America’s Mayors Tackle Housing Crisis and Immigration Enforcement: A Bipartisan Conversation

Housing Affordability: The Nation’s Most Pressing Economic Challenge

When Americans say the economy is their top concern, what they’re really talking about is the skyrocketing cost of simply having a roof over their heads. This reality has brought together an unlikely alliance of Democratic and Republican mayors from across the country, all facing variations of the same crisis in their communities. From Miami to Oklahoma City, from Kansas City to Mesa, Arizona, local leaders are discovering that housing affordability doesn’t respect party lines—it affects everyone.

Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins is confronting perhaps the most extreme version of this challenge. Her city has earned the dubious distinction of being America’s least affordable rental market, with median prices for condos and single-family homes surging more than 80% since the COVID pandemic. But Higgins brings a track record of creative solutions from her previous eight years on the county commission. Her approach centers on a simple but powerful insight: governments are often the largest landowners in their communities, and that land can be leveraged to create affordable housing without the crushing cost of land acquisition. By activating county-owned properties, particularly around transit stations, she helped build or rehabilitate 4,000 affordable and workforce housing units, with another 3,000 in the pipeline. Now as mayor, she’s targeting another critical bottleneck—the permitting process, which currently takes two to three years before construction can even begin. Her goal is to streamline this bureaucracy, following her success at the county level where she reduced permitting time for a 12-story building to less than four months.

David Holt, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City and current president of the United States Conference of Mayors, confirms that this housing crisis is universal. At a recent conference in Washington, 300 mayors from 1,400 cities across America gathered, and not a single one claimed to have adequate housing. The conference revealed a remarkable degree of bipartisan cooperation on this issue, with mayors working alongside senators from both parties, including Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott, who have co-sponsored housing legislation. This unity reflects a practical reality: when families are spending enormous portions of their income on housing, political ideology takes a back seat to finding solutions. Holt emphasizes that while local governments must do their part through regulatory reform and efficient permitting, federal partnership is essential—but no single approach will be a silver bullet.

Innovative Local Solutions and Persistent Challenges

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas has tackled the housing shortage through a housing trust fund, which made a “tremendous difference” in his city of half a million people—though the city still needs approximately 28,000 more units. This gap illustrates the scale of the challenge: even successful programs only make a dent in the problem. Lucas points to a fundamental question facing American cities: how to fund housing development long-term when federal resources may be limited and states have reduced their involvement. Cities are exploring various approaches, from bond obligations for local taxpayers to encouraging private investment, alongside permitting and land-use reforms. What’s particularly noteworthy is how this crisis is generating nonpartisan solutions that blend private and public investment with regulatory reform.

Mesa, Arizona Mayor Mark Freeman offers a different perspective from a city experiencing explosive population growth. Unlike many cities struggling with tax burdens, Mesa has no primary property tax and doesn’t tax food at grocery stores, providing some relief to residents. Freeman addresses the water concerns that often accompany Arizona’s growth with surprising confidence, citing a 100-year assured water supply for municipalities and describing a coalition with neighboring mayors to develop comprehensive water strategies. While acknowledging ongoing disputes between upper and lower basin states over Colorado River water rights—with Arizona having already absorbed significant cuts—he insists his city isn’t facing an immediate water crisis. This long-term planning approach, combined with strategic use of public land and a focus on attracting high-tech industries, represents another model for managing rapid growth while maintaining affordability.

Immigration Enforcement: Navigating Federal Power and Local Responsibility

The conversation shifts to perhaps the most politically charged issue facing mayors today: immigration enforcement. Recent events in Minneapolis, including the deaths of protesters during immigration enforcement operations, have sent shockwaves through city halls nationwide. Mayor Holt articulates the impossible position mayors find themselves in: they take office with a primary obligation to protect residents and are given police departments to fulfill that mission, yet the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution makes them entirely subservient to federal law enforcement operating within their cities.

What’s crucial to understand, Holt emphasizes, is that immigration laws have been enforced in America for over a century, and ICE has existed for two decades, including during the previous Trump administration—yet none of those periods saw the level of chaos currently erupting in American cities. The issue isn’t whether immigration laws should be enforced; most Americans, including these mayors, believe they should be. The crisis stems from how enforcement is being conducted. Mayors who were former police chiefs have told Holt they’re seeing tactics in enforcement videos that haven’t been used by local law enforcement agencies in 30 years—approaches that contradict everything police departments have learned about building community trust over the past quarter century.

Mayor Freeman of Mesa, Arizona, describes a different experience. His city has maintained an agreement with ICE since 2009 focused on civil infractions, and he’s worked to elevate community relationships through cultural celebrations like Dia de Muertos and El Grito. He meets regularly with pastors in the Latino-Hispanic community to ensure everything is going well. Notably, Freeman reports no significant protests or pressure to change policies, as residents feel the city stands ready to support them. This suggests that when immigration enforcement is conducted with discretion and community engagement, it doesn’t necessarily lead to the kind of tensions seen elsewhere.

Detention Centers and Local Control

A new flashpoint has emerged around the federal government’s plans to convert industrial warehouses into massive detention facilities holding up to 10,000 people. Kansas City’s Mayor Lucas has pushed back against such a facility in his city, passing a municipal ordinance challenging it on zoning grounds. He frames this as a fundamental question of local control and the 10th Amendment, which reserves certain powers to states—including zoning and police powers. When private contractors are involved in transactions with cities, Lucas argues, local governments have standing to engage through normal zoning processes and special use permits.

Beyond the legal questions, Lucas raises a moral concern: converting a giant distribution facility never designed for human habitation into a warehouse for 10,000 people is fundamentally inhumane and inhospitable. Whether the issue is converting distribution centers into mass detention facilities, creating what’s been dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, or any similar project, communities are demanding that if detention and enforcement occur, they must be consistent with constitutional principles and basic human dignity. Oklahoma City has faced similar proposals, though the property owners have now withdrawn from negotiations with the Department of Homeland Security—illustrating how community opposition can influence these decisions.

Mayor Higgins offers the most personal perspective on immigration enforcement impacts. In South Florida, nearly 7% of the population is undocumented, and approximately 15% of Miami-Dade County residents have Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—between 250,000 and 300,000 people. ICE tactics have been active in her community for over a year, creating what she describes as “great fear and terror” among residents. She can’t go anywhere without hearing stories of family members taken to detention facilities with families having no idea where they are. As a Catholic, she struggles with what she sees as a lack of basic humanity in the system.

The situation has become even more acute as TPS designations expire. Higgins warns of an impending crisis as 20% of TPS recipients with Haitian heritage work in healthcare—as nursing home workers, home health aides, hospital nurses, and physician assistants. When their status expires, these essential workers suddenly become deportable, threatening to devastate the healthcare system overnight. She calls for immediate extension of TPS for both Haitian and Venezuelan immigrants, arguing that both countries remain unsafe and that the policy can be changed “with the stroke of a pen” just as it was eliminated.

Technology, Growth, and Resource Management

The final major challenge these mayors address is the explosion of data centers and high-tech facilities in their communities—an issue that barely registered six months ago but now dominates local planning discussions. Mesa’s Freeman sees tremendous opportunity in Arizona’s position as home to TSMC, the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer. The ripple effects have brought 30 Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese companies to Mesa to supply the semiconductor industry, and a new $180 million Arizona State University advanced technology facility with $100 million worth of robots promises to create high-paying jobs that improve affordability through higher wages.

However, Mayor Holt admits that six months ago, he wouldn’t have known what to say about data centers, but now they’re omnipresent in zoning proposals. Cities are scrambling to understand the implications and looking for best practices. He highlights Lansing, Michigan as a potential model, where city officials recently negotiated what sounds like a favorable agreement with a data center developer. Mayors are sharing these examples at conferences, trying to establish benchmarks for what cities should demand when these facilities come to town.

Kansas City’s Lucas, whose city now hosts more than 30 AI data centers, offers a more cautious perspective. While acknowledging benefits like revenue for local government and some tech jobs, he emphasizes the challenges: data centers use enormous amounts of land, consume vast utility resources, and strain the electrical grid significantly. Surprisingly, they don’t create many jobs relative to their footprint and resource consumption. This raises fundamental questions for cities and state regulatory commissions: How much is too much? How dependent should one community become on a single economic sector? And should such massive industrial uses be located near residential neighborhoods?

The conversation among these four mayors—two Democrats and two Republicans—demonstrates something increasingly rare in American political discourse: substantive, solution-oriented dialogue across party lines. As Mayor Holt notes, this is simply what mayors do. Unlike the gridlock often seen in Washington, local officials must address real issues affecting real people every day. Whether the challenge is housing affordability, immigration enforcement, or managing technological growth, mayors are discovering that pragmatism trumps ideology when your constituents need results. Their bipartisan cooperation offers a glimpse of how effective governance can work when leaders focus on solving problems rather than scoring political points.