-housing movement that first emerged in San Francisco in the 2010s as a more market-based approach to the housing affordability crisis. YIMBYs, many of whom are Democrats, have largely opposed Prop. 33, arguing it would cause new rental construction to grind to a halt. An analysis by California YIMBY, an advocacy group focused on ameliorating the state’s housing shortage, argued that passing the measure “will likely worsen housing affordability by empowering NIMBY jurisdictions to block new housing.”
NIMBY, a largely pejorative label meaning “not in my backyard,” describes locals who oppose construction and redevelopment in their neighborhoods—ranging variously from affordable housing, to homeless shelters, to luxury condos, to public transportation infrastructure. According to Matthew Lewis, the communications director at California YIMBY, NIMBYs include residents from across the political spectrum. While conservative NIMBYs might oppose new buildings to maintain the status quo or inflate property values in their neighborhoods, many left-aligned NIMBYs strongly oppose market-based development out of fears over gentrification or ideological commitments. Between those poles lies a significant group of mainstream liberal NIMBYs, who, as New York Magazine’s Curbed puts it, “believe in affordable housing until it’s in their neighborhood.” In 2022, Barack Obama called them out, specifically arguing that resistance to “affordable, energy-sustainable, mixed-use and mixed-income communities” contributes to the housing crisis.
“When you have very right-wing NIMBYs agreeing with left NIMBYs that we should do all the things necessary to prevent more homebuilding, it kind of makes you go, huh?” Lewis said.
For Lewis, the story of a rent-controlled city like San Francisco characterizes the debate. According to the city’s housing plan, about 70 percent of San Francisco renters live in rent-stabilized units, built before June 1979. But this hasn’t helped the affordability crisis, as the percentage of the city’s households who were rent-burdened—that is, who spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent—increased by roughly 15 percent from 1990 to 2015 for residents making 50 to 80 percent of the median San Francisco income. And according to the Public Policy Institute of California and the California Housing Partnership, in 2024, over half of all renters in the state—roughly 3 million residents—are rent-burdened.
“I think our opponents on the left misconstrue that rent control is this mechanism of broad affordability,” Lewis said. “But what it’s supposed to do is provide stability and security of tenure for lower income tenants. In a city like San Francisco, what you end up with is millionaires living in rent-controlled housing.”
To get it right, Lewis suggests that the city first has to “unleash a building boom” by constructing housing and renting it out at market rate so developers can recoup investment costs and continue to build. “Then when those buildings become eligible for rent control—after 15 or 20 years—you have this abundant supply of rent-stabilized units because you’ve never stopped building,” he argues.
Many housing justice advocates reject that argument. In a 2021 article for Housing is a Human Right, a prominent group now backing Prop. 33, Patrick Range McDonald wrote that such market-based strategies resemble the real estate industry’s failed “trickle-down housing policy” that has led to the ongoing crisis. Comparing it to giving tax cuts to the rich, McDonald wrote that “corporate landlords and major developers will generate billions in revenue by charging sky-high rents for market-rate apartments, making massive profits off the backs of the middle and working class.”
In a May 2024 analysis charging that California YIMBY has sided with corporate landlords to defeat Prop. 33, McDonald wrote that this YIMBY proposal of “filtering” actually “fuels gentrification and displacement in working-class neighborhoods, including communities of color,” since, he says, developers will only build luxury housing to maximize profits.
For his part, Lewis contends that many of Prop. 33’s leftist supporters are acting in direct opposition to affordability by arguing that only government-funded social housing projects can solve the problem. “I think that this is where YIMBYs really part ways with the left,” he said. “The market can just move substantially faster than the government can, if you let it.” While Lewis concedes that the government should play a substantial role in providing subsidized housing for low-income residents, he says that “you can’t have a functioning system where the government is basically shutting down housing production for most of the market.”
Rent control, Lewis says, contributes to the housing shortage. He points to New York City, which has an estimated 26,000 older, rent-stabilized units that are empty, according to findings from the 2023 survey, because limits on rent increases make it difficult for landlords to keep up with maintenance costs and building codes.
The debate is raging among economists, too. A University of Chicago poll found that an overwhelming 81 percent of economists surveyed opposed rent control. But in 2023, 32 prominent economists signed a letter supporting nationwide rent control. The document referred to a 2007 study following rent control policies for 30 years across 76 cities in New Jersey. It found “little to no statistically significant effect of moderate rent controls on new construction.” There is also research connecting housing supply reductions to systemic loopholes, such as exceptions that allow landlords to evict all tenants in a building to convert their rental units into market-rate condos.
Shanti Singh, the legislative and communications director at Tenants Together, a coalition of local tenant organizations in California, argues that rent control and new development can work in concert. “We fight for housing that folks can afford. Millions and millions of people’s wages simply are not anywhere close to meeting market rates,” Singh says. “We’re fighting for people living in crowded conditions, people who are homeless, and people one step away from being homeless.”
It’s not tenant advocates but current laws restricting rent control that are the real problem, Singh claims: “Because of Costa-Hawkins, we are actually bleeding the supply of rent-controlled housing that’s affordable at below market rates. That’s a unit that you’ve lost. That’s the supply loss.”
According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there is a shortage of nearly one million affordable rental units in California for “extremely low income renters,” or residents who earn less than 30 percent of the state median income. “There’s a huge issue with folks with disabilities on fixed incomes, including seniors, who need accessible housing,” Singh says. They can’t access rent-controlled housing in places like San Francisco because the units are too old to have the necessary accommodations—they’re all constructed before 1979.
Instead of working on legislation that will solve the affordability crisis, Singh says that many YIMBYs are “leaving a status quo in place that’s untenable” by bringing up “insane hypothetical scenarios.”
Susie Shannon, the policy director at Housing Is A Human Right—which has put over $46 million into its support for Prop. 33—says Tony Strickland is one of these hypotheticals. Strickland, a conservative city council member in wealthy Huntington Beach, is an example of a NIMBY to many pro-development advocates. YIMBYs argue that he would use rent control laws like Prop. 33, if passed, to circumvent California’s affordable housing mandates by setting unreasonably low rent caps designed to stifle new housing development, according to the Orange County Register.
Shannon pointed to an op-ed by Strickland, in which the councilman said his words had been taken out of context and affirmed that he has been “a lifelong opponent of rent control.” He clarified that he does support some language in the ballot measure that stops the state from using the court system to block local rent control decisions. Strickland did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.
Dean Preston, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the number one enemy of several California pro-development groups, says the amount of money backing the campaign against Prop. 33—over $120 million according to the Los Angeles Times—is telling. The two largest opposition donors are the California Apartment Association at nearly $89 million and the California Association of Realtors at $22 million.
“What has sucked up a lot of the debate from [Prop 33] opponents is discussing…what impacts rent control has on construction financing,” Preston says. “But what’s really driving the opposition is vacancy control”—the possibility that with the repeal of Costa-Hawkins, local governments would limit the amount a landlord could increase rents between tenants.
Preston believes that without vacancy control, cities are essentially powerless to regulate rents. “That’s why it is worth it for the California Association of Realtors, the California Apartment Association, and the landlord lobby to invest,” he says.
While more than 650,000 people in the United States experience homelessness on any given night and living without shelter has increasingly become a crime, everyone I talked to maintains that there is a way to solve the housing crisis.
For Lewis, it’s expanding funding for programs like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which offers developers incentives for making a portion of their construction affordable for low-income residents. He also favors upzoning to increase housing density by allowing more multifamily units in areas previously reserved for single-family homes.
For tenant advocates like Singh and Preston, it’s about the increased dialogue around housing on the national stage, as well as the repeated attempts to create a federal social housing authority.
“I think there’s a sense within the tenant movement in California that it is inevitable at some point that Costa-Hawkins will be repealed because most people support rent control,” Preston says. “I hope Prop. 33 passes, but if it doesn’t, I expect it’ll be back on a future ballot and in future legislative efforts.”
This story was originally published by Gristand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
Helene and Milton, the two massive hurricanes that just swept into the country—killing hundreds of people, and leaving both devastation and rumblings of political upheaval in seven states—amounted to their own October surprise. Not that the storms led to some irredeemable gaffe or unveiled some salacious scandal. The surprise, really, may be that not even the hurricanes have pushed concerns about climate change more toward the center of the presidential campaign.
With early voting already underway and two weeks before Election Day, when voters will decide between Vice President Kamala Harris, who has called climate change an “existential threat,” and former President Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” Grist’s editorial staff presents a climate-focused voter’s guide—a package of analyses and predictions about what the next four years may bring from the White House, depending on who wins.
The next administration will be decisive for the country’s progress on critical climate goals. By 2030, just a year after the next president would leave office, the US has committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels, and expects to supply up to 13 million electric vehicles annually. A little further down the line, though no less critical, the country’s climate goals include reaching 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035 and achieving a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.
As you gear up to vote, here are 15 ways that Harris’ and Trump’s climate- and environment-related policies could affect your life—along with some information to help inform your vote.
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Energy Over the last year or so, utility companies across the country have woken up to a new reality: After two decades of flat growth, electricity demand is about to spike, due to the combined pressures of new data centers, cryptocurrency mining, a manufacturing boom, and the electrification of buildings and transportation.
While the next president will not directly decide how the states supply power to their new and varied customers, he or she will oversee the massive system of incentives, subsidies, and loans by which the federal government influences how much utilities meet electricity demand by burning fossil fuels—the crucial question for the climate.
Trump’s answer to that question can perhaps be summed up in the three-word catchphrase he’s deployed on the campaign trail: “Drill, baby, drill.” He is an avowed friend of the fossil fuel industry, from whom he reportedly demanded $1 billion in campaign funds at a fundraising dinner last spring, promising in exchange to gut environmental regulations.
Vice President Harris is not exactly running on a platform of decarbonization, either. In an effort to win swing votes in the shale-boom heartland of Pennsylvania, she has reversed course on her past opposition to fracking, and she has proudly touted the record levels of oil and gas production seen under the current administration. Despite the risk of nuclear waste, the Biden administration has also championed nuclear power as a carbon-free solution and sought to incentivize the construction of new reactors through subsidies and loans. Although Harris says her administration would not be a continuation of Biden’s, it’s reasonable to expect continuity with Biden’s overall approach of leaning more heavily on incentives for low-emissions energy than restrictions on fossil fuels to further a climate agenda. —Gautama Mehta, environmental justice reporting fellow
Home improvements In 2022, the Biden administration handed the American people a great big carrot to incentivize them to decarbonize: the Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA provides thousands of dollars in the form of rebates and tax credits for a consumer to get an EV and electrify their home with solar panels, a heat pump, and an induction stove. (Though the funding available for renters is slim, it is also out there.) In 2023, 3.4 million Americans got $8.4 billion in tax credits for home energy improvements thanks to the IRA.
If elected, Trump has pledged to rescind the remaining funding, which would require the support of Congress. By contrast, Harris has praised the law (which, as vice president, she famously cast the tie-breaking vote to pass) and would almost certainly veto any attempts by Congress to repeal it. As a presidential candidate, she has not said whether she would expand the law, though many expect she would focus on more efficient implementation.
But while repealing the IRA might slow the steady pace of American households decarbonizing, it can’t stop what’s already in motion. “There are fundamental forces here at work,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School. “At the end of the day, there’s very little that Trump can do to stand in the way.”
For one, the feds provide guidance to states on how to distribute the money made available through the IRA. More climate-ambitious states are already layering on their own monetary incentives to decarbonize. So even if that IRA money disappeared, states could pick up the slack.
And two, even before the IRA passed, market forces were setting clean energy on a path to replace fossil fuels. The price of solar power dropped by 90 percent between 2010 and 2020. And like any technology, electric appliances will only get cheaper and better. It might take longer without further support from the federal government, but the American home of tomorrow is, inevitably, fully electric—no matter the next administration. —Matt Simon, senior staff writer focusing on climate solutions
Insurance premiums Whether they know it or not, many Americans are already confronting the costs of a warming world in their monthly bills: In recent years, home insurance premiums have risen in almost every state, as insurance companies face the fallout of larger and more damaging hurricanes, wildfires, and hailstorms. In some states, like Florida and California, many prominent companies have fled the market altogether. While some Democrats have proposed legislation that would create a federal backstop for these failing insurance markets—with the goal of ensuring that coverage remains available for most homeowners—these proposals have yet to make much headway in a divided Congress. For the moment, it’s state governments, rather than the president or any other national politicians, that have real jurisdiction over homeowner’s insurance prices.
Near the end of the presidential debate in September, when both candidates were asked about what they’d do to “fight climate change,” Harris began her response by referring to “anyone who lives in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences, who now is either being denied home insurance or is being jacked up” as a way to counter Trump’s denials of climate change.
Traditional homeowner policies don’t include flood insurance, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency runs a flood insurance program that serves 5 million homeowners in the US, mostly along the East Coast. Homeowners in the most flood-prone areas are required to buy this policy, but uptake has been lagging in some particularly vulnerable inland communities—including those that were recently devastated by Hurricane Helene. Project 2025, which many experts believe will serve as the blueprint to a second Trump term (though his campaign disavows any connection to it), imagines FEMA winding down the program altogether, throwing flood coverage to the private market. This would likely make it cheaper to live in risky areas—but it would leave homeowners without financial support after floods, all but ensuring only the rich could rebuild. —Jake Bittle, staff writer focusing on climate impacts and adaptation
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Transporation The appetite for infrastructure spending is so bipartisan that the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed in 2021, has become more widely known as the bipartisan infrastructure law. But don’t be fooled. A wide gulf separates how Harris and Trump approach transportation, with potentially profound climate implications.
Harris hasn’t offered many specifics, but she has committed to advancing the rollout out of the Biden administration’s infrastructure agenda. That includes traditional efforts like building roads and bridges, mixed with Democratic priorities including union labor and an eye toward climate-resilience. The infrastructure law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act include billions in spending to promote the adoption of electric vehicles, produce them domestically, and add 500,000 charging stations by 2030. They also include greener transportation efforts aimed at, among other things, electrifying buses, enhancing passenger rail, and expanding mass transit.
That said, Harris has not called for the eventual elimination of internal combustion vehicles, despite such plans in 12 states. Trump has also been sparse on details about transportation—his website doesn’t address the issue except to decry Chinese ownership. During his first term and 2020 campaign, he championed (though never produced) a $1 trillion infrastructure plan. It focused on building “gleaming” roads, highways, and bridges, and reducing the environmental review and government oversight of such projects. He has favored flipping the federal-first funding model to shift much of the cost onto states, municipalities, and the private sector.
Ultimately, Trump seems to have little interest in a transition to low-carbon transportation—the 2024 official Republican platform calls for rolling back EV mandates—and he remains a vocal supporter of fossil fuel production. —Tik Root, senior staff writer focusing on the clean energy transition
Health Rising global temperatures and worsening extreme weather are changing the distribution and prevalence of tick- and mosquito-borne diseases, fungal pathogens, and water-borne bacteria across the US. State and local health departments rely heavily on data and recommendations on these climate-fueled illnesses from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—whose director is appointed by the president and can be influenced by the White House.
In his first term, Trump tried to divorce many federal agencies’ research functions from their rulemaking capacities, and there are concerns that, if he wins again in November, Trump would continue that effort. Project 2025, a sweeping blueprint developed by right-wing conservative groups with the aim of influencing a second Trump term, proposes separating the CDC’s disease surveillance efforts from its policy recommendation work, meaning the agency would be able to track the effects of climate change on human health, like the spreading of infectious diseases, but it wouldn’t be able to tell states how to manage them or inform the public about how to stay safe from them.
Harris is expected to leave the CDC intact, but she hasn’t given many signals on how she’d approach climate and health initiatives. Her campaign website says she aims to protect public health, but provides no further clarification or policy position on that subject, or specifically climate change’s influence on it.
It’s reasonable to expect that a future Harris administration would continue Biden’s work in this area. Harris cast the tie-breaking vote on the IRA, which includes emissions-cutting policies that will lead to less global warming in the long term, benefiting human health not just in the US but worldwide.
But there’s more to be done. Biden established the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity in the first year of his term, but it still hasn’t been funded by Congress. Harris has not said whether she will push for more funding for that office. —Zoya Teirstein, staff writer covering politics and the intersection between climate change and health
Trump’s immigration agenda could also affect food prices. If reelected, the former president has said he will expel millions of undocumented immigrants, many of whom work for low pay on farms and in other parts of the food sector, playing a vital role in food harvesting and processing. Their mass deportation and the resulting labor shortage could drive up prices at the grocery store. Meanwhile, Harris promises to uphold and strengthen the H-2A visa system—the national program that enables agricultural producers to hire foreign-born workers for seasonal work.
But the winner of the 2024 election can determine how badly climate change batters the food supply in the long run—primarily by controlling greenhouse gas emissions. —Frida Garza, staff writer focusing on the impact of climate change on food and agriculture & Ayurella Horn-Muller, staff writer focusing on the impact of climate change on food and agriculture
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Drinking water “I want absolutely immaculate, clean water,” Trump said in June during the first presidential debate this election season. But if a second Trump presidency is anything like the first, there is good reason to worry about the protection of public drinking water.
During his first term in office, the Trump administration repealed the Clean Water Rule, a critical part of the Clean Water Act that limited the amount of pollutants companies could discharge near streams, wetlands, and other sources of water used for public consumption. “It was ready to protect the drinking water of 117 million Americans and then, within a few months of being in office, Donald Trump and [former EPA administrator] Scott Pruitt threw it into the trash bin to appease their polluter allies,” former Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in a press release.
While in office, Trump also secured a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which last year tipped the court in favor of a decision to vastly limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate pollution in certain wetlands, forcing the agency to weaken its own clean water rules.
A Harris administration would likely carry forward the work of several Biden EPA measures to safeguard the public’s drinking water from toxic heavy metals and other contaminants. For example, in April, the EPA passed the nation’s first-ever national drinking water standard to protect an estimated 100 million people from a category of synthetic chemicals known as PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” which have been linked to cancer, high blood pressure, and immune system deficiencies. Enforcing the new standard will require the agency to examine test results from thousands of water systems across the country and follow up to ensure their compliance—an effort that will take place during the next White House administration.
“As president,” Harris’ website says, “she will unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis as she builds on this historic work, advances environmental justice, protects public lands and public health, increases resilience to climate disasters, lowers household energy costs, creates millions of new jobs, and continues to hold polluters accountable to secure clean air and water for all.” Project 2025, the policy plan drawn up by former Trump staffers to guide a second Trump administration’s policies, indicates that a future Trump administration would eliminate safeguards like the PFAS rule that place limits on industrial emissions and discharges.
Just this month, the EPA issued a groundbreaking rule requiring water utilities to replace virtually every lead pipe in the country within 10 years. With funds from Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law, the agency will also invest $2.6 billion for drinking water upgrades and lead pipe replacements. Harris has previously spoken out about the dangers of lead pipes, stating at a press conference in 2022 that lead exposure is “an issue that we as a nation should commit to ending.”
The success of these and other measures will rely on a well-staffed EPA enforcement division, which may end up being one of the most insidious stakes of this election for environmental policies. Budget cuts and staff departures during the first Trump administration gutted the EPA’s enforcement capacity — a problem that the agency has spent the past four years trying to mend. Project 2025 “would essentially eviscerate the EPA,” said Stan Meiburg, who served as acting deputy administrator for the EPA from 2014 to 2017. —Lylla Younes, senior staff writer covering chemical pollution, regulation, and frontline communities
Clean air President Biden’s clean air policy has been characterized by a spateof new rules to curb toxic air pollution from a variety of facilities, including petroleum coke ovens, synthetic manufacturing facilities, and steel mills. While environmental advocates have decried some of these regulations as insufficiently protective, certain provisions—such as mandatory air monitoring—were hailed as milestones in the history of the agency’s air pollution policy. Former EPA staffer and air pollution expert Scott Throwe told Grist that a Harris- and Democratic-led EPA would continue to build on the work of the past four years by enforcing these new rules, which will require federal oversight of state environmental agencies’ inspection protocols and monitoring data.
Project 2025 proposes a major reorganization of the EPA, which would include the reduction of full-time staff positions and the elimination of departments deemed “superfluous.” It also promotes the rollback of a range of air quality regulations, from ambient air standards for toxic pollutants to greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants.
What’s more, a growing body of research has found that poor air quality is often concentrated in communities of color, which are disproportionately close to fossil fuel infrastructure. Conservative state governments havepushedback against the Biden EPA’s efforts to address “environmental justice” through agency channels and in court—efforts that will likely enjoy more executive support under a second Trump administration. —Lylla Younes
Public lands Under the Antiquities Act of 1906, a national monument can be created by presidential decree. The act can be a useful tool to protect important landscapes from industries like oil, gas, and even green energy enterprises. Tribal nations have asked numerous presidents to use this executive power to protect tribal homelands that might fall within federal jurisdiction. During his first term, Trump argued that the act also gives the president the implicit power to dissolve a national monument.
In 2017, Trump drastically shrunk two Obama-era designations, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, in what amounted to the biggest slash of federal land protections in the history of the United States. At the time, Trump said that “bureaucrats in Washington” should not control what happens to land in Utah. While giving back local control was Trump’s stated rationale, tribes in the area, like the Diné, Ute, Hopi, and Zuni, had been working for years to protect the two iconic and culturally significant sites. Meanwhile, his decision opened up the land for oil and gas development. While not all tribal nations are opposed to oil and gas production, tribal environmental advocates are worried that a second Trump term will erode federal environmental regulations and commitments to progress in the fight against climate change.
Since 2021, the Biden administration has put more than 42 million acres of land into conservation by creating and expanding national monuments. This includes the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni, a new monument spanning a million acres near the Grand Canyon—the kind of protection that tribal activists for years had worked to prevent industrial uranium mining. And just this month, Biden announced the creation of the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary—a 4,500-square-mile national marine sanctuary to be “managed with tribal, Indigenous community involvement.”
But Harris might not continue that legacy. While she has remained silent about what she would do to protect lands, she has been vocal about continuing the US’s oil and gas production as well as a push for more mining to help with the green transition—like copper from Oak Flat in Arizona and lithium from Thacker Pass in Nevada—both important places to tribal communities in the area. Tribes have been subjected to the adverse effects of the energy crisis before—namely dams that destroyed swaths of homelands and nuclear energy that increased cancer rates of Southwest tribal members—and without specific protections, it’s easy to see green energy as a changing of the guard instead of a game changer. —Taylar Dawn Stagner, Indigenous affairs reporting fellow
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Climate disasters Congress controls how much money the Federal Emergency Management Agency receives for relief efforts after catastrophic events like hurricanes Helene and Milton, but the president holds significant sway over who receives money and when. A second Trump administration would likely curtail some of the climate-focused resiliency projects FEMA has pursued in recent years, such as cutting back money for infrastructure that would be more resilient against hazards like sea level rises, fires, and earthquakes. Republican firebrands, like Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, have decried these projects as wasteful and unnecessary.
Under the Stafford Act, which governs federal disaster response, the president has the power to disburse relief to specific parts of the country after any “major disaster”—hurricanes, big floods, fires. In September, Trump suggested that he might make disaster aid contingent on political support if he returns to office, promising to withhold wildfire support from California unless state officials give more irrigation water to Central Valley farmers. Harris has not given an explicit indication of how she would fund climate-resiliency or disaster-response programs, though she has boosted FEMA’s recovery efforts following Helene and Milton. —Jake Bittle, staff writer focusing on climate impacts and adaptation
Climate science The UnitedStates has long been a leader in research essential to understanding—and responding to—a warming world. The government plays a key role in advancing climate science and providing timely meteorological data to the public. Neither Trump nor Harris address this in their platform, but history yields clues to what their presidency might mean for this vital work.
Trump has consistently dismissed climate change as a “hoax” and downplayed scientific consensus that it is anthropogenic, or driven by human activities. As president, he gutted funding for research, appointed climate skeptics and industry insiders, and eliminated scientific advisory committees from several federal agencies. Thousands of government scientists quit in response. (In fact, still reeling from Trump’s attacks, new union contracts protect scientific integrity to combat such meddling.) His administration censored scientific data on government websites and tried to undermine the findings of the National Climate Assessment, the government’s scientific report on the risks and impacts of climate change. If reelected, Trump would almost certainly adopt a similar strategy, deprioritizing climate science and potentially even restructuring or eliminating federal agencies that advance it.
Harris has long supported climate action; she co-sponsored the Green New Deal as a senator and, as vice president, cast the deciding vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which bolstered funding for agencies that oversee climate research. As part of its “whole of government” approach to the crisis, the Biden administration created the National Climate Task Force, with the EPA, NASA, and others to ensure science informs policy. Although Harris hasn’t said much about climate change as a candidate, climate organizations generally support her campaign and believe her administration will build on the progress made so far. —Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, climate news reporting fellow
Your electric bill A lot goes into calculating the energy rates you see on your monthly electric bill—construction and maintenance of power plants, fuel costs, and much more. It’s pretty tough to draw a direct line from the president to your bill, so if you’re worried about your energy costs, you’d do well to read up on your local public utility commission, municipal electric authority, or electric membership cooperative board.
What the president can do, though, is appoint people to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission—the board of up to five individuals who regulate the transmission of utilities across the entire country. As the US continues to shift away from fossil fuels, a fundamental problem stands in the way: The country’s aging and fragmented grid lacks the capacity to move all of the electricity being generated from renewable sources. In May, FERC, which currently has a Democratic majority, approved a rule to try to solve that issue; it voted to require that regional utilities identify opportunities for upgrading the capacities of existing transmission infrastructure and that regional grid operators forecast their transmission needs 20 years into the future. These steps will be essential for utility companies to take advantage of the subsidies offered in the IRA and bipartisan infrastructure law.
The rule is facing legal challenges, which like much else in US courts, appear to be political. So even if Harris wins November’s election, and maintains a commission that prioritizes the transition away from fossil fuels, the oil and gas industry and the politicians who support it will not acquiesce easily. If Trump wins, he’d have the chance to appoint a new FERC chair from among the current commissioners and to appoint a new commissioner in 2026, when the current chair’s term ends. (Or possibly sooner.)
Although FERC’s actions tend to be more insulated from changes in the White House because commissioners serve five-year terms, a commission led by new Trump appointees would most likely deprioritize initiatives that would upgrade the grid to support clean energy adoption. Trump’s appointees supported fossil fuel interests on several fronts during his previous term, for instance by counteracting state subsidies to favor coal and gas plants. —Emily Jones, regional reporter, Georgia, and Izzy Ross, regional reporter, Great Lakes
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Plastic waste Some 33 billion pounds of plastic waste enter the marine environment globally every year, and the problem is expected to worsen as the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries ramp up plastic production.
Perhaps the most important step the next president could take to curb plastic pollution is to push Congress to ratify and implement the United Nations’ global plastics treaty, which is scheduled to be finalized by the end of this year. The Biden administration recently announced its support for a version of the treaty that limits plastic production, and, though Harris hasn’t made any public comment about it, experts expect that her administration would support it as well. Meanwhile, a former Trump White House official told Politico this April that Trump—who famously withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement in his first term—would take a “hard-nosed look” at any outcome of the plastics negotiations and be “skeptical that the agreement reached was the best agreement that could have been reached.”
The Biden administration has also taken some positive steps to address plastic pollution domestically, including a ban on the federal procurement of single-use plastics. Experts expect that progress to continue under a Harris administration. In 2011, as California’s attorney general, Harris sued plastic bottle companies over misleading claims that their products were recyclable. As a senator, she co-sponsored a Democratic bill to phase out unnecessary single-use plastic products.
Down–ballotelections After decadesof failed attempts to tackle the climate crisis, Congress finally passed major legislation two years ago with the Inflation Reduction Act. Not a single Republican voted for it.
Elections aren’t just important for getting the legislative power needed to enact climate policies—they’re also important for implementing them. The IRA and the bipartisan infrastructure law, another key climate-related law, are entering crucial phases for their implementation, particularly the doling out of billions of dollars for clean energy, environmental justice, and climate resiliency. Trump, having vowed to rescind unspent IRA funds if elected, seems poised to hamper the law’s rollout, slowing efforts to get the country using more clean energy.
But it’s a mistake to imagine that only federal elections matter when it comes to climate change. Eliminating greenhouse gases from energy, buildings, transportation, and food systems requires legislation at every level. In Arizona and Montana, for example, voters this year will elect utility commissioners, the powerful, yet largely ignored officials who play a crucial role in whether—and how quickly—the country moves away from fossil fuels. State legislators can also open the door to efforts to get 100 percent clean electricity, as happened in Michigan and Minnesota after the 2022 election. Even in a state like Washington with Democratic Governor Jay Inslee, who once campaigned for the White House on a climate change platform, votes matter—climate action is literally on the ballot in November, when voters could choose to kill the state’s landmark price on carbon pollution.
Depending on what happens with the presidential and congressional races, state and local action might be the best hope for furthering climate policy anyway. —Kate Yoder, staff writer examining the intersections of climate, language, history, culture, and accountability
International cooperation During his first term, Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement, a global commitment to reduce the burning of fossil fuels in an effort to curb the worst impacts of climate change. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” he said from the Rose Garden of the White House in 2017. Trump didn’t entirely abandon global climate discussions; his administration continued to attend global climate conferences, where it endorsed events on fossil fuels.
The Biden administration rejoined the Paris Agreement and pledged billions of dollars to combat climate change both domestically and abroad, but a second Trump administration would likely undo this progress. Trump says that he would pull out of the Paris Agreement again, and reportedly would also consider withdrawing the US from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a 1992 treaty that’s the basis for modern global climate talks.
Harris is expected, at least, to continue Biden’s policies. Speaking from COP28 in Dubai last year, an annual United Nations climate gathering, she celebrated America’s progress in tackling the climate crisis and petitioned for much more to be done. “In order to keep our critical 1.5 degree-Celsius goal within reach,” she said, “we must have the ambition to meet this moment, to accelerate our ongoing work, increase our investments, and lead with courage and conviction.”
But both the Trump and Biden administrations achieved record oil and gas production during their time in office, and Harris opposes a ban on fracking. In order to make a dent in the climate crisis, whoever becomes president would have to reject that status quo and put serious money behind global promises to mitigate climate change. Otherwise, climate change-related losses will just continue to mount—already, they are expected to cost $580 billion globally by 2030. —Anita Hofschneider, senior staff writer focusing on Indigenous affairs
In August, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, in his working-man’s clothes—aviators, jeans, and a trucker hat—starred in a video where he carted people’s possessions out of a homeless encampment near a Los Angeles highway.
On any given night in 2023, more than 650,000 people in the US experienced homelessness, with almost 400,000 unsheltered—though that figure may be an underestimate. Research by the federal Government Accountability Office found that every $100 rise in median monthly rent brings about a 9 percent increase in homelessness—notable as rent costs have climbed by 25 percent nationally since 2020, according to CNBC.
Newsom’s photo op followed his July order calling for the clearing of encampments on public property, and came alongside a threat to withhold state funding from cities and counties that failed to meet his requirements, much to the ire of local officials like Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. On July 25, the day of the order, the governor posted on X: “No more excuses. We’ve provided the time. We’ve provided the funds. Now it’s time for locals to do their job.”
Earlier this month, Newsom approved more than $130 million in funding for 18 cities, including over $12 million to Riverside, to “sweep” encampments. According to the governor, the goal is to support “efforts to get people out of encampments and connected with care and housing across the state.”
A statewide audit released in April tracked investment during Newsom’s first five years as governor, from 2019 to 2023, and found that California spent roughly $24 billion in that span to address housing and homelessness. At his inaugural address in January 2019, Newsom vowed to “launch a Marshall Plan for affordable housing and lift up the fight against homelessness,” promising to push for the development of 3.5 million housing units across the state by 2025.
According to CalMatters, his administration has since backtracked numerous times, calling in 2022 for cities to have planned a combined 2.5 million homes by 2030. The state still has about one-third of the country’s unhoused people, more than half of whom, in many cities—like San Francisco—are without any kind of shelter.
In Orange County, many homeless advocates denounced Newsom’s strategy as criminalizing life without shelter rather than driving the construction of affordable homes.
“All things like this do is just shuffle the chairs on the deck of the Titanic,” said David Gillanders, the executive director of Pathways of Hope, an Orange County organization that provides shelters and other support with housing. “If you uproot a person who’s living in an encampment, they’re just going to find another place to go if you’re not offering them an appropriate sort of accommodation.”
Gillanders cites California first responders who moved to—and started commuting from—Idaho, or even further afield. Kyle Conforti, an Orange County firefighter who lives in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, told the Guardian that the rise in cost of living “outpaces my raises and income. So we finally just ran the numbers and figured out it would be cheaper to live out of state and have me commute back.”
According to a 2024 report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, California has the highest housing costs in the nation. At an average of some $2,500 a month, it takes an hourly wage of almost $50 to afford a two-bedroom residence without being “cost-burdened,” or spending more than 30 percent of income. Another study released this year by the California Housing Partnership found even higher average rents in Orange County: just under $2,800, meaning renters would need to earn about $54 per hour.
“We are going to make them so uncomfortable on the streets of San Francisco that they have to take our offer.”
But not everyone in California is opposed to Newsom’s focus on encampments. San Francisco is among the largest cities to double down on a confrontational policy of eliminating encampments through police enforcement. In August, the city’s mayor, London Breed, strengthened one of its three separate programs to push unhoused people out of the city by offering one-way bus tickets before shelter or other services.
Responding to Newsom’s order in July, Breed said, “We have offered people shelter and space, and many people are declining…But we are going to make them so uncomfortable on the streets of San Francisco that they have to take our offer.”
Other city councils have similarly prioritized police raids of encampments. From 2006 to 2019, the National Homelessness Law Center found, the number of city-wide bans on camping and loitering doubled—and bans on living in vehicles tripled. Newport Beach, another wealthy Orange County municipality, unanimously voted to intensify anti-camping law enforcement by recruiting more officers for its police “Quality of Life” teams, which issue citations for camping and related violations, withdrew funding for a mobile mental health response team, and, according to the Los Angeles Times, is considering the hire of a full-time city attorney dedicated strictly to prosecuting anti-camping laws.
In early October, the city’s ordinance banning camping on public property went into effect, and within hours, all encampments were cleared by public works crews and police. The ordinance does not require Newport Beach to offer services to those who have been forced out.
But the most recent arguments over homelessness began in the lead-up to a June Supreme Court ruling, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, that overturned a 2018 lower court decision banning local laws against camping on public property if cities didn’t also provide adequate temporary shelter.
In that case, amicus briefs from various parties—including Newsom—were filed to the Supreme Court. One included petitions from 10 California cities, and Orange County, about the consequences of Martin v. Boise, the lower court’s ruling. Orange County called it “financially unsustainable,” citing a 2019 settlement payment of more than $2 million and a potentially “impractical” requirement to provide one shelter bed per person unhoused. The county’s budget for the 2022-2023 fiscal year was $8.8 billion.
Garden Grove, another of Orange County’s largest cities, wrote, “The further impacts of Martin include an increase in homeless individuals by 49% since 2017, an increase in petty crime and theft, and an increase in overdose calls from Fentanyl and other deadly narcotics.”
The Garden Grove comments came from a declaration by Sergeant Jeffrey Brown, the head of its police department’s “Special Resource Team” on homelessness. Brown referred to 2021 numbers demonstrating that less than one percent of homeless people were accepting referrals to shelter or inpatient mental health facilities, and wrote, “As it relates to encampments, the Martin decision has effectively disabled” local police “from mitigating encampment growth and homeless activity on public streets, sidewalks, and rights of way.”
“Now part of their housing solution would be to house them in jails.”
Neither the Garden Grove Police Department nor Brown responded to a request for comment.
Asked why people experiencing homelessness in nearby Newport Beach were turning down shelter bed offers, Natalie Basmaciyan, the city’s homeless services manager, said, “We tend to have a slightly older unhoused population in our region, and they’ve gone through shelters in the ’80s and ’90s and even in the ’00s that were not well-managed. They didn’t have good facilities…You know, here’s a sack lunch. You need to leave for the day. You have to queue up at 5pm and hope you get a bed again.”
“We don’t do that,” said Basmaciyan. “Once you’re assigned a bed and you’re in our program, you are here until you get housed.”
Voxfound that other reasons many people avoid shelters range from having to give up pets and personal belongings to having to leave a partner at a gender-segregated facility.
Even adequate shelters present problems absent a system to move people to permanent supportive housing. “We have people that have been in a temporary shelter for three years,” Joe Stapleton, the mayor pro tem of Newport Beach, admitted.
According to CalMatters, homeless shelters themselves often pose health and safety risks; the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California found raw sewage flowing from porta-potties, broken showers, rodent and maggot infestations, a lack of wintertime heating, and flooding during storms. The ACLU also uncovered accounts of unchecked theft, sexual abuse, and violence. Despite California law requiring shelter inspections and repairs, CalMatters found little to no evidence of accountability, with just four of the state’s 478 cities filing mandatory shelter reports—apparently without consequence.
For those who turn down shelters, Newport Beach’s municipal code provides a list of penalties enforced via civil or criminal citation, which both escalate with repeat offenses and accrue interest and late fees.
According to Stapleton, applying those penalties “is a last resort,” as is calling police.
“This is where the system has failed, where it’s like, how many times is somebody going to remain on the streets, refusing all the services and everything that we’re providing, to a point where they’re going to continue to sleep in front of a business. I don’t think we have the solution. I don’t think anybody has a solution,” said Stapleton.
Sacramento police officers, staff from the Department of Community Response, public works, code enforcement, animal control, and the Fire Department clear out Camp Resolution in August.Paul Kitagaki Jr./Zuma
Cesar Covarrubias, executive director of the Kennedy Commission, an Orange County nonprofit that works to increase production of homes for lower-income residents, described the penalty structure as a trap that unhoused people are forced into.
“Individuals who are homeless get citations,” said Covarrubias, and if those go unpaid, “then there’s warrants that are issued against them.” Most people cited “are never going to be able to pay for those,” he said, “and it just continues to be a cycle where now part of their housing solution would be to house them in jails.”
Covarrubias suggested that “more affordable housing needs to happen through regional and local partnerships with cities,” using publicly owned lands and “local, regional, and state funding…to really create more housing that is affordable.” But the focus on clearing encampments, he said—especially following the Grants Pass decision and Newsom’s order— has hindered progress.
State and local authorities “are really going to stifle this collaboration of addressing housing and homelessness regionally, because there is just no incentive for them to do so,” Covarrubias said. “Now they’re going back to what they traditionally did, which was more enforcement [and] criminalization of homelessness.”
Cities are also divided on housing construction. According to Covarrubias, many municipalities are failing to satisfy guidelines set by the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, a California mandate that decides how much housing each city requires to meet affordability standards. The assessment is a planning tool, he said, that in theory discourages landlords and developers from building only market-rate housing.
Covarrubias explained the failures—and the vital impact of housing policy—by contrasting housing development in Santa Ana and Anaheim, two cities in northern Orange County, which has relatively higher rates of poverty and residential overcrowding than its southern part. Although Anaheim was producing more homes than required, most construction served “above moderate” income levels, a floor of about $124,000 a year for a two-person household. Conversely, Santa Ana, where an affordable housing opportunity ordinance preserves at least 15 percent of new housing for low-income residents, exceeded state guidelines for “low” and “very low” income levels: for two-person households, that represents annual incomes of $101,000 and $63,100, respectively.
Police ordinances and encampment raids “are not addressing the issue of why individuals are homeless.”
So what to do? Covarrubias cited the Kennedy Commission’s suggestion, a $1 billion county bond to leverage state resources and fund affordable housing. Northern California’s Santa Clara County, home to many of Silicon Valley’s largest firms, suffers one of the worst housing crises in the country. It issued a $950 million affordable housing bond in 2016, partnering with 10 of its cities to fund affordable housing development. By December 2023, the measure had facilitated the construction of 5,127 new affordable apartments and 56 multi-unit housing developments.
That’s where the state and groups like the Kennedy Commission come in, said Covarrubias—monitoring housing commitments and progress on construction for low-income residents. The state’s housing department has the ability to initiate lawsuits, request court orders, and administer penaltiesto cities for noncompliance in housing plan implementation, including fines of up to $50,000 per month and some loss of authority over building permits or zoning changes. Norwalk, a city in Los Angeles County that extended a moratorium on building emergency shelters, recently forfeited state housing and homelessness funding as a consequence, and, according to Newsom, can no longer reject certain affordable housing initiatives. Over the past five years, the city has accepted nearly $29 million to house people experiencing homelessness but has failed to provide a sufficient number of units—just 175 out of 5,034 planned, according to the governor’s office.
Gillanders, of Orange County’s Pathways of Hope, said that more avenues for public housing are needed—beginning with the repeal of the Faircloth Amendment, which caps the number of public housing units that the federal government can fund and authorize at 1999 levels. Jared Brey, the housing correspondent for nonprofit news organization Next City, wrote that the Faircloth Amendment was part of a wave of welfare reform laws passed during the Clinton administration in the ’90s that considered public assistance programs counterproductive to financial self-sufficiency.
Gillanders also suggested that the Department of Housing and Urban Development should be empowered to build affordable housing directly, using federal funds—development Reagan-era budget cuts still severely limit to this day, and which would require fiscal backing from Congress. As housing costs have soared, HUD’s budget and power have not.
In fact, a bill along those lines just hit Congress: the Homes Act, introduced in late Septemberby Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), would repeal the Faircloth Amendment and establish a new federal authority to develop affordable housing with tenant protections. Gillanders calls it a “step in the right direction.”
Covarrubias stressed the need for a human perspective on homelessness: “The reality that we need to understand is that many individuals that are on the streets at some point coped with life normally until something happened”—like a layoff. And as my colleague Julianne McShane writes, many who experience homelessness are survivors of domestic violence and struggle to find safe access to shelter and housing. “In the bigger picture,” Covarrubias said, police ordinances and encampment raids “are not addressing the issue of why individuals are homeless.”
California’s statewide rent control law, the Costa-Hawkins Act, has been contentious since it was signed into law in 1995. California politicians saw Costa-Hawkins, which made it illegal for localities to impose rent control on homes, condominiums, and new apartment housing, as a way to appease the interests of landlords.
Nearly 30 years later, Costa-Hawkins increasingly limits disabled and aging people’s ability to get accessible, affordable housing—practically impossible on a fixed income. The law was enacted less than four years after the Fair Housing Act’s accessibility requirements left some Californians stuck between old homes they couldn’t use and new ones they couldn’t afford.
Compounding the problem, the Americans With Disabilities Act, which requires shared common spaces to be accessible, was also signed into law just five years before Costa-Hawkins, in 1990. And Costa-Hawkins also froze previous local rent control laws—in San Francisco, only buildings built on or before June 13, 1979, are subject to rent control.
Ending Costa-Hawkins stands to increase the number of accessible apartment buildings.
“We have one member that spent two years coming out of a shelter trying to find a mobility-accessible unit that was affordable,” said Ocean Coast, a housing community organizer with San Francisco–based advocacy group Senior and Disability Action.
Ending Costa-Hawkins stands to increase the number of accessible apartment buildings—and Proposition 33, on California’s November ballot, would do just that. (San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin, a mayoral candidate, has already introduced a bill to expand rent control if Proposition 33 passes.)
The proposition’smain backer is the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), which provides treatment and preventative services, including housing—though it has been criticized for, among other things, conditions in the residential units it owns.
Zeenat Hassan, a senior attorney with Disability Rights California, which supports ending the state’s rent control ban, said newer buildings come with irreplaceable benefits.
“For buildings, as much as for anything else, it’s usually easier to build accessibility into the front end that to try and retrofit things later on,” Hassan said.
But Prop 33 has earned the AHF a powerful enemy: California’s landlord lobby. Proposition 34, also on November’s ballot, would restrict AHF’s ability to fund ballot initiatives that are not explicitly related to health care—commercials for that bill position it as an innocuous pro-patient ballot initiative that might, on paper, sound appealing for disabled people with complex health conditions.
Konstantine Anthony sits on the city council of Burbank, in Los Angeles County. Anthony is also Burbank’s ex-mayor—the country’s first openly autistic mayor—and recently headed the state Democratic Party’s disability caucus. California’s landlord lobby was “fed up with fighting the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, and so they put a bill on the November ballot,” Anthony said. “It’s a revenge bill.”
It may “sound weird,” Anthony acknowledges, that the AIDS Healthcare Foundation is leading the fight to un-ban rent control. That’s part of a holistic approach, he says: people need to be housed to get effective medical treatment. A Los Angeles County report found that, in 2022, 13 percent of people recently diagnosed with HIV were experiencing homelessness.
And believes that expanding rent control, including into single-family homes, intertwines with disability rights.
“A lot of folks who have mobility issues, balance and illness issues, need a larger space,” Anthony said. That’s partly space for “wheelchairs or bedding or medical equipment, something that doesn’t typically fit into smaller apartments,” and potentially for live-in caregivers.
While Proposition 34 does not mention AHF by name, its effective targeting of the group has been widely reported—andit would be the soleorganization affected by the measure. The San Francisco Chronicle editorial board, which came out against Prop 33, called Prop 34 “cheap political gamesmanship.” The Los Angeles Times editorial board also opposed Prop 34, saying it has a “hidden agenda.” A request for comment to the California Apartment Association, which lobbies on behalf of the state’s landlords, was replied to directly by the Yes on 34 campaign.
Major developers and corporate landlords have funneled millions of dollars to make sure rent control isn’t expanded.
“Prop 34 simply ensures that taxpayer dollars meant to provide medical care for low-income patients actually are spent for that purpose,” said Yes on 34 spokesperson Nathan Click, a former top communications official for California Gov. Gavin Newsom. “It’s why it’s supported by more than a dozen patient rights organizations.” One such organization is the ALS Foundation—which, unlike the California Apartment Association, is not spending millions to stop a bill that could expand rent control.
The state’s major developers and corporate landlords, like Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, have funneled millions of dollars to the California Apartment Association to make sure rent control isn’t expanded. As of September 25, the Association’s Issues Committee had spent nearly $35 million to oppose Proposition 33, and almost another $30 million backing Proposition 34, according to records from the California Secretary of State. Two firms funding the campaigns, Essex Property Trust and Equity Residential, did not respond to requests for comment.
Jerry Flanagan, litigation director with the consumer rights group Consumer Watchdog, said that “this kind of initiative sets a horrible precedent for the idea that if you don’t like what a nonprofit organization is doing in terms of advocacy, just sponsor a ballot initiative to take that up—to kill it—and just dress it up as something else.”
Even if Prop 33 does not pass, and California’s rent control ban stays in force, Anthony, the Burbank city councilor, said the state could build on a model like the state’s Tenant Protection Act of 2019, which caps rent increases once an apartment building is 15 years old, unlike Costa-Hawkins’ fixed date.
Hassan, of Disability Rights California, also noted that the lack of affordable, accessible housing could force disabled people into institutions like nursing homes.
“When we allow the private market to continue the financialization of housing,” she said, “you increase the risk of perpetuating that segregation for people with disabilities.”
During the vice presidential debate, CBS news moderator Margaret Brennan pressed Ohio Sen. JD Vance about former President Donald Trump’s proposal to seize public lands to use them for housing construction. “Senator, where are you going to seize the federal lands?” she asked. “Can you clarify?”
“Well, what Donald Trump has said is we have a lot of federal lands that aren’t being used for anything,” Vance replied. “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.”
Vance was referring to an idea Trump floated in 2023 when he announced that his next administration would solve the nation’s housing crisis by holding a contest to charter 10 new “freedom cities” on public land. “These freedom cities will 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,” he said in a video announcing the proposal. (In the same video, Trump also pledged to solve the country’s transit woes with flying cars.)
Whether he realized it or not, Trump’s ”freedom cities” put a new face on an old pet cause of Western conservatives and Sagebrush Rebellion sympathizers. For years,these anti-government activists have been agitating for the federal government to sell off public lands or place them under state control. But affordable housing has never been part of their agenda. After all, most public land out West is in remote places with little water and infrastructure, and where few people want to live. (Dunn County, North Dakota, anyone?)
The push to sell off public lands has long been backed by big corporations seeking cheap land for grazing, oil and gas drilling, or coal and uranium mines, all free from many federal environmental regulations. Even so, Trump isn’t the first politician to propose using public land for housing. The idea was most recently, and most prominently, brought into circulation by the far-right agitator Ammon Bundy.
He’s the son of rogue Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who engaged in a 2014 armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management when the agency attempted to impound cows he’d been illegally grazing for years on federal land. Two years later, Ammon Bundy orchestrated the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, a confrontation that ultimately led an FBI agent to fatally shoot one of the occupiers, LaVoy Finicum. Bundy was tried twice for his role in the standoffs. The first case, in Nevada, ended in a mistrial after misconduct by the government. A jury in Oregon ultimately found him not guilty of the Malheur occupation.
The confrontations—and the failure of the Justice Department to punish him—turned Bundy into an outlaw hero to those who oppose federal control of public lands in the West. After instigating protests against Covid restrictions during the pandemic, in 2021, he leveraged his fame into a political campaign and announced he was running as a Republican for governor of Idaho. And that’s when his housing policy came into play. Bundy stumped heavily on using public lands in Idaho to help state residents buy affordable homes. On his campaign website, he wrote:
If we are going to maintain our historic and traditional values, and ultimately Keep Idaho IDAHO, we must spread out and make Idaho’s land available to the people while simultaneously ensuring that necessary land remains public land for multiple use purposes (under local jurisdiction). Then we can enjoy the fruits of prosperity and land ownership while maintaining our culturally conservative identity.
The current affordable housing crisis is caused by a number of complicated factors, many of which have been caused by the Federal Government. Nevertheless, at its core, this crisis is simply a supply-and-demand issue. To lower prices, we simply need more supply. And to have more supply, we need to take our land back.
“I’m not sure if Ammon Bundy pioneered the idea of seizing public lands to create more sprawl, but he definitely leaned hard into it when he was running for governor of Idaho,” says Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the nonprofit Center for Western Priorities, who has followed Bundy’s career for many years. “Sometimes terrible ideas come back around with a fresh coat of lipstick, but it’s still the same old land-seizure movement.”
“Sometimes terrible ideas come back around with a fresh coat of lipstick, but it’s still the same old land seizure movement.”
Bundy’s proposal made news, but it didn’t do much for his campaign. After losing the GOP primary to the current sitting governor, Brad Little, he ran as an independent in the general election in 2022 and lost again. But Bundy seemed fairly sincere about wanting to build housing on public lands. In interviews, he said his own adult daughter was struggling to afford a house in Boise’s overheated housing market. (He’s also not a Trump supporter. He criticized the former president in 2018 for his hateful anti-migrant rhetoric.)
Trump’s housing plan, however, seems much more like cover for the same old agenda pushed by Republicans from Reagan to George W. Bush. It boils down to a simple premise: giving away public lands to fossil fuel companies and other extractive industries that want to plunder them on the cheap. Indeed, people hoping to shape the next Trump administration’s public lands policy have not demonstrated much interest in housing in the past.
Take William Perry Pendley, who served as the acting BLM director during the Trump administration for more than a year despite never getting confirmed by the Senate; he even ignored a ruling from a judge who said he had to leave the job because he was serving illegally. When Trump tapped him as acting BLM director, Pendley released an extensive recusal list of former clients in the oil, gas, and mining industries.
During the 2014 armed standoff at the Bundy ranch in Nevada, Pendley wrote a column in National Review expressing support for the embattled rancher and his fight with the federal government. “Westerners are tired of having Uncle Sam for a landlord,” he complained. Two years later, Pendley wrote again in National Review, “the Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold.”
More recently, Pendley authored the Interior Department section of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a new Trump administration. It outlines 28 pages of proposals for turning over more public lands to unfettered oil, gas, and mineral development, including in sensitive areas from Alaska to Minnesota. But suddenly, Pendley has become an affordable housing advocate. In July, hewrote an op-ed in the Washington Examiner headlined “Solve the housing crisis by selling government land.”
Strangely enough, using public land for housing is a rare point of agreement between Trump and President Joe Biden—sort of. After all,the Biden administration has already done it. In July, the BLM announced the sale of a small 20-acre parcel in the Las Vegas Valley for the specific purpose of developing affordable housing. The land would be sold cheaply to the Clark County Department of Social Services, with strict requirements about how it can be used. Eighty percent of the housing must be sold to first-time homebuyers with household incomes at or below 80 percent of the Las Vegas area median income, for instance, and the rest will go to first-time buyers at or below 100 percent of the area’s median income.
“The Biden administration just called the bluff of land transfer proponents,” Weiss said in a statement at the time. “The Interior Department is showing how public lands that are already well-suited to development can be part of the housing solution, with appropriate safeguards to make sure the housing is affordable and doesn’t end up as trophy homes for billionaires.”
Bundy doesn’t seem to have weighed in on the Trump “freedom cities” proposal. He’s been a little busy dodging thepayment of a $50 million defamation judgment against him, the result of an armed protest he organized in 2022 against an Idaho hospital he falsely claimed had kidnapped the baby of one of his supporters. (Social workers had taken the baby in for being malnourished.) After the jury verdict last year, Bundy took his family and went into hiding. The hospital seized his house to help pay the judgment. Bundy later resurfaced at an undisclosed location somewhere in Utah.
While he too may need some affordable housing, it’s not clear that he’d be a fan of Trump’s “freedom cities.” After all, Bundy despises cities. “History and human nature demonstrate that if we go down the path we are on now and build up and create dense and congested cities with large populations, traffic, and pollution, we will lose our conservative, traditional values,” he wrote on his campaign website in 2021. “It’s just what happens.”
This story was originally published by Gristand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
Buried deep within the minutiae of federal regulation is a seemingly tiny policy switch that, if flicked, would dramatically raise the energy efficiency standard for new homes. Such a move would save homeowners thousands of dollars on their energy bills and nudge the country toward its climate goals. But, after months of waiting to see whether the government would indeed flip it, eight Democratic Senators have grown impatient and, on Monday, implored regulators to act.
“We urge you to move quickly to adopt modern energy standards for new homes,” read a letter to the Federal Housing Finance Agency that was provided exclusively to Grist. The little-known independent entity oversees Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the country’s two largest backers of mortgages, and has the authority to mandate minimum energy standards for those programs—which cover hundreds of thousands of new home purchases each year. This breadth means that any FHFA benchmark would effectively become a de facto national standard.
Currently, though, the agency has no efficiency standard at all, and the senators—including Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts—want that to change. Instituting minimum requirements, they said, “will support a stable, efficient housing market by reducing wasted energy, improving health outcomes, and lowering costs for both renters and homeowners across the country.” Establishing guidelines will also reduce planet-warming emissions and, they note, help protect families from the impacts of extreme weather.
Advocates contend that many new homes are less energy-efficient than they could be, which leads to higher utility bills that hit low-income households particularly hard. This, they say, is because only a handful of states require that new homes are built to the current International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), which was last updated in 2021. Most adhere to outdated versions of the code, and some states have no requirements at all.
“Too many American families are stretched thin by the high costs of their energy bills,” Van Hollen told Grist. “Improving home energy efficiency will help lower those bills, and the FHFA can play a key role in saving both homeowners and renters money by adopting a minimum energy standard for new properties built using Enterprise-backed mortgages. I appreciate FHFA’s earlier commitments to taking this action, and now it’s time for them to follow through so we can pave the way for more cost-effective and energy efficient housing across this country.”
“It doesn’t make sense to keep building new buildings that lock in higher utility bills and guarantee that people have to pay more than they should on energy.”
The IECC dates to the late 1990s and, despite its name, is predominantly used in the US. The code governs energy conservation factors such as insulation, window efficiency, and air-sealing. It is revised every three years, and the 2021 version represents an improvement of approximately 40 percent in energy efficiency compared to the 2006 edition. The IECC also serves as the basis for more stringent standards, such as the federal Energy Star program.
“This is not aggressive green building,” said Lowell Ungar, director of federal policy for the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, which is pushing the FHFA for change. “This is intended as a baseline that builders across the country can do.”
The Federal Housing Finance Agency declined Grist’s request for an on-the-record interview, and did not answer questions about if, and when, it would adopt energy efficiency standards for its mortgage programs.
This spring, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the Department of Agriculture (USDA), finalized a long-delayed update to minimums for its mortgage programs, which was based on the latest international standard. Around the same time, the FHFA told Congress that it was considering a similar step and that a decision was expected by the end of the second quarter—a deadline that passed months ago.
According to HUD and USDA estimates, the changes to its codes would come with an average upfront cost of about $7,200 per home, but save $950 in annual utility costs and around $15,000 over the course of a 30-year mortgage. An FHFA change would have a similar effect but with far wider reach, since Fannie and Freddie back well over half of the mortgages on more than 1 million new homes built each year.
“Energy poverty is a real problem,” said Alys Cohen, a senior attorney with the National Consumer Law Center. “It doesn’t make sense to keep building new buildings that lock in higher utility bills and guarantee that people have to pay more than they should on energy.”
The climate impact of an up-to-date FHFA standard could be enormous because it could reduce a home’s energy consumption by an average of one-third.
“It’s a big deal,” Ungar said, adding that, over time, as new homes become a larger part of the housing stock, the climate and financial benefits of more stringent FHFA efficiency standards will only grow. His organization estimates that, by 2050, the move to the latest international standard would save some 194 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions—or the equivalent of consuming nearly 22 billion gallons of gasoline.
Some, however, oppose the FHFA adopting a standard.
The National Association of Home Builders, which is one of the largest trade associations in the US, has argued that a “rush” to require new homes to meet the 2021 IECC will cause an unreasonable increase in up-front costs that will exacerbate the affordable housing crisis. The organization declined Grist’s interview request, but in a press release from May its representative, Sean Woods, said that mandating the latest standard “will act as a drag on housing production and this will have a domino effect on the rest of the economy, with fewer jobs and housing options, higher housing costs, and a lower tax base.”
What, if any, steps the FHFA ends up taking on the issue remains unclear, as do more granular details such as how long builders might have to adapt to new requirements or how future iterations of the International Energy Conservation Code might be handled. Advocates and opponents alike eagerly await answers from FHFA director Sandra Thompson, whose five-year term leading the independent agency ends in 2027.
”It would be a huge lost opportunity if it didn’t happen,” said Cohen, of FHFA standards. “The buildings being built now are the buildings lower income people move into later.”
This story was originally published by Gristand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
Buried deep within the minutiae of federal regulation is a seemingly tiny policy switch that, if flicked, would dramatically raise the energy efficiency standard for new homes. Such a move would save homeowners thousands of dollars on their energy bills and nudge the country toward its climate goals. But, after months of waiting to see whether the government would indeed flip it, eight Democratic Senators have grown impatient and, on Monday, implored regulators to act.
“We urge you to move quickly to adopt modern energy standards for new homes,” read a letter to the Federal Housing Finance Agency that was provided exclusively to Grist. The little-known independent entity oversees Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the country’s two largest backers of mortgages, and has the authority to mandate minimum energy standards for those programs—which cover hundreds of thousands of new home purchases each year. This breadth means that any FHFA benchmark would effectively become a de facto national standard.
Currently, though, the agency has no efficiency standard at all, and the senators—including Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts—want that to change. Instituting minimum requirements, they said, “will support a stable, efficient housing market by reducing wasted energy, improving health outcomes, and lowering costs for both renters and homeowners across the country.” Establishing guidelines will also reduce planet-warming emissions and, they note, help protect families from the impacts of extreme weather.
Advocates contend that many new homes are less energy-efficient than they could be, which leads to higher utility bills that hit low-income households particularly hard. This, they say, is because only a handful of states require that new homes are built to the current International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), which was last updated in 2021. Most adhere to outdated versions of the code, and some states have no requirements at all.
“Too many American families are stretched thin by the high costs of their energy bills,” Van Hollen told Grist. “Improving home energy efficiency will help lower those bills, and the FHFA can play a key role in saving both homeowners and renters money by adopting a minimum energy standard for new properties built using Enterprise-backed mortgages. I appreciate FHFA’s earlier commitments to taking this action, and now it’s time for them to follow through so we can pave the way for more cost-effective and energy efficient housing across this country.”
“It doesn’t make sense to keep building new buildings that lock in higher utility bills and guarantee that people have to pay more than they should on energy.”
The IECC dates to the late 1990s and, despite its name, is predominantly used in the US. The code governs energy conservation factors such as insulation, window efficiency, and air-sealing. It is revised every three years, and the 2021 version represents an improvement of approximately 40 percent in energy efficiency compared to the 2006 edition. The IECC also serves as the basis for more stringent standards, such as the federal Energy Star program.
“This is not aggressive green building,” said Lowell Ungar, director of federal policy for the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, which is pushing the FHFA for change. “This is intended as a baseline that builders across the country can do.”
The Federal Housing Finance Agency declined Grist’s request for an on-the-record interview, and did not answer questions about if, and when, it would adopt energy efficiency standards for its mortgage programs.
This spring, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the Department of Agriculture (USDA), finalized a long-delayed update to minimums for its mortgage programs, which was based on the latest international standard. Around the same time, the FHFA told Congress that it was considering a similar step and that a decision was expected by the end of the second quarter—a deadline that passed months ago.
According to HUD and USDA estimates, the changes to its codes would come with an average upfront cost of about $7,200 per home, but save $950 in annual utility costs and around $15,000 over the course of a 30-year mortgage. An FHFA change would have a similar effect but with far wider reach, since Fannie and Freddie back well over half of the mortgages on more than 1 million new homes built each year.
“Energy poverty is a real problem,” said Alys Cohen, a senior attorney with the National Consumer Law Center. “It doesn’t make sense to keep building new buildings that lock in higher utility bills and guarantee that people have to pay more than they should on energy.”
The climate impact of an up-to-date FHFA standard could be enormous because it could reduce a home’s energy consumption by an average of one-third.
“It’s a big deal,” Ungar said, adding that, over time, as new homes become a larger part of the housing stock, the climate and financial benefits of more stringent FHFA efficiency standards will only grow. His organization estimates that, by 2050, the move to the latest international standard would save some 194 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions—or the equivalent of consuming nearly 22 billion gallons of gasoline.
Some, however, oppose the FHFA adopting a standard.
The National Association of Home Builders, which is one of the largest trade associations in the US, has argued that a “rush” to require new homes to meet the 2021 IECC will cause an unreasonable increase in up-front costs that will exacerbate the affordable housing crisis. The organization declined Grist’s interview request, but in a press release from May its representative, Sean Woods, said that mandating the latest standard “will act as a drag on housing production and this will have a domino effect on the rest of the economy, with fewer jobs and housing options, higher housing costs, and a lower tax base.”
What, if any, steps the FHFA ends up taking on the issue remains unclear, as do more granular details such as how long builders might have to adapt to new requirements or how future iterations of the International Energy Conservation Code might be handled. Advocates and opponents alike eagerly await answers from FHFA director Sandra Thompson, whose five-year term leading the independent agency ends in 2027.
”It would be a huge lost opportunity if it didn’t happen,” said Cohen, of FHFA standards. “The buildings being built now are the buildings lower income people move into later.”
The immediate reaction to former President Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night was that it sounded a lot like the sort of remarks he’d delivered before. He asked the audience at Chicago’s United Center if they were “fired up” and rewrote his 2008 campaign mantra to accommodate the vice president: “Yes she can.” Democrats on the ground here say they’re seeing a level of excitement they haven’t witnessed since Obama’s first campaign; the former commander-in-chief was happy to indulge their newfound hope.
But there was one item on his agenda that sounded quite different from the Obama of old.
“We can’t just rely on the ideas of the past, we need to chart a new way forward to meet the challenges of today and Kamala understands this,” Obama said, as he rattled off key planks of Harris’ domestic agenda. “She knows for example that if we want to make it easier for young people to buy a home, we need to build more units—and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that made it harder to build homes for working people in this country. That is a priority, and she’s put out a bold new plan to do just that.”
Just a few years ago, if you’d asked the leading political scientists & thought leaders whether YIMBY ideas would be advanced by a figure like Obama on a national stage, they’d have laughed you. Clear evidence for the power of (correct) ideas. pic.twitter.com/GwxGFSfUw5
That’s right—the push for zoning reform has gone presidential. Obama’s lengthy convention remarks are a useful barometer for where the party stands. I checked to see if any of his previous DNC speeches had tackled the housing shortage that has squeezed low- and middle-income Americans’ finances, displaced working people, and powered a homelessness crisis in places like Los Angeles and New York City. The issue never came up in 2020 or in 2016. In 2012, in the aftermath of a severe recession triggered by a predatory mortgage lenders, Obama did talk up home construction—but only the idea of making them more environmentally friendly. In 2008, as that housing bubble was bursting, he addressed falling home values—but that’s a much different problem than an affordability crisis driven by limited supply and high demand. The idea that the government should clear the road for a massive home-construction boom was simply not the sort of thing people talked about in primetime.
“I plead guilty,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders told me this week, after praising Harris’ proposal. “It just hasn’t been as high up on the agenda as it should have been. It’s an issue that’s staring us right in the face. You know, walk two blocks away from the Capitol you have people sleeping out on the street. I talk to people who pay 50, 60-percent of their income in housing. It’s an issue that we should have dealt with, and we’ve got to be bold.”
The failure to tackle the housing crisis has recently seeped into Republican messaging, albeit in a far different way. A good deal of Trump’s narrative of “American Carnage” in largely Democratic cities is really a story about the downstream effects—things like tent cities and visible drug use. At the Republican National Convention last month, Ohio Sen. JD Vance even offered a radical solution to the crisis.
“The absurd cost of housing is the result of so many failures, and it reveals so much about what’s broken in Washington,” he said in his convention speech. In his telling, “Wall Street barons crashed the economy and American builders went out of business,” and then “tradesmen scrambled for jobs, houses stopped being built.” Then: “Democrats flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens. So citizens had to compete—with people who shouldn’t even be here—for precious housing.”
His plan, and Trump’s, was to free up housing stock by deporting 11 million people.
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