Trump’s Executive Order on Housing: Cutting Through the Spin

Whether you support or oppose President Donald Trump, it makes sense to activate your bullshit meter. Now.

Really, you should keep it on any time you hear from politicians. Virtually everything they say is laden with spin.

I write about New York, so my columns are usually about Democrats, who run the city and state. But spin and exaggeration are just as prevalent, if not more so, from Republicans and socialists. (Incidentally, Trump was a registered Democrat from 2001 to 2009.)

Trump’s talent for showmanship and marketing, combined with his casual relationship with the truth, makes skepticism especially important.

Take his executive order to reduce housing costs and other expenses. It blamed the Biden administration for “destructive policies [that] inflicted an historic inflation crisis on the American people,” citing numbers from a propaganda-style report that did not mention housing.

“I hereby order the heads of all executive departments and agencies to deliver emergency price relief, consistent with applicable law, to the American people and increase the prosperity of the American worker,” the order says. “This shall include pursuing appropriate actions to: lower the cost of housing and expand housing supply…”

If you’re looking for specifics, don’t bother. There were none.

There were none during the campaign either. Trump’s campaign did claim that mass deportations would lower home prices by reducing competition for housing, but any effect would be negligible. Trump also pledged, as Kamala Harris did, to make federal land available for housing development.

“These zones will be ultralow tax and ultralow regulation,” Trump promised at a September campaign event, according to Realtor.com. “We’re going to open up our country to building homes inexpensively so young people and other people can buy homes.”

But as that article noted, there is no significant federal land where people want to work and live.

Chances are, Trump’s agencies will find that the forces driving up housing costs have already been targeted by the Biden administration.

The plans that came before

That link, to the Housing Supply Action Plan announced in May 2022, is courtesy of the Wayback Machine. The original whitehouse.com web page was taken down the day after Trump was sworn in.

Biden’s plan included “legislative and administrative actions that will help close America’s housing supply shortfall in five years, starting with the creation and preservation of hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units in the next three years.”

Together with such policies as rental assistance and downpayment assistance, the Biden plan was supposed to deliver “more affordable rents and more attainable homeownership for Americans in every community.”

Technically, that was true, but it was referring only to participants in those programs, not Americans in general.

The next Biden claim was almost Trumpian: “This is the most comprehensive all-of-government effort to close the housing supply shortfall in history.”

Part of it was PRO Housing, for Pathways for Removing Obstacles. The program doesn’t directly remove obstacles to housing, such as apartment bans, because localities and states control them.

Instead, PRO Housing offers carrots to communities “actively taking steps to remove barriers to affordable housing,” notably “outdated zoning, land use policies, or regulations; inefficient procedures; gaps in available resources for development; deteriorating or inadequate infrastructure,” and more.

If Trump’s housing secretary, Scott Turner, continues that program, he would surely rebrand it. But the points to remember are that the housing supply problem only exists in high-demand areas (think New York City, not West Texas) and is caused by local restrictions on development.

Trump, as president in 2020, endorsed those restrictions when he repealed the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule.

“I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood,” Trump tweeted at the time. “Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!”