Report lays bare dire outlook for housing as affordability crunch continues
The US is short 10 million homes, a White House report highlighting efforts to boost homebuilding and ease the national housing crisis showed.
The 2026 Economic Report of the President proposed slashing red tape as a way of turbocharging construction and bolstering the economy to winnow down that shortage, which is steeper than most experts had previously indicated.
That analysis, released by the Council of Economic Advisers, underlined a sharp drop-off in home construction after the global financial meltdown of 2007-08 – sparked by risky mortgage lending – as a key reason for the current gap.
“If homebuilding the growth of the single-family housing stock had continued at their historical pace instead of falling dramatically after 2008, there would be 10 million or more additional single-family homes today,” the report indicated.
The housing crisis has also been worsened by huge price appreciation since 2000, the report said, with growth in property values far outstripping wage increases and combining with rising interest rates since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic to worsen the affordability outlook for buyers.
Excessive regulation adds over $100,000 in building costs, the White House economists argued – and they say removing that so-called “bureaucrat tax” could lead to construction of more than 31 million homes.
The report described the Trump administration’s approach to housing as “a new posture of private-sector-driven demand and healthy supply unleashed by deregulation, pro-growth tax relief, and America First trade.”
It credited those policies with putting downward pressure on 10-year Treasury yields and mortgage rates, although both have been on a steady increase in recent weeks amid the ongoing war with Iran.
On January 30, 2025, the average 30-year fixed rate sat at 6.95%. Last week, it was 6.37%, according to Freddie Mac. That’s a sizable drop – but still smaller than the “nearly… full percentage point” decline touted by the report’s authors.
The report also mentioned President Trump’s executive order to ban institutional investors from purchasing additional single-family homes and reduction by Fannie Mae and Freddie of multifamily mortgage insurance premiums to their statutory minimum.
Housing affordability has emerged as a hot-button issue since the beginning of Trump’s second term as president in January last year.
A Brookings study at the end of 2025 highlighted the growing challenges facing US homeowners seeing their income swallowed up by rising housing costs. “One-third of the American middle class cannot afford the cost of basic necessities as of 2023,” that report said.
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