It was Zohran Mamdani‘s surprise win in New York City‘s June mayoral primary that first got the media talking about the severe shortage of reasonably priced homes and apartments, not just in the Big Apple, but around the country. As Time magazine reported, his “decisive victory didn’t just shake up New York politics — it signaled a national reckoning with housing affordability.”

Worried that Democrats might finally be getting on the popular side of a major problem with proposals such as government funding for low-income housing and expanded rent control, President Donald Trump is reportedly ready to declare a national housing emergency. But before he or anyone else in the GOP floats a program of their own, they should first learn more about how a policy they already support — school choice — could help.

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The idea that subsidizing families to choose among multiple K-12 placements could also reduce housing costs was first developed over two decades ago by, of all people, a Harvard Law School professor named Elizabeth Warren. Unsurprisingly, she stopped talking about it after deciding to run for a Massachusetts Senate seat as a Democrat, but by then, she had already made considerable progress.

Most importantly, Warren had documented the fact that much of the problem of home affordability was really a problem of parents trying to afford residences in the relatively few communities with reputations for good public schools. (The alternative of living in a less expensive area and sending one’s children to a private school only turns a housing affordability problem into a tuition affordability problem.) If “charter schools and other school choice programs” were more widespread, she predicted, families could live in more reasonably priced zip codes without compromising their children’s educations.

It was 14 years later when Bartley Danielsen, a professor of real estate at North Carolina State University, demonstrated the accuracy of Warren’s assertion. After studying a number of areas that had adopted some form of school choice, including Santa Ana in Southern California, Wake Forest, North Carolina, various towns in Vermont, and even certain districts of Paris, France, he found that they all experienced rapid economic growth.

The underlying reason for this, Danielsen showed, was that the upwardly mobile parents in the places he examined no longer had to worry about the adequacy of local schools and therefore had no need to buy pricier homes in “better” public school districts. At the same time, families from outside these communities began to see them as both financially and educationally attractive.

Some who read Danielsen’s research initially worried that using school choice to turn less affluent areas into family housing bargains might unfairly gentrify the poorest residents out of their old neighborhoods. But as a recent Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank study has clarified, the rapid development of most localities has little effect on the rents of older inhabitants. This is because the only time an upwardly mobile family has any interest in occupying or rehabbing a preexisting rental unit is when local politicians needlessly limit new construction.

If the spread of school choice has the potential to negatively affect any group, it is those in wealthier areas who can no longer sell their homes at an exaggerated premium just for being located in a good public school district. But even they will benefit if school choice can prevent such left-wing housing policies as downzoning or taxing high-end properties to build low-income apartments from being enacted.

And so, it turns out that the GOP has a very effective policy for increasing the supply of affordable housing: the same policy it has to improve K-12 education. Once more, the party has already begun, if unknowingly, to implement its housing solution.

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Since July of 2022, Arizona, Florida, Ohio, Texas, and 14 other red or Republican-leaning states have enacted universal school choice programs that are just now coming online. And at the federal level, the GOP has included a provision in Trump’s recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act that gives all taxpayers the ability to claim a dollar-for-dollar annual credit of up to $1,700 for donations to groups that fund private school scholarships. Depending on how the final IRS regulations are written, up to 90% of schoolchildren could be eligible for them.

All this is not to say that school choice is the only solution to the current housing crisis. But it certainly ought to be prominently featured in any coming GOP plan.

Lewis M. Andrews is the former executive director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy. His latest book is Living Spiritually in the Material World (Fidelis Books).