The key to the election post-mortem, I've learned, is speed. Most takes come in hot but underbaked, before the trends have clarified, more than a bit stodgy from all the shelf-stable biases and stock narratives. Others trickle out in the days that follow with more coherence, or more vitriol. Mine, despite other intentions, never quite appeared—until this, today. Busy-ness is an easy excuse (though one that has never occurred to the residents of Busytown): I've been preparing for the launch of Homes for Living on February 11th (add these events to your calendar!), was putting the final touches on a book review in Vital City, and mustered my meager online following to raise some funds (wink wink) for a publication on which I'm proud to sit on the board, Shelterforce.

But acting fast is key. In his newsletter The Imperfectionist, Oliver Burkeman shared Elizabeth Gilbert's belief that "ideas have their own agency – that they visit you, like birds alighting on a branch, and that if you don’t do something about them fairly rapidly, they’re liable to fly away to someone else." I felt something like that when I read Charlie Dulik's excellent analysis in n+1 centering on a group that few takes on Trump's win seemed to consider: tenants. I doubt I could have realized the idea bird's promise in the way Dulik has; it chose right. The absence of tenants from most election analysis is an  oversight surpassed only in real explanatory power by Harris, Biden, and most of the Democratic Party's unapologetic contributions to genocide in Palestine.

 

That the struggle of tenants is missing in explanations of the Trump-ward shift is all the more ridiculous given a key talking point: inflation. Most commentary is happy to treat it like an ethereal force rather than interrogate its components or question certain assumptions, not the least that rising rents are the biggest contributor to recent inflation. Not the least that inflation has been a convenient smoke screen for some profit-driven price increases, housing market included.

 

I found it telling that in the dying days of Biden's candidacy, when he grasped at anything to save his doomed, egomaniacal campaign, he embraced a proposal to cap rents of large landlords for a couple of years. It was a remarkable, broadly popular reentry of rent control measures to the federal scene—and one that was quickly abandoned by the Harris campaign despite this traction. In its place came overtures to building new homes and further subsidizing homeownership: cold comfort for the many renters who will never own a house and who don't have years to wait for the new supply to (potentially) move rents in their cities. Delayed gratification is good and all, but our rent checks are due now.

Support for first-time homeowners and building more: not bad, but certainly not an intervention scaled to address the crisis. That approach is just one more entry in the annals of something with elite bipartisan appeal because it won't disrupt the profits from real estate that fuel both parties. The predictable switch away from rent controls says all you need to know about who the Democrats tried to appeal to, and it certainly wasn't anyone who's struggling. Four years of overseeing growing housing cost burden with little to point to in terms of immediate mitigation is not a winning formula. But the stock market shows the economy is good, we're told.

Another op-ed game since the election consists of predicting what still pending pieces of Biden-era climate investments, particularly those in the Inflation Reduction Act, might have that same elite bipartisan support necessary to avoid the new administration's axe. (Big chunks have been obligated and are "safe;" other funds have yet to be used and may never see the light of public.) The best bet for what will remain are some of the act's tax credit provisions, put in place to incentivize decarbonization of our building stock and wider economy by offsetting tax liability. 

In the simplest terms, you need assets that are being taxed in order to make use of tax credits. You also need money, borrowed or banked, to pay up front for something, say a solar installation, before the benefit of the credit comes through upon tax filing. If you're an entity not subject to federal taxes, like a local government or nonprofit, you may be able to sell your credits to someone with a lot to pay (a complex process underlying how nonprofit developers pay for the construction of affordable housing with the Low Income Housing Tax Credit). An exciting development under recent climate legislation also allowed non-taxable entities to receive the value of the tax credit directly (dubbed Direct Pay or Elective Pay), in cash, after making certain clean energy investments. Whether that provision will survive the axe is unclear.

Those workarounds aside, you can start to get a picture of why the tax credits might stick around. You generally need capital to be able to get a break on your capital, and without guardrails or support meant to ensure these kinds of investments are equitably distributed, their benefits are at risk of accruing largely to rich places and rich people. Keeping what we can of the IRA is good. But one can expect to see a further solidifying, if not an exacerbation, of climate apartheid, where the same communities that contribute disproportionately to the problem are also able to make use of these tools to further insulate themselves (not entirely, of course) from some of the most severe, localized repercussions. They'll make a buck too. 

Which brings me back to tenants, a group which faces real barriers to benefiting from the IRA. They can't themselves opt-in to upgrades for their homes. Their landlords won't directly get the health and cost savings upgrades would bring so may forego them. And without safeguards, certain upgrades will come with rent increases that reduce housing security. Without designing decarbonization strategies and housing interventions to benefit tenants, some will look for a narrative, no matter how vile or illogical, that at least speaks to their interests.

I'll end in the spirit of delayed gratification: if you're looking for a last minute gift, a "wild roller coast ride" (Rebecca Solnit), or an "engrossing feat of reporting" (Henry Grabar) that a loved one can dig into in the new year, consider preordering my book and spreading some cheer for maintaining our public goods and housing our people. Happy eves, days, and new years to you all!