President Donald Trump’s allies seek to augment immigration enforcement and housing construction as a solution to address America’s housing market crisis.
Almost a year into his second term, Trump has claimed inflation, gas, and grocery prices have decreased significantly from former President Joe Biden’s administration. However, Americans still feel the impact of an unstable economy, and began to place their trust behind candidates who championed progressive avenues to address the affordability crisis, such as rent freezes and increased public housing, in this year’s elections.
This has led Republicans to revive the matter Trump declared to be a “dead” issue, and highlight their own solutions ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
“We have an affordability agenda, as the president has been touting, and we have to do that in earnest. Healthcare is part of that. But it’s just the costs across the board,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said earlier this week.
The Republican affordability agenda Johnson mentioned prioritizes tackling the housing market — which many young Americans consider to be “starved” for affordability — through the increase of production and continued immigration enforcement.
“The economy is not working for everyday Americans. We need to build 10 million more homes in the next few years. Home prices need to be down,” former Rep. Madison Cawthorn, who is now running in Florida’s 19th congressional district, told the Washington Examiner.
“Almost nobody can afford a home in this economy. The number one thing we as republicans can do to make the U.S. efficient is to bring back manufacturing and address the supply shortage home builders face,” he added.
Zillow estimates the country faces a shortage of 4.7 million homes, which has kept prices high.
“Unfortunately, after passing NAFTA, we realized that we’re sending all of our manufacturing overseas. We should be producing more than anywhere on the planet,” Cawthorn added.
Cawthorne argued that the increase of manufacturing jobs in the United States can “overwhelmingly flood the market with more houses,” adding the need to cut back on regulations to ensure that the entry fee for newly developed houses into the market remains accessible.
“We need to be aggressive and go after EPA regulations that inflate home prices, especially in places prone to natural disasters like Florida, we need tax rebates for flood insurance,” the congressional hopeful stated.
In Florida alone, the median household cost for flood insurance increased from $1,933 in 2011 to $2,437 in 2024, according to WUTF.
Other Republican officials, such as Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI), argue that addressing the housing crisis begins with enforcing Trump’s deportation efforts. Grothman argued that the Biden administration’s “decision to allow millions of illegal immigrants into the country has only magnified that shortage.”
“If we’re serious about fixing the housing market and easing the strain caused by this historic influx [of illegal immigrants], we need to enforce the law and give Trump the tools to actually remove the millions who entered during the Biden years,” Grothman told the Washington Examiner.
Grothman then made similar remarks to those of Cawthorn, and argued for the need to increase housing construction.
“America hasn’t built enough housing in the last twenty years, even as we’ve seen historic population growth. That shortage alone has driven up prices, but Biden’s mass influx of illegal immigrants has pushed the market past its breaking point,” Grothman added. “When millions of people enter the country illegally, it adds enormous pressure to an already tight housing supply, and rents go up.”
Grothman’s and Cawthorn’s remarks added to the arguments of Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made earlier this fall.
“We flooded the country with 30 million illegal immigrants who are taking houses, which ought by right go to American citizens and at the same time, we weren’t building enough new houses to begin with even for the population we have,” Vance said earlier this month.
BESSENT: TRUMP MAY DECLARE HOUSING EMERGENCY THIS FALL
Bessent discussed with the Washington Examiner in September how the Trump administration is focusing on addressing the housing market.
Previously, Bessent hinted at things like eliminating regulations for permitting tariff relief to items used for construction.
