Can cutting red tape make housing affordable again?
President Donald Trump says the U.S. housing affordability crisis can be improved by cutting regulations, speeding up approvals, and making it easier to build more homes. The article notes that the administration points to actions by HUD and the FHA-such as reducing mortgage approval timelines and lowering FHA mortgage insurance premiums-as evidence the approach is working.
Housing affordability remains a major voter concern heading into the 2026 midterms, and while home prices have cooled, high mortgage rates and years of price growth still keep ownership out of reach for many.
A former FHA and HUD commissioner, Frank Cassidy, argues the administration is treating housing agencies “like a business,” aiming for profitability and faster processing to move more mortgages through the system. He frames affordability as supply-focused: expanding housing requires lowering building costs by reducing bureaucratic barriers.
however, some conservatives argue that simply increasing supply may not be enough. Oren Cass warns that political incentives often protect both low prices and high home values, and supports measures to restrict large institutional investors from buying single-family homes to prevent bidding-driven price increases. Others, like Howard Husock, contend builders are producing larger, higher-priced homes rather than sufficient starter homes.
The piece emphasizes that affordability is influenced by many factors beyond federal regulations-investor demand, local zoning, home size choices, and the political difficulty of lowering prices without harming existing homeowners. It also recalls that Trump explored declaring a national housing emergency to accelerate construction, but Cassidy says the administration ultimately favored its deregulatory strategy rather.
President Donald Trump has spent much of his second term arguing that the solution to the U.S.’s housing affordability crisis is straightforward: cut government regulations, streamline approvals, and make it easier to build.
The administration points to a series of deregulatory actions at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Federal Housing Administration as evidence that the strategy is already working. But even some conservatives question whether slashing red tape alone can solve a housing crisis decades in the making.
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Housing affordability remains one of voters’ top economic concerns heading into the 2026 midterm elections. While home prices have cooled from pandemic-era peaks, elevated mortgage rates and years of price appreciation have kept homeownership out of reach for much of the public.
Former Federal Housing Commissioner Frank Cassidy, who recently left his dual roles at the FHA and HUD to return to the commercial mortgage banking industry, argues the administration’s approach is already producing results.
“I think President Trump brings a unique role,” Cassidy said. “He understands housing, he understands real estate, he’s a builder, he understands development.”
The FHA insures private mortgages for first-time homebuyers, lower-income borrowers, and multifamily housing developments. The agency’s portfolio totals roughly $1.6 trillion across more than 8 million mortgages.
Cassidy said the president directed housing officials to run their agencies “like a business.” For FHA, that meant being profitable. It also meant reducing the timeline for mortgage insurance approvals in order to move more “deals” through the federal queue.
Over the past year, according to Cassidy, the FHA cut closing times for single-family homes from between six and 12 months to between 90 and 120 days. The agency also reduced the mortgage insurance premium by 25 basis points, lowering the cost of construction, refinancing, and purchasing all multifamily homes covered by the program.
For administration officials, those changes represent a broader philosophy: housing affordability begins with increasing supply.
“I think that the way to boost supply is to lower cost,” Cassidy said. “Ultimately, we need to bring more supply online to make housing more affordable, and the problem is that it’s been expensive to build new housing.”
That means reducing bureaucratic barriers, which Cassidy describes as making new development more expensive and time-consuming.
The White House is also backing efforts to craft a bipartisan housing bill in Congress to incentivize state and local governments to revamp zoning and development laws in hopes of spurring a boom in home construction.
But some conservatives argue that increasing supply is only part of the problem.
“We have a political class that promises both low housing prices and high home values,” said Oren Cass, co-founder of American Compass. “Unfortunately, those two are the same thing, and so unless you’re willing to talk about reducing home values, you are not going to have lower housing prices.”
That’s why Cass is supportive of a provision within the housing bill to prohibit big institutional investors, such as BlackRock, from buying single-family homes. The argument is that Wall Street funds can outbid individuals, thereby inflating the cost of housing stock.
Others argue the problem is not simply how much housing gets built, but what type of housing enters the market. Howard Husock, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has argued that builders continue to favor larger, higher-priced homes over starter homes.
“The median new house today is more than 2100 square feet,” Husock wrote in February. “The typical house lot is more than 9,000 square feet.”
The competing arguments highlight the challenge of lowering housing costs.
While the Trump administration has focused on reducing federal barriers to construction, critics argue affordability is also shaped by investor demand, local zoning restrictions, the types of homes builders choose to construct, and the political difficulty of lowering prices without hurting existing homeowners.
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The debate over how to address the housing shortage has followed Trump throughout his second term.
Last fall, Trump reportedly even considered declaring a national housing emergency, the first such declaration issued by the executive branch since the end of World War II, to speed up construction. However, Cassidy said the administration ultimately concluded its deregulatory agenda offered a more effective path.
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