A month ago, New Yorkers received a booklet in the mail profiling candidates running for various municipal offices. Each profile listed the candidate’s top three priorities. Leafing through the book, Home Economics noted that every single profile included housing affordabilitya as a first or second priority. Not one profile omitted the issue.
Housing affordability—like jobs—is a perennial concern. Newspaper archives spanning decades—even centuries—chronicle the struggles of all but the very rich in securing safe, clean, well-located housing within their budgets.
Our favorite evidence of this timelessness comes from Australian economist Cameron Murray, who cites Charles Darwin describing conditions in Sydney in January 1836:
“The number of large houses just finished and others building is truly surprising; nevertheless every one complains of the high rents and difficulty in procuring a house.”
Modest Evolution Since 1836
But if housing affordability is as old as housing itself, what’s new is how it’s intersecting with our increasingly polarized politics.
Consider: Zoran Mamdani won the New York City mayorship largely on clever messaging around the plight of renters. And this week, President Trump announced a desire for the GSEs to make 50-year mortgages eligible collateralb. We have two leaders at opposite ends of the political spectrum, both putting housing affordability front and center.
It’s savvy politics, and their specific policies speak to their bases.
Our analysis of the American National Election Studies data shows renters lean decisively left, while homeowners lean right.
Political affiliation by tenure
And this split has been intensifying over time.
Growing divides
There is no filter—education, race, or religion—that comes close to showing the 14-point ideological split we see between renters and owners.
Renters are more left-leaning across the income spectrum, across ages, and in all but 7 states. So it makes complete sense for Mamdani to champion renters and challenge NIMBYism, while Trump focuses on easier homeownership financing.
Owner/renter chasm
This is a political hot potato and we’re wary of putting our thumbs on the scale. But our view—formed through countless analysesc and grounded in academic literatured—is that unequal access to housing primarily reflects unequal incomes.
Proposed solutions that sidestep this reality—freezing the rent, boosting supply, improving construction productivity, or extending mortgage terms—will merely keep affordability at the top of the agenda, and certainly won’t overcome the force of income inequality that’s been gaining strength since Darwin observed a housing crisis in 1836.
- Or at least affordability, generally[↩]
- The plan would presumably be to have the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau designate 50-year mortgages as ‘Qualified Mortgages’, allowing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase them from lenders[↩]
- See for example ‘Why is Housing so Expensive?’[↩]
- See for example ‘Supply Constraints do not Explain House Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities’[↩]