👋👋 Good morning real estate watchers! Today, we are going to talk about how the Trump Administration wants to declare a housing emergency and make real estate cheap again. But there’s more to shelter affordability than just letting Eric crash on Ivanka’s couch. Is there a burgeoning Make Housing Cheap Again (MHCA) movement? Say it with us now…MAHHHCHA…

But first, here’s what we’ve been paying attention to this week…

1️⃣ Storage Wars: Apartment development has surged to unprecedented levels, fueling a self-storage industry boom, now spanning 2B square feet, with 87% of that inventory built in the last four decades and 547M square feet added in just the previous ten years. (StorageCafe)

2️⃣ Negative Rent Growth: National median rent fell 0.2% in August to $1,400, marking the first monthly decline since January and a 0.9% drop year-over-year—the weakest rent growth since December 2023. Vacancy rates reached a record 7.1% amid an ongoing wave of new multifamily supply, with units taking an average of 29 days to lease, down from a January peak of 37. (ApartmentList)

3️⃣ Trickle Downbuyers: Mortgage rates dipped to 6.56%, the lowest in nearly a year, cutting median monthly payments to $2,593 and nudging pending sales up just 1.6% year-over-year. But with home prices still climbing 1.6%, inventory growth slowing to its weakest pace in 18 months, and buyers waiting for sub-6% rates, the housing market remains a game of cautious negotiations rather than a flood of demand. (Redfin)

4️⃣ Cut Rates, Cut Prices: Mortgage rates slipped on weaker job-openings data and dovish Fed signals, inching closer to Zillow’s forecast of mid-6% by year-end. While affordability remains strained, buyers now enjoy more leverage as inventory builds and 27.4% of listings face price cuts—the highest share since 2018—pushing many metros firmly into neutral or buyer’s market territory. (Zillow)

5️⃣ Listing Limbo: he housing market is idling in a late-summer slowdown, with prices flat year-over-year, homes sitting eight days longer on the market than last year, and inventory up 19.5% year-over-year to 1.1 million active listings, marking the 95th straight week of gains. New listings grew just 0.7%, the weakest since April, leaving buyers facing more stale summer inventory while sellers grapple with affordability-constrained demand. (Realtor.com)

TOP STORY

At a diner better known for hash browns than housing policy, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent leaned across a booth on Labor Day and let slip what could become one of the most sweeping federal interventions in U.S. housing in decades: President Donald Trump may soon declare a national housing emergency.

The declaration, Bessent told Reuters, would be an “all hands on deck” response to what he later described to the Washington Examiner as a crisis that has left millions of Americans struggling to pay rent or buy a home. “We may declare a national housing emergency in the fall,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out what we can do, and we don’t want to step into the business of states, counties, and municipal governments.”

Housing affordability has collapsed to near a 40-year low. Nearly half of renters spend more than 30% of their income on rent, according to Realtor.com, while the U.S. faces a shortfall of about 4.7 million homes. In some markets, affordability is stretched to absurd extremes: “Now, across the country, prices are five times income in places like Boston … and in the high-cost markets in California, they’re 10 times income,” Chris Herbert of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies said last year.

Interest rates have only worsened the situation. Since Trump returned to office in January, mortgage rates have hovered above 6.5%. Even after dipping to 6.56% last week, they remain double the levels Trump promised on the campaign trail, when he vowed to “get mortgage rates down to 3% or less.”

What precisely a “housing emergency” would unleash remains unclear. Under the 1976 National Emergencies Act, the president can bypass Congress using a menu of 137 statutory powers. Trump has already declared 10 such emergencies in his current term, ranging from immigration to tariffs. But legal challenges are common.

This time, the administration is floating several possibilities: cutting closing costs, standardizing building and zoning codes nationwide, and even carving out tariff exemptions for construction materials. Federal land could also be opened for housing development.

Joel Berner, senior economist at Realtor.com, is cautiously optimistic but skeptical about legality: “It remains unclear exactly what kind of emergency measures the administration could take to address housing, or even if using emergency powers in this way is lawful.”

Housing groups aren’t waiting to see if the threat is bluster or breakthrough. Shannon McGahn of the National Association of Realtors (NAR) said in a statement: “If a national emergency is declared, NAR stands ready to work closely with the Administration, Congress and state and local leaders … Bold, coordinated action is needed now to boost housing supply so more families can achieve the American Dream of homeownership and the generational wealth it provides.”

Congress, meanwhile, has been advancing its own effort. The bipartisan ROAD to Housing Act of 2025 (a real page turner!), which passed out of committee unanimously, would create a framework of zoning “best practices” for cities to adopt voluntarily. Whether the White House wants to wait on legislation—or circumvent it altogether—remains to be seen.

Declaring a housing emergency would mark the first such move since the 2008 financial crisis, when collapsing home prices nearly tanked the global economy. Back then, the emergency was too many houses collapsing in value. Now, there are not enough houses. It’s as if America looked at the last housing disaster and said, ‘Okay, but what if we did the opposite… and somehow made it worse?’

The stakes are as much political as economic: the announcement would frame housing as a defining issue heading into the 2026 midterms, just as redistricting battles heat up.

Critics see another example of Trump wielding emergency powers as a political hammer. Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice has called U.S. emergency powers “easy to declare and hard to stop.”

Still, for voters who’ve watched rent checks consume paychecks, the bigger question may not be whether Trump is overreaching but whether anything will actually make housing cheaper.

Until then, Americans may just have to keep waiting and eating diner breakfasts while Washington debates whether the cost of a roof over your head is finally a national emergency.