this meeting could’ve been an interest rate cut

So Davos happened. And on a stage usually reserved for global finance and vague optimism, trump decided to talk about his plans for housing. Big plans! Billion dollar plans! Executive order plans! And a lot of them sound like they make housing more affordable: push rates down, cap credit card interest to 10%, have the government buy mortgage bonds (which, to be fair, did actually work for almost a whole week).

He also pledged to go after institutional buyers* of single-family homes, framing Wall Street as the reason behind your last rejected offer and the heartbreak that followed. A very satisfying story, as most fiction tends to be. America should not become a nation of renters! Cue the applause.

*Except the policy gives a pass to developers building entire rental neighborhoods, which naturally means… more renters. A very efficient path to exactly where you said you didn’t want to go.

The executive order doesn’t even fully ban these firms, plus they still make up a small share of the market (he says 10%, the facts say 1%, what’s an extra zero between billionaire friends?). Still, the message landed emotionally. If you’ve never lost an offer to a mysterious all-cash buyer, were you ever really in the market?

The same people who want housing to be “affordable” also really, really do not want prices to fall, because that would upset homeowners who like their equity very much, thank you. Which is politically convenient but executionally messy if affordability is the actual goal. You can’t both protect high values and make things meaningfully cheaper without some trade-offs showing up.

So it’s a lot of big promises built on an impossible premise: making homes easier to buy without letting them get cheaper. A sentence that pretty much explains the whole thing.

bi bi bi-partisan

Now for the surprising part. The House just passed the Housing for the 21st Century Act by a 390–9 vote (a unicorn sighting in 2026 politics!). By some miracle, our deeply polarized lawmakers have finally found one basic idea they can actually agree on: America needs more actual homes. Shocking no one who’s ever met supply and demand.

We’re short about 4+ million homes, and even if we get serious now, it could still take a decade to dig ourselves out. Builders have been starting around 1.4 million homes a year, versus over 2 million in past decades, back when the country was even smaller. Yikes. As a result, home prices are up about 88% over the last decade. Great for anyone who already owns. A test of character for anyone trying to buy.

So this bill goes after supply instead of pretending we can mortgage-product our way into affordability. A big part of how we got here is regulation, which makes up 25% of construction costs. A truly impressive way to make homes super expensive before anyone even breaks ground.

The unglamorous fix is very boring: faster permits, simpler zoning, streamlined reviews, and even pre-approved designs. It also gives manufactured and modular housing a long-overdue makeover and helps community banks fund more local projects.

Will this make homes cheap overnight? Nope. Labor is still tight. Materials are still pricey. Zoning fights still happen in very passionate school gyms. But for once, lawmakers are actually agreeing that the affordability crisis is more of an oops-we-forgot-to-build-houses problem.

All this time, when they could’ve just read my newsletter.

the 3% rate is no longer a personality trait

Homeowners have been in a very serious, borderline-toxic, long-term relationship with their houses. Sellers at the end of 2025 had been in their homes an average of 8.6 years, up from 4.2 years in 2000. For the past few years, the housing market has been held hostage by a single, tiny number: 3%. Millions of homeowners in every major metro looked at their mortgage and basically decided, “I live here now. Forever.”

But things might finally be shifting. Homeowners with 6%+ mortgage rates now outnumber the very comfortable sub-3% crowd for the first time since 2020, meaning fewer people are emotionally attached to their dreamy pandemic rate. About 62% of buyers last year paid under list price, the highest share since 2019.

Which means the market might, just maybe, quite possibly, be getting ready to move again.