American Suburbs First?

Trump, Project 2025, and the Future of Urban America

In the charged summer of 2020, amid a contentious election campaign, President Trump declared that his opponent Joe Biden wanted to “abolish suburbs.” Whereas Trump’s HUD Secretary Ben Carson once tweeted that HUD was “taking on the NIMBYs,” Trump’s promise to defend the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” reversed his administration’s earlier diagnosis that excessive zoning stifled housing in cities and suburbs alike. The pivot didn’t help Trump win in 2020, housing costs continued to soar, and the bipartisan urgency around affordability only grew.

By the summer of 2024, in another election campaign, Trump was again vowing to “stop Joe Biden’s sinister plan to abolish the suburbs.” Meanwhile, the press turned its attention to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for a potential Republican administration that seemed to lean into this urban/suburban divide. The report, authored by a coalition of right-leaning groups, offered a mix of fiscal and social policy recommendations, some contradictory. The media seized on Project 2025’s most culture-warrior aspects, deriding it as “extremist”, “dangerous”, and “Jim Crow 2.0”—a characterization that wasn’t entirely fair—but the document became a political liability. Trump disavowed it on the campaign trail, but nobody was surprised when he nominated several authors of Project 2025 to key posts in his second administration. However, his appointments for Treasury and HUD secretaries suggest a more pragmatic approach than offered in the report. So, now that Trump is back in office, it’s worth considering what aspects of Project 2025 he might pursue, since its proposals for housing, transit, and disaster preparedness, in particular, could have important implications for cities.

Let’s go back to housing.

Project 2025 frames its housing policies as a rejection of Biden-era progressive ideology. Carson, once a YIMBY champion, wrote the chapter on HUD, arguing that “Congress should prioritize any and all legislative support for the single-family home,” including opposing “any efforts to weaken single-family zoning.” He also called for repealing the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, a legal requirement under the Fair Housing Act that mandates jurisdictions receiving federal funds to address barriers to fair housing, including zoning. Critics of AFFH argue that it imposes unwanted density and subsidized housing on suburban communities, undermining property rights and local control. Proponents, however, contend that such rules are necessary to combat historic discrimination. Trump revoked the rule in 2020, claiming to protect “suburban housewives.” While Biden sought to reinstate it, his administration quietly withdrew the effort just days before Trump’s second inauguration.

This repeal aligns with Project 2025’s broader vision of local land-use control—a victory for the status quo. Yet, as Trump’s HUD nominee Scott Turner suggests, the administration’s housing agenda might depart from the report’s more polarizing elements. Turner, who worked on Opportunity Zones during Trump’s first term, struck a pragmatic tone in his confirmation hearing. He emphasized the need to build “millions of homes, all kinds of homes, multi-family, single-family, duplex, condo, manufacturing housing, you name it.” Turner linked homelessness to housing shortages, a position that is not always supported by conservatives. Meanwhile, he called on local and state governments to review zoning laws and excessive permitting fees that account for up to 40% of multifamily housing costs. This is largely consistent with the bipartisan, pro-housing YIMBY agenda and Republican-led zoning reforms in Montana and Florida.

While Turner supports some of Carson’s recommendations regarding Section 8 housing vouchers, he repeatedly emphasizes the need to make HUD programs more efficient and effective for the people they serve. Progressives will likely bristle at tying vouchers to work requirements, but such policies do not portend an evisceration of the department or its programs. Still, policies that redirect vouchers away from illegal immigrants or mixed-status families could lead to displacement of lower income people in cities.

If Project 2025 reflects a preference for the suburbs, its transportation policies are no exception.

By prioritizing highways and internal combustion engines over transit and electric vehicles (EVs), the report reinforces an auto-centric vision of suburban life while downplaying urban transit needs that serve to connect regions and reduce congestion. Project 2025 called for ending the so-called “EV mandate,” which they claimed subsidized “EV producers such as Tesla at the expense of legacy automakers.” Trump has already repealed the EV mandate via executive order, a move that will likely only hurt EV-leader Tesla’s competitors. Practically, while this may slow the transition to cleaner technologies on urban roads, cities have other tools for dealing with automobile emissions, like congestion pricing and tolls, that Project 2025 doesn’t cover. Meanwhile, the report called for redirecting federal funds toward highway infrastructure and cutting support for public transit.

Sean Duffy, Trump’s nominee for Transportation Secretary, said he wants to see a “robust marketplace” for a variety of transportation technologies and priorities. Though critical of transit inefficiencies, cost bloat, and mismanagement, Duffy praised successful rail projects like Utah’s FrontRunner commuter train, noting “how effective that's been [at] reducing congestion and moving people efficiently and rapidly between the cities,” as well as the forthcoming Brightline West, connecting Las Vegas and Los Angeles, noting that “taking cars off the road…makes it better for everybody.” He also acknowledged the popularity of Amtrak lines, even among red-state senators, and noted the importance of rural connections, although he suggested buses make more sense than rail in less-populated areas. In another rebuke to Project 2025, which critiqued Vision Zero—an international effort to eliminate traffic-related fatalities—Duffy, whose wife survived a deadly car crash, condemned the 40,000 deaths that happen annually on America’s roads.

Previewing President Trump’s inauguration day declaration, Duffy said he hopes to “usher in a golden age of transportation and travel” that will “make travel in America more efficient, more comfortable and safer.” He wants to rebuild our “crumbling” infrastructure, support innovation, and cut red tape, a move that will be facilitated by Trump’s executive order rolling back onerous environmental constraints. Duffy also wants to develop a national framework and safety standards to facilitate autonomous vehicles, a technology that could revolutionize personal and mass transit. All told, Duffy’s orientation strikes me as more growth-oriented and city-friendly than Project 2025. I suspect this administration will take a second look at federally-supported projects that have gone awry, like California’s floundering high-speed rail, while facilitating big infrastructure projects—which may include new rail, but may also include urban highway expansions, too. Overall Duffy’s testimony is not indicative of a strong anti-transit or anti-urban bias.

Project 2025’s prescriptions for disaster preparedness would disproportionately affect cities, which bear the brunt of such risks.

While the fires continue to rage in Los Angeles, President Trump has already indicated that he wants to have a "whole big discussion very shortly” about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and suggested devolving disaster response to the states—one of Project 2025’s recommendations. Project 2025 also advocates for abolishing FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), arguing that subsidized flood insurance is actuarially unfair, requires too-frequent taxpayer bailouts, and encourages risky development in flood-prone areas. While an overhaul to FEMA would have major implications for states, outright abolition of the NFIP would have more immediate and far-reaching consequences for cities.

NFIP flood maps are deeply embedded in mortgage writing, private insurance practices, real estate valuations, and urban planning. The maps, though often outdated and expensive to produce, guide building codes, development, and infrastructure resilience in thousands of municipalities. Although third party solutions exist—private companies like CoreLogic, AIR Worldwide, and RMS provide flood-risk data and satellite maps that already support federal agencies and municipalities including FEMA, HUD, New York City, Miami-Dade County, and New Orleans—transitioning smaller, resource-constrained communities to private alternatives would require thoughtful coordination and funding. It’s unclear what Trump actually wants to do, but I expect we’ll have that big discussion very shortly.

While Project 2025 blends culture-war rhetoric with conservative boilerplate, President Trump’s recent words and deeds suggest a less radical, more selective alignment. Cabinet nominees like Turner and Duffy reflect a pragmatic, efficiency-oriented approach rather than a wholesale rejection of urban priorities. Project 2025 may be of biblical length, but as with the Bible, this administration will only pick and choose the parts it likes. Still, cities cannot afford to be complacent. The federal government is not standing in the way of cities adopting good housing or transit reforms today, though they may have to get more creative about other transportation goals and FEMA/NFIP reforms. And while I think the culture war aspects of Project 2025 would not be great for America, the report does not spell DOOM for cities. Really, to the extent the report is anti-city, it’s really only anti- one city: Washington DC, mostly for what it symbolizes to Republicans. Still, even Trump wants to help DC Mayor Muriel Bowser clean it up.

That’s the spirit I hope this administration leans into: one that rejects the false suburban-urban binary and that sees cities and suburbs, town and country, as part of a greater American fabric. The golden age of America will never begin if we tear ourselves apart at the seams first.

We’ll see what happens—but what do you think?