Where Does the Money Come From? Part 2
Cutting one-eighth of the military budget would ensure housing for all.
This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right on October 3, 2025.
Readers of this newsletter already know that the U.S. can fulfill the human right to housing by ensuring universal housing assistance to all who are eligible, an immediate fix on the path to the end game of far more and far better public housing.
But housing is not cheap. The Urban Institute has estimated that it will cost $118 billion annually to provide housing subsidies to all who qualify, a switch that would finally end the cruel musical chairs game where only one in every four eligible households get subsidies now. The Green New Deal for Public Housing Act proposed a $23 billion per year investment in improving public housing, and the Homes Act proposed $30 billion per year to build new units.
So it is fair to ask where the money will come from.
The first answer is the option we discussed in a previous article: better use of the housing money we already spend. We can transition the billions per year of housing subsidies for corporate landlords and the wealthiest homeowners to address the needs of low-income households.
Today we will provide a second answer: move over a small amount of the money we spend every year for the purpose of killing people to the purpose of housing them. The U.S. spent $997 billion in military expenditures in 2024. That is more than three times the world’s second largest spender, China, and nearly 40% of the war spending for the entire world.
Cutting less than 12%--one-eighth—of the military budget would ensure housing for it all. Make it a 25% reduction for a few years and we could build world class high-quality public housing all across the country.
Just like with transitioning government housing subsidies from the rich to the poor, repurposing military spending is a no-brainer policy choice. But in both cases, political resistance would be significant. President and give-star General Dwight Eisenhower warned us almost 65 years ago about the power of the military industrial complex, just as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich warns us that money and power are inextricably linked.
But we should take heart in one thing: elected officials are professional, perpetual participants in popularity contests. If we the people insist that our housing crisis get fixed, politicians will find the dollars to make it happen. And we know just where they can find them.
