Facing public concern about high home purchase prices, the Trump Administration is said to be considering the idea of “Trump Houses,” starter homes to be built privately but with some sort of federal backing to encourage the private investors. Potential buyers would start off as renters and make the transition to owners after three years.
There’s a lot to like about the idea. Renting first to make sure buyers have the financial wherewithal to become owners makes sense. The concept is far better than the costly subsidized rentals that Democrats favor—through the low-income housing tax credit or, even worse, a new era of public housing. But Trump Houses will only work if they truly meet the criteria for starter homes—small houses on small lots that are naturally affordable as a result.
The context is this. Starter homes have become scarce in America. Small houses on small lots were once common—for example the 1146 square foot home in Dalton, Illinois purchased new in 1949 by the parents of the boy who became Pope Leo. The median new house today is more than 2100 square feet. The typical house lot is more than 9,000 square feet, compared to the 4900 square foot size of the Pope’s family’s.
Between 1910 and 1940, Sears-Roebuck sold 70,000 home-building kits to allow buyers to assemble their own homes as small as 600 square feet, marketed explicitly as housing for the working class. When builder William Levitt built 17,000 homes in the Long Island development that became Levittown, they were just 750 square feet, with neither basements nor attics. San Jose, California, where home prices today top $1 million, once hosted a wave of postwar small homes, often just 1600 square feet. (They’ve ballooned in price because zoning and environmental regulations have stymied new home building in Silicon Valley.) More recently, Habitat for Humanity has helped buyers of 1000–1200 square-foot homes that resemble permanent trailer homes.
If Trump Houses can take their place in this frayed American tradition, they will provide an important neglected rung on what might be called the housing ladder—a step that allows those of modest means to get into the market in the first place.
But the plan will only work if the President, whose father Fred Trump was, in fact, known for building working class housing in Queens and Brooklyn, is willing to forego his preference for grand structures and attach his name to small homes.
Crucially, moreover, builders will only be able to build Trump Houses if local communities will let them do so. There are more than 30,000 “zoning jurisdictions” in the US—that is, municipalities and other government entities that decide the size of homes and their lots than are permitted in their communities. They are the front lines of “Not in My Backyard” decisions that zone out new home building. Among the most exclusionary are found in blue states that may not take to the Trump brand.
It’s unlikely the President will forego that branding—and call the homes Next Gen Starters or some such. But even those communities unfriendly to the Trump name should—as I’ve written in my book The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It—should welcome small homes that enable the children of longtime residents to live in the towns where they grew up and teachers, firefighters and police to live in the towns they serve.
Ultimately, the President or Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner will have to use their bully pulpits to convince communities that Trump Houses are a good idea.