In ancient Rome, Marcus Licinius Crassus augmented his fortune by flipping fire-damaged properties. Crassus formed one of the first private fire brigades, and took advantage of his market domination by rushing to the scene of every blaze. Before fighting the fires, though, he would offer to buy the buildings from panicking owners, who often sold them at a steep loss. Crassus then put out the fires, rebuilt the properties, and leased them back to their former owners at a high markup. He would have been right at home in modern-day Manhattan.

Our president inherited a real estate empire from his father and made his name through constructing and marketing luxury buildings. (Too bad for Donald we invented municipal fire companies in the 1850s.) His son-in-law is a property investor who harasses and steals from his low-income tenants. The head of HUD called ending racial discrimination in housing “a failed socialist experiment.” Meanwhile, more than one-third of the country now rents, a figure that continues to grow. Though our national rhetoric still valorizes homeownership, Americans are increasingly unable to achieve or maintain that vaunted status.

It’s fitting that we should be in this position, given the US political establishment’s approach to housing over the last fifty years. In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon declared a moratorium on the construction of all federally subsidized housing. When the moratorium was lifted several years later, it didn’t usher in a new era of public housing, but instead began the era of Section 8 vouchers, a federal subsidy to private landlords of low-income tenants. In the years since, the federal government has doubled down on the shift to private housing, notably under Clinton’s hope vi and welfare reform programs, which disallowed construction of new public housing units beyond the total that existed in 1999.