...
By Giulia Carbonaro
Senior Reporter
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
President Donald Trump is considering declaring a national housing emergency to address the affordability crisis that has pushed homeownership out of reach for millions of Americans, according to U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
The announcement, which would be the latest in a series of national emergencies declared by Trump since his inauguration in January, could come as soon as this fall, Bessent told the Washington Examiner earlier this week.
"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," Bessent said. "We may declare a national housing emergency in the fall."
Read More on News
But housing experts are skeptical of the effect this move from the Trump administration could have on the U.S. market.
"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," Joel Berner, a senior economist at Realtor.com, told Newsweek.
Why Would Trump Declare an Emergency?
The U.S. housing market is currently in the midst of an affordability crisis caused by a combination of sky-high home prices, historically elevated mortgage rates, and other rising costs including property taxes, homeowners association fees, and home insurance premiums.
Limited inventory during the pandemic homebuying frenzy, when mortgage rates as low as 2-3 percent sparked a nationwide surge in demand, led to home prices rocketing by more than 40 percent between 2019 and 2022, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Three years after mortgage rates shot up to 6-7 percent as a result of the Federal Reserve's aggressive rate-hiking campaign to fight inflation, putting a dampener on demand, home prices nationwide remain much higher than before the pandemic. As of July, according to Redfin, the median sale price of a typical U.S. home was $443,141, up 1.1 percent from a year earlier.
...
Mortgage rates have also remained stubbornly high. As of the week ending on August 28, the average 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage was 6.56 percent, according to Freddie Mac.
Not only Americans are struggling to buy homes—with sales down by 1.6 percent in July compared to a year earlier and sellers outnumbering buyers by more than 500,000, according to Redfin data—but those who already own a property carry a heavier financial burden to maintain it than they did before the pandemic.
Property taxes have risen in nearly every major U.S. metropolitan area over the past five years as a result of the rise home values, according to a Redfin report. Home insurance premiums have surpassed 40 percent over the past six years, according to LendingTree, as more frequent and more severe natural disasters increase the risk of paying higher claims for carriers.
What Does Declaring a Housing Emergency Do?
Over the past seven months, Trump has declared a national emergency at the southern border, an energy emergency, and an economic emergency—among others—proving that it is a tool he often favors to enact his agenda.
A national emergency can be declared by a U.S. president at any time without it being approved by Congress. It allows the president to act quickly on matters of immediate urgency, without sending legislation to Congress for approval.
Legally, there is no clear definition of what constitutes an emergency under the 1976 National Emergency Act—it is left to the discretion of the president.
"Trump has been using emergency powers because they are legal powers granted to him by Congress as long as certain conditions are met. So in some ways, they are less legally controversial than his executive orders that have simply purported to cancel the effects of statutes enacted by Congress," Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University, told Newsweek.
But Trump has been stretching "the truth on the ground" to meet the conditions that the statute requires before he can use those powers, Scheppele said, adding, "That is where his use of executive powers is alarming."
Scheppele said Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., where Trump deployed national troops after declaring an emergency, "were not in chaos" as the president said. "The U.S. was not in an energy emergency on Day 1 of his presidency when he signed the executive order to use the Army Corps of Engineers to build pipelines," she said. "He has discovered a huge range of additional powers by claiming that conditions exist that are simply not true."
Several other analysts and lawmakers have found Trump's use of national emergencies controversial, and, in the case of the White House administration's sweeping tariff policies, there has been pushback in federal courts.
But declaring a national housing emergency could be politically important for the Trump administration and the Republican Party, as affordability has proven to be an urgent issue for many Americans.
Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, nearly a third of voters told Redfin that housing affordability was likely to affect their pick.
If it happens, the emergency is likely to come ahead of the 2026 midterms. It would be the first such instance of one being declared since the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008.
How Is This Going To Help Americans?
At the heart of the current housing affordability crisis there is a chronic lack of supply across the U.S., which has been developing and deepening for the past two decades. According to some estimates, the U.S. market currently needs around 4 million more homes.
Elena Chachko, an assistant professor of law at Berkeley Law School, told Newsweek, "A declaration of national emergency or a state of war can trigger the approximately 150 provisions scattered across the U.S. code the delegate emergency powers to the executive. IEEPA is a prominent example and probably the most often-used emergency statute. It gives the President a broad suite of economic powers he can invoke in the event of a national emergency that has a substantial foreign element."
It is unclear, however, how the White House would use the powers given to it by the declaration of an emergency. Among the moves already proposed by the Trump administration to improve the situation and boost supply are the use of federal land for building new homes and the elimination of regulations hindering new construction.
"The best ways the administration could make an impact are by encouraging the building and purchase of homes. Overriding, or at least standardizing, local laws on zoning would be a great step toward allowing builders to deliver the inventory needed by the American people in the places where it is needed," Berner said.
"It is often the case that regulation gets in the way of building homes in high-demand areas, so the costs of housing in these places—many of them in the Northeast—continues to soar," he added.
"Streamlining the permitting process and putting fewer restrictions on builders would be a great way to augment home inventory in locations that need it the most. This would have the best long-term impact, but the federal government could also juice the housing market in the short run by making it easier to buy a home," Berner said.
"This could include offering a tax credit to offset closing costs. The upfront expense of buying a home is often what discourages many would-be first-time homebuyers, so relief there could help them make a larger down payment and minimize their monthly costs going forward."
Bessent provided no details of exactly what measures the government could take to address the crisis, but he suggested that they might involve standardized local buildings and zoning codes and lower closing costs.
"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," Bessent told the Washington Examiner. "I think everything is on the table."
Update 9/3/25, 5:26 a.m. ET: This article was updated with comments from Joel Berner, Kim Lane Scheppele, and Elena Chachko.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines