Mr. Trump said in July that he favored a $10-an-hour federal minimum wage, but he has made contradictory remarks in other public appearances, the proposal does not appear in campaign materials, and he did not mention it in Detroit.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump have said that they are focused on creating more and better jobs.

“My primary mission as president will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages right here in the United States,” Mrs. Clinton said in accepting the Democratic nomination in Philadelphia last month.

But Mr. Desmond, the Harvard sociologist, said that was not enough because the poor faced a wide range of other obstacles to economic stability. His own work has focused on a growing shortage of affordable rental housing. In his recent book, “Evicted,” he showed that evictions were a regular feature of life in lower-income neighborhoods, and that they were not just the result of poverty, but that instability causes poverty.

Increasing affordable housing was until recently a standard campaign pledge for presidential candidates of both parties. President Bill Clinton created a “National Home Ownership Strategy.” President George W. Bush announced early in his first term a target of creating 5.5 million new minority homeowners by 2010, alongside measures to encourage the construction of rental housing.

But Mrs. Clinton made only one glancing reference to affordable housing on Thursday, spending far more time on promoting entrepreneurship and small businesses, bolstering broadband access and reviving manufacturing. Her campaign website highlights 37 issues, but housing is not among them, although the campaign issued some proposals in February.

Mr. Trump, during a speech in Miami to the National Association of Homebuilders on Thursday, lamented the decline of homeownership since the housing and financial crisis of 2008. But he stopped short of outlining a housing policy.