President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 promising to tackle America’s housing affordability crisis, arguing that deregulation, new home construction and mass deportations of undocumented immigrants would help expand housing supply and lower costs. Almost exactly one year ago, Trump told Americans that he would expand homeownership to millions more families during his second administration, allowing them to step onto the property ladder despite the challenges of still-climbing home prices, stubbornly high mortgage rates and rising homeowners insurance premiums and property taxes. I was a real estate developer.
I know what it is,” Trump said in video remarks to a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) event on the National Mall on September 8, 2025. The administration has acted on several parts of its housing agenda, particularly deregulation, immigration enforcement and restrictions on institutional investors. However, those measures have yet to translate into a substantial increase in homebuilding.
Although the number of homes on the market is modestly higher than when Trump took office, much of that inventory growth appears to have come from weaker demand and properties taking longer to sell, rather than a surge in newly built homes. Single-family housing starts have recently fallen to their lowest level in more than three years. Newsweek contacted the White House for comment by email on Wednesday.
When Trump returned to the Oval Office, the housing market was still grappling with years of underbuilding that contributed to the current shortage in the country, estimated between 2.8 million and 10 million units. Inventory had begun recovering from COVID-19 pandemic-era lows, especially in states like Florida and Texas that led a boom in new construction, but remained below pre-pandemic norms in many parts of the country. According to Redfin, there were 1,400,188 active listings of homes for sale nationwide in January 2025.
By December, that figure had risen modestly to 1,473,056. New listings moved in the opposite direction. A total of 383,208 homes were newly listed in January, compared with 376,281 in December.
Construction data also showed little momentum. In January 2025, the Census Bureau reported seasonally adjusted annual rates of 1.5 million building permits, 1.4 million housing starts and 1.6 million housing completions. Single-family housing starts, which account for the largest share of homebuilding in the country, fell 8.4 percent from the previous month, at a rate of 993,000.
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