Two years after Donald Trump won the presidency amid widespread frustration over the cost of living, housing affordability remains one of the defining pressures on American households heading into the 2026 midterm elections. The White House has not been silent on the issue. It has issued executive orders, directed the country’s two giant mortgage enterprises to buy bonds, and promoted factory-built housing and cheaper refinancing. Yet, on the eve of voting, the headline numbers point in the opposite direction from the one the administration promised: mortgage rates are back above 7 percent, the income needed to afford a typical home has risen sharply, and several of the boldest ideas floated by the White House have not materialised at all.
That gap between action and outcome is the central fact of the housing story. It does not mean nothing has happened, and it does not mean the administration’s policies have had no effect. It means that the tools available to a president are limited, that some of the forces pushing rates higher sit outside the White House altogether, and that a voter judging the administration on whether buying a home has become easier will find, on the latest data, that it has become harder. This article sets out what the White House tried, what the market did in response, and what remains unresolved, using the figures published in the days before Election Day.
Trump Housing Agenda in One Picture
The broadest summary comes from a November 2 assessment of the housing market, which described a market that is, in its words, paralysed: buyers pulling back, builders growing more pessimistic, and homes changing hands at a pace near 30-year lows for three years. Homebuilding has not kept pace with demand since the financial crash of 2008 weakened the construction industry. At the same time, home prices have kept climbing each month to record-high levels, while elevated mortgage rates have pushed monthly payments higher for anyone who needs to borrow.
The affordability arithmetic is stark. As of the third quarter of 2026, the average household must earn $115,600 a year to afford the typical cost of housing, according to Oxford Economics figures cited in that assessment. Five years earlier, the required income was $66,200. That is a rise of about 75 percent in half a decade. No single executive order can reverse a shift of that size in a few months, and no voter needs a detailed knowledge of housing finance to feel its effect: it shows up in a larger monthly payment, a smaller home than expected, or a decision to keep renting for another year.
There are, however, some brighter spots in the same picture. Rents have stabilised nationally over the past few years, according to Yonah Freemark, a principal research associate in the Housing and Communities Division at the Urban Institute, partly because increased apartment construction between 2020 and 2024 relieved some demand pressure. That matters for renters, but it does not solve the ownership problem, which is where the administration’s promises were concentrated. A renter who can afford the rent may still be a long way from affording a mortgage at above 7 percent.
Mortgage Rates in 2026: From Below 6% to Above 7%
The path of mortgage rates during 2026 explains much of the frustration. In January, Trump directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises that underpin much of the American mortgage market, to buy $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities in an effort to push rates lower. For a brief period, the move appeared to help. Rates dipped below 6 percent in February for the first time since 2022, when the Federal Reserve began raising rates to fight post-pandemic inflation, and hopes rose that cheaper borrowing would ease the affordability squeeze.
The reprieve did not last. Mortgage rates climbed again after the United States began its war with Iran, and they have remained elevated since. In recent weeks they surged back above 7 percent, hitting a three-year high of 7.4 percent last month, before easing slightly to 7.24 percent in the week ending October 29, according to Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey. That latest figure was down from 7.32 percent the previous week and was the lowest reading of October, but it was still well above the 6.17 percent recorded a year earlier. The 15-year fixed rate stood at 6.60 percent in the same survey, down from 6.68 percent the week before, against 5.41 percent a year earlier.
To put those percentages in household terms, the difference between a rate near 6 percent and a rate above 7 percent is hundreds of dollars a month on a typical loan, and tens of thousands of dollars over the life of a mortgage. That is why a relatively small movement in the headline rate can change whether a family qualifies for a loan at all, or whether it must settle for a smaller home, a different neighbourhood, or a longer wait. It is also why the administration’s early success in pushing rates down, followed by their return above 7 percent, feels to many buyers like a promise made and then lost, even though the forces behind the reversal were not all within the president’s control.
Mortgage rates are tied to the 10-year Treasury yield, which moves with investors’ expectations for inflation, economic growth and the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate policy. In recent months, according to the November 2 assessment, the bond market has been unsettled by renewed inflation fears, an oil-price shock linked to the Iran conflict, rising federal deficits and a surge in investment in artificial intelligence. None of those factors is set by an executive order. A president can influence sentiment and can direct agencies to act, but cannot simply order the bond market to price a 30-year loan more cheaply. That structural limit runs through the whole housing story.
What the White House Has Actually Done
Most of the administration’s housing work has come through executive orders rather than legislation. Trump, who spent decades as a real estate developer before entering politics, said on the 2024 campaign trail that his plan for housing would rely primarily on lowering interest rates. At a cabinet meeting at the start of 2026, he returned to that theme, saying his administration would keep homeowners wealthy, keep home prices up, and make it easier to buy by getting interest rates down. The tension in that statement is worth noting: policies that keep prices high help existing owners, but make entry harder for first-time buyers, and the administration has at times seemed to be speaking to both groups at once.
In October, Trump signed a further executive order directing federal agencies to ease the burden of mortgage insurance and refinance costs, among other measures. That order, titled Decreasing Housing Costs for the American People, was the subject of an earlier, narrower White House housing report, which examined its specific mechanisms for cancelling mortgage insurance, broadening cheaper alternatives to title insurance on refinances, cutting rates on certain direct federal home loans and promoting factory-built housing. The important qualification from that earlier report still applies: the order is a directive to agencies, with named mechanisms and deadlines, not an immediate cut in anyone’s monthly payment. Savings, if they arrive, will arrive through implementation, not on the day of signing.
The administration has also acted on the investor side of the market. A separate executive order banned large institutional investors from buying single-family homes, a move presented as protecting homes for ordinary buyers. Experts cited in the November assessment were sceptical about its scale, arguing that it would not significantly increase the supply of homes on the market, because large investors account for only part of purchases and because the deeper constraint is the total number of homes built. A policy can be popular in principle and modest in effect at the same time, and this one appears to fall into that category.
The White House’s public defence of its record has been firm. A White House spokesperson, Davis Ingle, said the president had been laser-focused on making housing more affordable, would not stop fighting until homeownership was within reach for every American, and continued to sign bold executive orders while calling on Congress to pass further legislation. That is a statement of intent and effort, not a measurement of results, and it should be read as such. Voters can accept that the administration has acted, while still judging that the market has not yet delivered the affordability it was promised.
What Did Not Materialise, and the One Law That Did
Some of the most eye-catching housing ideas discussed by the White House never became policy. A 50-year mortgage, which would lower monthly payments by spreading them over a much longer period while greatly increasing total interest paid, was floated but did not materialise. So did the idea of portable mortgages, which would allow homeowners with lower rates to take their existing loan to a new property when they move, rather than giving it up and borrowing again at a higher rate. Both ideas would have addressed a real problem, the so-called lock-in effect, in which owners with low pandemic-era rates are reluctant to sell because moving means borrowing at a much higher rate. Neither, however, was turned into a working programme before the midterms.
The one exception to the pattern of executive action came through Congress. The ROAD to Housing Act passed this summer with broad bipartisan support. The bill included measures to increase housing supply and a provision limiting large investor purchases of single-family homes, which codified into law one of Trump’s earlier executive orders. Trump, however, allowed the measure to become law without his signature, rather than signing it or vetoing it, and at the time described the housing bill as a big yawn and of minor importance, according to the November assessment. That reaction is difficult to square with the claim that housing is a top priority, and critics have pointed to it as evidence that the issue has featured relatively little in the administration’s public messaging over the past two years, despite the executive orders.
There is a further complication that the administration’s supporters rarely emphasise and its critics frequently raise. The National Association of Home Builders has said that the White House’s tariff regime has added to the cost of building housing, and that deportations have slowed home-building projects in many areas that rely on an immigrant construction workforce. Those are claims from an industry association, reported in the November assessment, not findings of a court or an independent audit, and the administration disputes the idea that its wider economic policies are the main driver of housing costs. But the claims point to a genuine policy tension: measures pursued for other reasons, such as trade and immigration enforcement, can raise costs in a sector where the administration is simultaneously trying to lower them. A housing agenda cannot be judged in isolation from the rest of the government’s programme.
Why Washington Cannot Fix Supply Alone
Even a fully committed federal housing programme would face a structural limit. Zoning and permitting decisions, which determine where homes can be built and how quickly, are made mainly by local and state governments, not by Washington. Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin, made that point in the November assessment, noting that in places that have been friendly to builders and have allowed supply to meet demand, prices have fallen and affordability has improved. Austin, Texas, was cited as an example: the city expanded its housing stock by roughly 30 percent between 2015 and 2024, according to Pew figures, and home prices there have fallen from their 2022 peak.
The national data underline how far the rest of the country is from that example. Pending home sales fell to a record low in September, in data going back to 2001, according to the National Association of Realtors. New home construction dropped to a four-month low, according to Census Bureau data, as elevated borrowing costs continued to weigh on the market. Homebuilder sentiment sank to a 14-year low in September, according to the National Association of Home Builders. Together, those figures describe a market in which buyers are waiting, builders are cautious, and the pipeline of new homes is not expanding fast enough to relieve pressure on prices.
That is why analysts quoted in the assessment warned that the housing market’s issues will take a long time to solve. A federal order can change a fee, a form or a deadline. It cannot, on its own, rezone a suburb, approve a subdivision or train a construction workforce. Those steps require local decisions, private investment and time, and they are sensitive to interest rates in a way that makes the current rate environment doubly damaging: high rates discourage buyers and also make it more expensive for builders to finance new projects.
What Buyers Should Watch Next
For households, the practical questions after the midterms are narrower than the political argument. The first is whether mortgage rates stay above 7 percent into 2027. The Mortgage Bankers Association, as reported in late October, expected the 30-year rate to remain above 7 percent through 2027, and Fannie Mae’s October outlook pointed in a similar direction. Those are forecasts from industry bodies, not guarantees, and they could be wrong if inflation eases, if the Iran conflict de-escalates, or if bond markets settle. But they suggest that buyers should not plan on a rapid return to the below-6-percent rates briefly seen in February.
The second question is whether the October executive order on mortgage insurance and refinancing produces measurable savings once agencies implement it. That will depend on the rules agencies write, the deadlines they meet, and whether lenders pass any savings on. Voters and journalists should look for specific implementation dates and for evidence in actual closing costs, rather than treating the signing of the order as the saving itself.
The third question is whether Congress, whatever its composition after November 3, returns to housing legislation. The ROAD to Housing Act showed that bipartisan housing legislation is possible, even if the president’s reaction to it was lukewarm. A new Congress could build on that act, revisit the 50-year mortgage or portable mortgage ideas in a more workable form, or focus on supply measures such as federal land, zoning incentives and support for factory-built housing. None of that can be predicted before results are known, and none of it should be promised to buyers as if it were already law.
The fairest summary, on the evidence available before voting, is therefore a mixed one. The White House has acted, repeatedly, through executive orders, and it can point to a brief period in early 2026 when rates fell below 6 percent. It cannot yet point to a sustained improvement in affordability. Rates are back above 7 percent, the income bar for a typical home has risen to $115,600, sales are near historic lows, and builders are at their gloomiest in 14 years. Whether the next Congress and the next phase of implementation change that picture will be one of the clearest tests of the administration’s second term, and it will be measured not in orders signed, but in monthly payments actually paid.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from CNN, Freddie Mac and WRE News.