As Americans simmered over the state of the economy, President Trump took to television last month and pledged to lower housing costs, teasing a plan that he described as one of the most “aggressive” in history.
But with prices and mortgage rates elevated and rents still above what many families can stomach, the Trump administration is discovering that the work to make housing more affordable is neither quick nor easy, particularly at the federal level.
Over the past three weeks, top aides to Mr. Trump have met repeatedly to try to hammer out a series of ideas that might help millions of Americans buy or sell homes and lower their monthly housing payments. They have explored a roster of actions that aim to increase housing construction, reduce some mortgage fees, ease taxes on home sales, and permit families to tap college and retirement funds for down payments on a home.
Mr. Trump, who is scheduled to speak about the economy in Detroit on Tuesday, has already revealed some of the policies he intends to pursue. That includes a new push to use the levers of government to force down mortgage costs, coinciding with his intensifying attacks on the Federal Reserve into lowering interest rates.
The discussions, described by four people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about a private policymaking process, have run into familiar political hurdles. Some of the administration’s proposals appear to require passage by a deeply divided Congress, while others — including those Mr. Trump announced — are still lacking in detail or have not been finalized.
Nor does everyone in the administration believe that a full-court campaign on housing is necessary, with some arguing that ballooning costs are primarily a blue-state problem. It is a common refrain among officials throughout the White House lately on matters of the economy, even though high rents, expensive mortgages and other constraints are national and nonpartisan in scope.
Mr. Trump has expressed a frequent desire to act swiftly, though some of the most aggressive reforms that aides have considered might take years to yield results. That has further complicated the political calculus for the president, who has started to acknowledge that his party risks a drubbing in the midterm elections when inflation remains high and millions of Americans are grappling with the added burden of rising health insurance bills.
“President Trump is committed to making it easier and more affordable to achieve the American dream of homeownership by eliminating unnecessary red tape, increasing supply, and lowering costs,” said Davis Ingle, a spokesman for the White House.
The stakes for Mr. Trump are clear in reams of data and recent polling, which all show that the rising cost to rent or buy homes has strained families, many of whom historically have spent about one-third of their income on housing.
House prices nationally have soared in recent years, climbing nearly 55 percent from the first quarter of 2020, the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, to the third quarter of 2025, according to the National Association of Home Builders. It has been no easier on renters, who have seen the average payment grow by more than 35 percent over roughly the same period, according to Zillow, though prices have cooled some since the intense highs of the public-health crisis.
Poll after poll has evinced a public that is also frustrated by the state of the economy, offering a stark contrast with Mr. Trump’s claims that the issue of affordability is a “hoax” drummed up by Democrats. And voters increasingly see the president’s policies as partly to blame, a reversal from the 2024 election, when Republicans captured Washington on the promise of unlocking an economic boom.
“The average American looks at this against a larger stack of cost-of-living increases they’re experiencing right now,” said Julie Margetta Morgan, the president of The Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank. The rising cost of housing was made only worse by the “shocks” people were feeling elsewhere, as the prices of other goods and utilities were on the rise, she said.
Throughout his first year in office, Mr. Trump and his aides sounded a contradictory note on housing. They promised to bring down costs in a bid to help home buyers and renters while still moving to slash a vast array of federal housing programs, especially those that provide rental vouchers, utility assistance and other aid for the poor and homeless.
In doing so, the president has repeatedly blamed rising housing costs on illegal immigrants, part of his broader set of justifications for mass deportations. Economists broadly reject that characterization, citing in no small part the persistent shortage of homes nationwide. Still, Mr. Trump has repeated his claims, even using an address on the economy last month to attribute the housing crunch to a “colossal border invasion.”
The president has said he hopes to unfurl the full details of his housing strategy in a speech to the ultra-elite at an economic conference in Davos, Switzerland, this month. Already, though, he has announced a set of new policies targeting affordability.
Weeks after his economic speech, the president announced he would block institutional investors, including firms like Blackstone, from purchasing single-family homes. Some Democrats have previously endorsed a similar prohibition, though it is unclear whether the president can accomplish this through executive action — or how much.
Days after the announcement, Mr. Trump ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage-financing giants that remain under federal control, to purchase up to $200 billion in mortgage bonds. It was an explicit attempt to nudge down mortgage costs, which have remained elevated for years and left many Americans reluctant to buy — and still more unwilling to sell and surrender more favorable financing.
“This will drive Mortgage Rates DOWN, monthly payments DOWN, and make the cost of owning a home more affordable,” the president said on social media.
Analysts remained unsure about the long-term implications of the bond purchases, which had landed Fannie and Freddie in trouble before the 2008 financial crisis. That led to the government placing the two firms in conservatorship.
Still, Mr. Trump’s intervention fit a pattern in his second term: He has frequently and aggressively tried to use the presidency to manipulate or pressure markets and the financial system, a tactic he has deployed most to browbeat the Fed into lowering interest rates.
The Fed does not directly set mortgage costs. Rather, its actions influence borrowing throughout the economy, including on the government bonds that help to determine interest owed on a typical 30-year loan.
Yet Mr. Trump has spent months blaming the Fed for turbulence in the housing market, claiming that the chair of the central bank, Jerome H. Powell, is the reason that “people can’t get a mortgage.”
With Mr. Powell’s term set to end in May, the president has made clear that he intends to select a replacement who will lower rates, quickly and substantially, in a bid to stimulate the housing market. Mr. Powell revealed on Sunday that the Trump administration had also opened a criminal investigation into him and the central bank, describing it as an attempt to pressure the Fed into rate cuts.
Matthew Martin, the U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, said he expected the Fed to continue lowering rates gradually through the year as conditions dictated. But he cautioned that markets might not react in ways that immediately bring down the costs of longer-term borrowing, including on 30-year mortgages.
If the central bank is too aggressive, it could even have the opposite effect on housing, because rates that are too low could “fan inflation” across the economy, Mr. Martin said. That is why he said the federal government needed to think more holistically, particularly by spurring more home construction nationwide.
“Without a really large build-out in housing units around the country,” Mr. Martin said, “we’re not going to see any decline in home prices because demand is still relatively strong.”
Mr. Trump’s aides have considered such ideas in recent months. Since last year, they have explored how they might leverage federal aid — the grants and tax credits typically reserved for states and localities — to push through changes to regulations and zoning rules. That, in turn, would allow Washington to foster more housing construction at the local level, according to those familiar with the administration’s thinking.
“We have a carrot, and we can have a stick approach as well,” Bill Pulte, the federal housing director, said during an appearance last week on CNBC.
He added, “You’re going to see action that’s going to be taken.”
In a separate post on social media, Mr. Pulte teased some of the focus, saying that builders “who do business with Fannie and Freddie (which is most builders) need to start building out their lot supply, including optioned land which is ‘ready to go’.”
The United States currently faces a housing shortage. To close it, the country would need to build about three million to four million additional homes beyond its normal construction, according to a report from analysts at Goldman Sachs in October. Under Mr. Trump, congressional Republicans most recently used their sprawling tax package to extend a series of federal programs that offer generous tax breaks for housing investment and focus them more on undeveloped communities.
To further ease construction, the president acted on the eve of the new year to quietly suspend tariffs on lumber, furnishings and other imports critical to the housing market. Absent that, a study from the Brookings Institution in October found that the full slate of Mr. Trump’s tariffs could have added $30 billion to building, repairing and maintaining single-family homes and other residences, perhaps contributing to the problem.
Still, Mr. Trump, a former real estate developer, has also expressed an aversion to building too much housing. Speaking to reporters last month, he said that some homeowners, particularly older Americans, had houses that were “very valuable.” The president added that he did not want to undermine them, even as he sought to “make it possible for young people out there and other people to buy.”
“In other words, you create a lot of housing all of a sudden, and it drives the housing prices down,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “Got to be careful with that.”
Targeting those aspiring home buyers, he and his aides have discussed allowing Americans to tap retirement savings and college accounts without penalty to help with down payments. They had also considered allowing Americans to obtain 50-year mortgages, but the White House has cooled on the idea after widespread blowback.
Many of the proposals appear to require Congress, where lawmakers in recent weeks have forged ahead on their own set of housing bills, some of which have the support of both parties. Dennis C. Shea, a housing policy expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said the flurry of activity reflected that “everyone in political leadership is feeling the need to respond to the concern about housing affordability.”
Entering the midterms, Mr. Shea added, “they’re feeling the heat from their constituents.”
Tony Romm is a reporter covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The Times, based in Washington.
The post Facing Political Pressure, Trump Seeks Answer to Rising Housing Costs appeared first on New York Times.
