Good morning, Inequality Insights readers. I’m CalMatters housing affordability reporter Felicia Mello.
One in five California children comes from a mixed-status family, in which at least one member is undocumented, according to the California Immigrant Data Portal. Concern is growing among housing advocates that those families risk losing access to federal housing assistance once President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
That’s because Trump administration officials proposed such a change during his first term, floating a rule that would have barred mixed-status families from receiving public housing and Section 8 vouchers. (Currently, mixed-status families can get pro-rated benefits based on how many family members are eligible.) The change was never implemented, but Los Angeles housing authorities estimated at the time that it would have led to the displacement of more than 10,000 people in that city alone.
If the federal government were to enact a similar rule today, “there’s a large number of households in California that would be impacted — mixed-status families who would have to make that hard choice of separating as a family or leaving their housing and quite possibly not being able to find an alternative,” Chione Flegal, executive director of the advocacy group Housing California, told me earlier this week.
Trump has offered few specifics about his housing plans. But the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump administration, in a section written by former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, calls for reviving the ban on mixed-status families, along with adding time limits and work requirements for housing benefits and selling off land owned by public housing authorities.
California could push back by supplementing Section 8 voucher funding or using state money to build affordable housing that wouldn’t be bound by the federal rules, Flegal said – though that would be “incredibly expensive.” You can find out more about how an incoming Trump administration might affect housing affordability in the state – from raising tariffs on construction materials to building “Freedom Cities” on federal land – in my story.
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