Less than 100 days into his second term, President Donald Trump has already made good on one of his campaign promises: to “target everything from car affordability to housing affordability.” Since his return to office in January, the president has directed the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)—as well as the newly created, non-cabinet-level Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE), helmed by tech billionaire Elon Musk—to target federal affordable housing programs for funding cuts and freezes.
Included among the cuts: a $1 billion program that helps preserve hundreds of thousands of low-rent units, grants to organizations that enforce fair housing, and at least $60 million in funding largely earmarked for affordable housing development.
Beyond funding, already limited federal tenant protections are also starting to take a hit.
Tenant organizers and advocates have prior experience with a Trump administration hostile to their communities, but as Trump 2.0 takes a more aggressive chainsaw approach to the safety nets and protections that renters rely on, they’ve had to respond quickly as their communities are assailed with manifold threats of displacement.
But those who spoke with Shelterforce say that the only way to protect their communities is to stay the course, continuing to organize for housing rights and building political power among renters.
Meeting an Uncertain Moment
Within the first few weeks of the Trump administration taking office this year, news of mass deportation, trade wars, and fears of an impending recession have compounded economic anxiety for Americans, who are already reeling from an ever-deepening housing affordability crisis.
Renters, especially, were already bearing the brunt of the housing crisis, and tenant organizers say that their communities are in survival mode.
“There is a lot of frustration, primarily from pocketbook issues,” says Divya Sundaram, a political organizer for the New York State Tenant Bloc, a new sister organization to Housing Justice for All—a New York-based tenant and homeless coalition. The new organization is looking to build electoral power among organized tenants. Since launching earlier this year, it has recruited nearly 200 volunteers and garnered 10,000 signatures for its latest petition for a four-month rent freeze in the city. “Across the country, rent is too high. Groceries, child care—a lot of basic needs are not affordable. A lot of working people today have to make the decision, ‘Am I going to pay my rent, or am I going to put food on the table?’”
There’s a bunch of questions that weren’t really priorities for us to answer in the last four years that are now high priorities.”
Noah Moskowitz, Tenant Education Network
These concerns, of course, predate the current federal administration, says Sundaram, but are now exacerbated by new threats. “Trump is coming for a lot of the systems that we rely on,” she says. Cuts to Medicaid, HUD, and threats to Section 8 “are all of deep fear and concern for a lot of our members.”
And while organizers are experienced in challenging a predictably hostile administration, they are also uncertain how their advocacy will be received this time around.
“Our organizing model is unchanged,” says Noah Moskowitz, an organizer for the Chicago-based Tenant Education Network, which organizes residents who live in Section 8 buildings—particularly low-income women of color. The network uses direct action to respond to various situations tenants are facing—like eviction or dealing with landlords who aren’t addressing much-needed repairs in their properties. And historically, it has known how to pressure HUD to respond to tenants’ issues.
But now, with the new changes to HUD, the Tenant Education Network isn’t so sure the administration will respond to its organizing efforts in a way that will make things better or worse.
“We really have to understand, on a deep level, what HUD can and can’t do, what can be challenged in a local court, and then, what that challenge would look like and how it would play out,” says Moskowitz. “There’s a bunch of questions that weren’t really priorities for us to answer in the last four years that are now high priorities.”
The network is proceeding with caution, says Moskowitz, but is prepared to organize as threats become realities, like the recent gutting of staff for the LIHEAP program, which helped low-income Americans afford their energy bills. And tenants have already been affected by the loss of funding for a program to preserve their buildings, to which the network is preparing a direct-action response in the coming weeks.
But the strategy remains “straightforward,” he says: “Organize those people and get them active and on the street.”
Uncertainty over which programs will be sacrificed in the DOGE-led “waste, fraud, and abuse” spending cuts has created a “bit of a chilling effect” across communities, Sundaram says, but “rather than retreat into that fear or frustration, we are seeing a lot of people wanting to lean into power.” Instead of disengaging from politics, she says, tenants are even more energized to advocate for sound housing policies—and push elected officials to deliver on them.
We are joining @PplsAction on the Take Back Our Money bus tour. First stop: Blackstone headquarters. Home of the largest landlord in the country and a key driver of rent spikes, unfair evictions and poorly maintained properties. #therentistoodamnhigh pic.twitter.com/VJMRGrq2n7
— Right to the City Alliance (@ourcityRTTC) February 26, 2025
This isn’t the first time that organizers have had to quickly mobilize their bases to respond to attacks on community members. Just as they did during the first Trump administration, housing and tenant advocacy groups have been carrying out know-your-rights trainings—workshops that help attendees understand how to handle a direct confrontation with ICE agents at home or in the workplace and even roleplay the scenario—alongside immigrant rights advocates to protect undocumented community members from what Trump promised on the campaign trail last year to be the “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history.
“This is very similar to the first Trump administration,” says Alia Trindle, director of political strategy for the Right to the City Alliance, a national network of more than 90 community-based organizations. Trindle says that tenants who are undocumented historically leave their homes and families out of fear and anticipation of raids, so establishing clear systems for neighbors to confirm and report ICE sightings plays into the anti-eviction work that alliance member organizations have done and continue to do.
“Many consider themselves to be doing the same work that they’ve always done,” says Trindle. “The work hasn’t changed. They’re still organizing for fundamental housing rights.”
Far from being distinct from their renters’ rights work, tenant organizers say that protecting immigrant community members is partly why organizing around rental protections remains their central focus.
Building Political Power
In New York City, an epicenter of the nation’s housing crisis as well as a unique target for the Trump administration’s siege on sanctuary cities, the fight for stable housing is multifaceted.
The New York State Tenant Bloc plans to counter the state’s powerful real estate lobby by organizing tenants—that’s 70 percent of New Yorkers, according to the organization—into a powerful electoral bloc to pressure mayoral candidates to commit to a rent freeze.
In November, New Yorkers will head to the polls to choose the city’s next mayor, who will have the power to enact rent freezes for the city’s 1 million rent-stabilized units (as one mayor did in the recent past). One of the candidates is incumbent Mayor Eric L. Adams, who has been indicted on federal corruption charges and is accused of making a deal with the Justice Department to have those charges dismissed in exchange for compliance with the department’s immigration enforcement priorities—thereby weakening the city’s sanctuary laws.
Immigrants make up nearly 40 percent of the population of the renter-majority city. And even among households that aren’t in public housing or rely on housing vouchers, roughly one quarter spend more than half of their income on rent.
“Immigrants are tenants too,” says Sundaram. “So tenant issues and tenant organizing also appeal to immigrants.”
It’s why the coalition has seen immigrant community members turn up to their organizing actions—including canvassing and rallying for more tenant protections—even in a moment of heightened fear. Sundaram says that the New York State Tenant Bloc’s petition for a rent freeze represented a clear demand.
“It’s not radical at all,” she says. “It’s just the simple belief that the rent is too high and it shouldn’t go up in a time when the city is really unaffordable.”
Even community members who had been won over by right-wing talking points—including those from immigrant demographics—are joining in organizing around the rent freeze. “It’s not necessarily about Trump or the right wing,” Sundaram says. “It’s about the issues of affordability. By coming to these communities and doing smart, strategic organizing and offering real housing solutions, we’re having a lot of success in organizing those people into our movement.”
We're out ALL OVER today talking to rent stabilized voters and reminding them that the Mayor controls the rents! We need ALL MAYORAL CANDIDATES to commit to a rent freeze! There are 2.4 million rent stabilized tenants — we make New York New York, and we deserve to stay.
— The NYS Tenant Bloc (@tenantbloc.bsky.social) February 1, 2025 at 2:32 PM
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Of course, with the now ever-present threat of immigration raids, organizers have had to change how they invite these community members into action.
“We’ve heard multiple accounts of people leaving their homes because they’re worried ICE may be coming—so, no longer staying with family because of that fear,” says Farihah Akhtar, an organizer with CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, a grassroots community group that organizes working class Asian immigrants in New York City’s Chinatown and Astoria, Queens.
“We’re encountering a lot more hesitancy to open their doors and engage in conversation with strangers,” says Akhtar. “It’s also scary for folks who were born here, and for those who are working-class immigrants, so our ability to come together is incredibly important.”
CAAAV, which is a coalition member of Housing Justice for All, incorporates language justice in its outreach, speaking with neighbors in Mandarin and Bangla as much as in English, and building trust within fear-stricken communities through patient in-person conversations as well peer recruitment to bring more members into its organizing—particularly around the rent freeze.
“Once people are a part of [organizing], it really develops our willingness to risk,” says Akhtar. “If something were to happen, we are able to mobilize, we are able to take action. It’s not a guaranteed safety, but it is much more safe to be organized and to be organizing. In isolation, that fear festers.”
And because the home is the safest place to be when ICE enters a community, says Akhtar, “stable housing becomes even more important, which is why it’s critical that working-class tenants get organized against both displacement and deportation during a key mayoral election year.”
We cannot be stuck in just response mode … What is our counter to the crisis of affordability? What is our counter to the level of fear and repression people are experiencing? For us, that is rent control …”
Farihah Akhtar, CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities
CAAAV has also held know-your-rights and community defense trainings twice a month, and the group has seen consistent attendance since the election not only by undocumented community members but by all non-citizen members, who also fear being targeted.
Akhtar says it’s important that organizers focus on building collective power in the face of fear, so trainings covering attendees’ legal rights and how to exercise them also serve to bring them into organizing actions, especially when individual rights are being habitually violated. Trainings help community members contextualize and make sense of recent events to understand how collective action can respond to them.
“We cannot be stuck in just response mode,” says Akhtar. “What is our counter to the crisis of affordability? What is our counter to the level of fear and repression people are experiencing? For us, that is rent control, because we know that communities that are able to stay together [and] embedded are safe. That is as much about fighting displacement as it is deportation.”
The view from the ground is as it’s always been, say organizers, as the powers that be shift and toy with the systems that working-class renters especially need. But it’s not all bleak, they say, as they continue to mobilize community members to locate power not from above but from among themselves. “Now more than ever, we need a multiracial working-class movement grounded in their communities,” says Moskowitz of the Tenant Education Network.
The administration’s most recent attack on tenant protections targets lease policies that protect them against unexpected rent increases and lease terminations—a move supported (and even requested) by lobbyists with the National Multifamily Housing Council and the National Apartment Association.
In an emailed statement to Shelterforce, the national advocacy group People’s Action Institute said it is calling for a day of action on May 20 to push back on HUD cuts and other attacks on housing “and to push forward solutions that get and keep people housed and protect our communities and our homes.” Right to the City Alliance has also doubled down on its commitment “to fight for common sense protections for tenants, despite these attacks.”
“As scary as this moment is, we really do see that there are openings in the next four years,” says Trindle of the Right to the City Alliance. “The opportunities to organize tens of thousands of people around progressive housing solutions are there.”
“If anything, the election was just confirmation: organizing is the antidote,” says Sundaram. “This is how we keep people from being displaced.”
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