Former Rep. Mike Rogers, who is running for Senate in Michigan, has rolled out a housing affordability plan that he hopes can help win over young homebuyers struggling to break into the market.
Rogers, a Republican who served in Congress from 2001 to 2015, including as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told the Washington Examiner during an interview that he has heard a lot about housing affordability on the campaign trail. Rogers is running for the open Senate seat in Michigan in this year’s midterm elections.
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“Most of these conversations start with people saying, ‘My kids walk [up] to me and say, you know, I just don’t have the same kind of opportunity here in Michigan, I’m going to have to leave the state,’” Rogers said.
“So I say, we’re going to change that when we get to the United States Senate,” he said.
Rogers said that what he has heard from young people — including in his extended family — is that, because of their lower monthly income, there is a pretty narrow band of houses within their reach, and when those hit the market, it is “outrageously competitive.”
Rogers said that when he examined the challenges facing prospective homebuyers, one big hurdle was saving up for a down payment.
One key part of his plan is expanding 529 savings accounts, which are tax-advantaged investment accounts that help families save for education costs. Rogers proposes expanding those to include down payments for first-time homebuyers.
“Because not everybody’s going to college, not everybody finishes college, not everybody wants to go directly into college,” he said. “They deserve a way to save for that down payment in a way that some people are using it to pay for college.”
He also pointed out that one doesn’t necessarily exclude the other. For instance, someone could use the 529 account to help pay for college and then keep it open and use it to start saving for a down payment.
Rogers’s plan also includes allowing young homebuyers to pay their first year’s property tax using their 529 accounts as well as eliminating transfer fees and ensuring the 529 plans don’t count against private mortgage insurance eligibility.
Rogers, who previously ran for Senate in 2024 against Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) and lost by a 19,000-vote margin, said he also intends to help with building credit. He pointed out that renters can hurt their credit by not paying rent, but can’t build credit by making timely rent payments over time, something he sees as contradictory.
“Makes no sense to me whatsoever — so we’re going to make sure that those rent payments count towards your credit,” Rogers said.
His affordable housing plan also calls for people to defer their student loans while they are saving for a down payment for a home.
Additionally, Rogers said another pillar of his housing plan is slashing regulatory barriers that make housing more expensive. He wants the federal government to partner with states to cut red tape in the housing market. He did not provide any specific reforms, though.
The Home Builders Association of Michigan estimates that just under $94,000 of the cost of a new home is spent on complying with regulations, building codes, and land-use rules. The group also estimates that for every $1,000 increase, nearly 3,400 households are priced out of the market.
“They’re just adding these needless regulatory environments for housing — they’re not any safer, they’re not any better, they’re just a lot more expensive,” Rogers said.
The last component of Rogers’s plan concerns housing supply, which many economists point to as the biggest factor behind housing becoming so unaffordable.
The former congressman said he wants to see home construction incentivized through the creation of residential housing zones where 100% of construction in these zones would be completely free of federal taxes for the builders.
“They’re going to be in areas where there is opportunity for builders to go in and either fully remodel or build homes on empty lots or others in places like Detroit, or Pontiac, or Flint that has some pretty poor housing stock — this has the ability to regenerate it,” Rogers said.
He said that this would give builders an enormous incentive to go in and build up housing stock in communities they might not normally take a risk on.
“More home ownership in those neighborhoods means less crime, it means better schools, better community, better sense of community, I mean it has all the positives,” Rogers said.
Rogers said that he hopes some of these housing proposals would garner bipartisan support in the Senate.
And this year has been a big year for bipartisanship in the housing space.
Earlier this week, the Housing for the 21st Century Act passed the House in an overwhelming 390-9 vote. The bill would ease some federal housing regulations to boost supply and would also nudge state and local governments to loosen land-use rules that make it difficult to build housing.
The Senate previously passed its own bipartisan housing legislation, the Road to Housing Act, last year.
“Anything that we can do to make home ownership easier, I’m gonna be for,” Rogers said when asked about the pieces of legislation.
One thing that isn’t in the dueling bipartisan housing bills currently in Congress is a proposal by the Trump administration to ban large institutional investors such as Blackstone from buying single-family homes.
Proponents of banning major firms from buying single-family homes, many of whom are on the Left and populist Right, argue that those investors are crowding the market for homebuyers. Others in the housing space, though, say that is not the case and that the policy could backfire by making housing more expensive for some.
“I do worry about them buying and holding large swaths … of individual resident real estate,” Rogers said.
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The Senate banking committee is where a lot of housing legislation originates from, and while Rogers said he would love to get a seat on the banking committee if he wins in November, he thinks his housing agenda can get done no matter where he is.
“I think I can do this, whatever committee I’m on, it, this is about using your ability to build a coalition around an important issue and get it done,” Rogers said.
