By Diana Bilovsky

With the dust settled on the 2024 election, the question becomes, how did a slim majority of American voters choose a candidate with authoritarian tendencies? Did the fault lie in Kamala Harris? Missteps of Joe Biden? Bad messaging? 

Compared to the other side, they all did fine. Did sexism and racism play a part? Sure, but that’s not news — those are always at play in America.

The “how” of the 2024 election boils down to James Carville’s dictum, “it’s the economy, stupid,” evidenced by the 75 percent of Americans who reported inflation had caused them financial hardships. But the biggest of these price bites came not from the cost of butter and bacon, but from the rise in everyone’s largest monthly expense — housing. 

On paper the economy was healthy with wages up, post-COVID inflation down, and full-employment. But on the ground what mattered was the rent raises of 30 percent or more in most metro areas between 2019 and 2023. What mattered was the 30 percent of Americans who earned $30,000 or less per year, allowing them a max rent of $750 — for rentals that no longer existed. What mattered was the 12.1 percent rise in houselessness in 2023, increasing the vehicularly housed, snaking through our towns.

So, in part, people stayed home or voted against democratic values because the government kept failing to deliver housing that was available and affordable. But neither the offered promises of first-time home buyer assistance, nor the scapegoating promises of immigrant deportation to free homes, could fully remedy our shortfall of 7.3 million low-income housing units. 

This is because the beef is decades in the making — and a set-up of our own creation. We did this by choosing to hitch our wagon to the neoliberal tenets of limited government and limited taxes. This choice transferred wealth to speculators who used it to hoover-up affordable housing, replacing it with luxury digs — while hobbling the government’s ability to replace the missing units.

And we forgot the inconvenient fact that the government could only provide housing when we were willing to live with a tax rate that never dipped below 70 percent, and were willing to put community needs above individual needs — and call it patriotism, not socialism. 

Yet this have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too attitude has led to our governing pickle. People are rightfully upset because “the government” can’t deliver lower rents and mortgages, nor make homelessness disappear. But they are also unwilling to acknowledge their complicity, and embrace the obvious cure: live with higher taxes, support regulations mandating low-cost housing preservation and creation, and walk the walk of personal sacrifices for the common good. 

The reality? On the national level, none of those above are about to happen, especially since the election. However, all is not lost. Through broad coalition building — housing affordability affects us all — great things can still be done on the state and local level. Washington state has now twice approved taxes on wealth to fund low-cost housing (funding for Vienna’s public housing for 60 percent of its citizens was through wealth taxes). And many states and cities are setting up their own nonprofit development corporations, cutting out fiscally wasteful for-profit investor involvement. 

Land is always a difficult get, but at the local level, it can be made available through the piggybacking of low-cost units onto other developments. And permanent affordability can be preserved with limited equity restrictions written onto each deed. Below are a few suggestions for these fixes:

 1. Require all commercial buildings to be built with second or third floors of dedicated rentals priced for those earning $15,000 or below; 

2. Require all new job creators to provide housing for all workers earning $40,000 or below; 

3. Revise middle housing laws to mandate the inclusion on each lot of one unit for those earning $30,000 or below. 

Working together to implement these changes will provide healing for ourselves and our cities as, in time, the inadequately housed find affordable stability. This also will boost, once again, our confidence in each other and our government. Is this all pie-in-the-sky? Perhaps. But we have no choice: neither our neighbors living with housing precarity nor the survival of our beautiful democracy are sustainable without hard changes that start with housing us all.Diana Bilovsky is a writer and affordable housing advocate living in Eugene. This essay is an adaptation from The Affordability Conundrum, a work in progress.