by Lynn Westmoreland
This past week, Democrats and the mainstream media had their daggers drawn at the Trump administration over high prices for new homes.
Unfortunately, their smear campaign is proving effective. Fewer than two months before the midterm elections, voters are telling pollsters that housing costs are among their top concerns. Voters also say that the administration is tone-deaf to their concerns because, as they put it, mortgages and rents continue to rise.
But the mainstream media’s narrative on Trump’s housing policies contradicts the facts.
At last week’s Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas, HUD Secretary Scott Turner told Bloomberg TV about how the administration has helped Americans move into homes of their own. He’s right. Although inflation remains high for reasons outside of the administration’s control, the Trump administration has still done a remarkably good job of improving the nation’s housing affordability conditions.
Take, for example, what Turner highlighted in his speech: killing the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule.
AFFH was originally implemented by the Obama administration and restored by former President Joe Biden. Under the rule, local governments that accepted federal housing funds had to prepare detailed assessments of their zoning restrictions, distribution of affordable housing, and housing access to opportunity, and then commit to specific, HUD-approved five-year plans to address what the assessment found. Failure to abide by HUD’s terms would lead to a withholding of federal funds.
The end result was that local officials, wary of a multi-year federal planning obligation and the litigation risk of getting it wrong, had an incentive to build less—or at the very least, slow-walk permits and new development out of fear of getting in HUD’s crosshairs and losing their federal money. This brought the housing supply down—and less housing, of course, means higher prices for the homes on the market.
That’s why the Trump administration rightfully said enough is enough. But you won’t hear a peep out of the mainstream media about this.
The White House has rolled back many of the policies that kept construction and loan costs high.
For example, Trump ordered federal agencies to ease up on stormwater and wetlands rules and restricted big investors from scooping up single-family homes. The administration also helped more than 1 million people purchase homes through new Federal Housing Administration programs.
The administration’s policies are working.
Existing home sales rose more than 5 percent to a multi-year high in late 2025, and brighter days are projected to be ahead.
The administration is not stopping here. It’s not getting complacent and knows there’s plenty more work to do to make housing more affordable.
HUD in particular has made it clear that it plans to do more. It put the total regulatory cost around $132,000 for a new home on average, with green-energy building codes adding another $30,000 or more, and will, without question, do more to address this problem.
Given the recent congressional momentum to stop housing conglomerates from putting much of the available supply behind an insider paywall, the odds are high that the Trump Department of Justice will also soon be getting involved in the housing affordability push.
As The Daily Caller recently explained, “the nation’s largest brokerage, Compass, and the dominant multiple listing service (MLS) in the Chicago area—Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED)—are working in cahoots to wall off listings behind a private, pay-to-see network.” Obviously, this reduces competition and raises the costs of buying a home. Doing away with that private paywall would put more homes in front of more buyers and help the administration open the market to more prospective homeowners.
Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-Wis.), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, sent letters to both companies asking them to respond by Aug. 5, but per The Caller, Compass did not respond by the Aug. 5 deadline.
The Trump DOJ has investigated housing behemoths before, and now that Congress has teed up a low-hanging fruit investigation for Stanley Woodward’s Antitrust Division, it seems like only a matter of time before the department conducts yet another pro-consumer probe with the goal of opening the housing market for consumers.
The media may want voters to believe that President Trump has ignored the housing crisis, but his record tells a different story. He has made housing affordability a priority by cutting costly regulations, expanding access to homeownership, increasing supply, and preventing Wall Street investors from crowding families out of the market. There is still plenty of work to be done, especially as Americans continue to feel the effects of stubborn inflation and high borrowing costs. But those broader economic pressures should not obscure the progress the administration has made or its willingness to confront the government mandates and private barriers that make buying a home more expensive.
If Trump continues down this path, more Americans will have a fair shot at achieving the American dream of homeownership. That’s the real story that the media should be telling.
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Lynn Westmoreland is a former member of Congress from Georgia who served on the Financial Services’ Subcommittee on Insurance, Housing and Community Opportunity.
