President Donald Trump said he will expand homeownership to millions more American families during his administration, even as longstanding affordability issues have recently forced the U.S. housing market to a slowdown.
“Under the Trump administration, we believe that affordable homeownership is a fundamental part of the American dream, and we’re working every day to make that dream a reality for millions and millions of Americans,” Trump said in video remarks to a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) event on the National Mall on Monday.
How Does Trump Plan To Achieve This Goal?
The country is in the midst of a housing affordability crisis, caused by a chronic lack of inventory, sky-high home prices, and historically elevated mortgage rates, which has pushed the dream of homeownership out of reach for millions of Americans.
Despite the fact that the country would still need millions of homes to fix the existing gap between supply and demand, sales have dropped in recent months as many just cannot afford the homes for sale on the market. Long-term renting in the U.S. is rising as a result of the increasing unaffordability of home-buying, and the nation’s homeownership rate has fallen to 65 percent in the second quarter of the year, the lowest since 2019, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
According to housing experts, the U.S. housing market will only become more affordable through a combination of growing inventory and lower mortgage rates.
The president has offered his own career in real estate as guarantee that he knows how to fix the country’s housing affordability crisis. “I’ve been a builder all my life. I build things. I was a real estate developer. I know what it is,” Trump said in his video remarks on Monday.
His speech, however, did not offer much in terms of details about what his administration plans on doing to achieve this goal, saying that “some of our nation’s greatest architects, engineers, and innovators” are working together to create “cutting-edge technologies and new ideas for housing construction.”
“We’re slashing permitting delays and eliminating a record number of costly regulations. We’re also defeating inflation,” he said. “We took over the worst inflation in the history of our country, and we’ve beat it, bringing down mortgage rates, reducing energy costs, and unleashing incredible economic growth like this country has never seen before. Together, we can put millions more American families in a home of their very own.”
What Do We Know About The Trump Administration’s Housing Policies?
In January, before his return to the White House, Taylor Rogers, a spokesperson for the Trump-Vance transition team, told Newsweek that the president “will deliver on his promise to Make Housing Affordable Again by defeating historic inflation and reducing mortgage rates.”
According to Rogers, Trump was planning to “ban mortgages for illegal immigrants who drive up the price of housing, eliminate federal regulations driving up housing costs, open portions of federal land with ultralow taxes and regulations for large-scale housing construction. The cost of new homes will be cut in half, and President Trump will end the housing affordability crisis.”
Nearly eight months later, home prices across much of the country remain near their pandemic peaks—and so do mortgage rates, even as they have started sliding down over the past couple of weeks. The median sale price of a home in the U.S. is $443,019, up 1.2 percent from a year earlier, and the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 6.5 percent as of September 4, up 0.15 percentage points from a year earlier but down 0.06 from the previous week.
While these figures are elevated, home price growth has slowed down significantly from last year as inventory has risen massively across the country in recent months due to dwindling demand. And mortgage rates, while still high, are finally trending down as investors expect the Federal Reserve to finally cut rates this month, giving more homebuyers a chance to get a loan and more homeowners the opportunity to refinance.
This slight improvement, however, has little to do with Trump. Inflation rose for the third straight month in July, to 2.8 percent, and while mortgage rates are finally coming down this has more to do with the country’s slowing job growth than the president’s insistent calls for the Fed to lower its rates in recent months.
The Trump administration, however, is following up on some of the pledges listed by Rogers to Newsweek in January.
While it has not banned mortgages for illegal migrants, HUD Secretary Scott Turner recently announced that his department will be asking public housing agencies across the country to share citizenship information of those receiving rental assistance under the federal Section 8 program. Proof of American citizenship or eligible immigration status is already a requirement for eligibility to receive rental assistance under the Section 8 HVC program.
Trump is also trying to cut red tape and ease the cost of building new homes to boost construction across the country, including by potentially opening up federal land for residential use. The federal government owns about 640 million acres of land, though much of it is not suitable for housing due to environmental regulations or the nature of the terrain. Some states like Nevada, however, could massively benefit from it.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has also recently said that Trump is likely to announce a national housing emergency soon—a move that would allow him to pass more initiatives boosting housing affordability in the country without passing through Congress.
Neither Bessent nor Trump, however, have explained in detail how they would use the power given to the president by a national emergency. Joel Berner, senior economist at Realtor.com, told Newsweek that the best ways the administration could make an impact are by encouraging the building and purchase of homes.
“Overriding, or at least standardizing, local laws on zoning would be a great step toward allowing builders to deliver the inventory needed by the American people in the places where it is needed,” Berner said. “It is often the case that regulation gets in the way of building homes in high-demand areas, so the costs of housing in these places—many of them in the Northeast—continues to soar,” he added.
“Streamlining the permitting process and putting fewer restrictions on builders would be a great way to augment home inventory in locations that need it the most. This would have the best long-term impact, but the federal government could also juice the housing market in the short run by making it easier to buy a home,” he said.
The post Trump Makes Housing Market Pledge To Americans appeared first on Newsweek.
