Whatever Happened to Trump's Housing Affordability Executive Order?
The Trump administration revises wonky federal regulations to reduce home construction costs.
Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week's newsletter includes stories on:
- The far left winning state elections in Berlin, Germany, on the promise of municipalizing 225,000 private apartment buildings.
- A zoning and religious freedom case out of Idaho, in which a college founded by controversial "Christian nationalist" pastor Doug Wilson is claiming discrimination at the hands of Moscow planning officials.
- A new report on how the housing shortage is driving up poverty rates.
But first, we have our lead story on the Trump administration's progress on implementing the president's affordable housing executive order.
Much Ado About Stormwater Runoff
Back in March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies to reduce regulations and red tape affecting the permitting and construction of new housing.
Rent Free Newsletter by Christian Britschgi. Get more of Christian's urban regulation, development, and zoning coverage.
As has been discussed in the context of the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, the federal government generally plays a minimal role in setting land use regulations that govern the siting and approval of new homes.
Zoning and permitting are primarily done by local governments.
For the most part, therefore, Trump's "Removing Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Home Construction" order directs agencies to pare back the regulations it attaches to federal housing subsidy programs. It also directs them to advise local and state governments on ways they could increase home construction.
To that latter end, in May, the Department of Housing and Urban Development published a list of "best practices" for state and local governments that encourages them to adopt permitting shot clocks and zone more land for single-family home construction.
(This reflects the second Trump administration's general approach to housing policy, which focuses on encouraging more single-family home construction while saying nothing about increasing residential densities.)
In the same month, the Department of Energy requested input on how it could change its evaluation of state and local building codes to better account for the costs imposed on consumers by energy efficiency standards.
In August, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) also proposed eliminating the energy efficiency standards it imposes on housing subsidized via various rural housing programs. The USDA argued in its proposed rule-making that housing subsidized by those programs already must comply with state and local standards, making federal requirements duplicative.
The real substantive deregulation of private homebuilding activity stemming from the order comes in the area of environmental permitting.
As mentioned, states and localities are the ones who determine where new homes can be built. During the construction phase, homebuilders must comply with federal rules controlling stormwater runoff into streams and lakes and the like.
In brief, residential construction projects that disturb one or more acres of land must comply with the requirements of a "construction general permit" that attempts to limit the amount of sediment that runs off sites into water systems.
To prevent that runoff, builders will typically install silt fences around construction sites and stabilize piles of disturbed soil by matting or compacting it.
The construction general permit also requires builders to monitor and report soil runoff to EPA or state officials and to follow specific timelines for stabilizing soil to prevent runoff.
These are all technically federal requirements set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). However, the EPA only directly sets construction general permit requirements for three states (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico), the District of Columbia, some U.S. territories, and tribal lands.
Everywhere else, EPA has delegated administration of stormwater runoff regulations to the states.
Regardless of whether the permit is administered by the EPA directly or by the states, its requirements impose costs on builders, says Evan Branosky, an environmental policy expert with the National Association of Homebuilders.
The installation of silt fences and soil stabilization efforts have a direct cost, he says. Monitoring requirements and timelines for installing silt fences and the like also raise the cost of construction.
Branosky says that builders often must retain third-party contractors to immediately repair fences and stabilize soil to keep in compliance with permit requirements.
The requirements of the construction general permit are updated every five years. The last update was in 2022. In August, the EPA proposed a host of reforms to the forthcoming 2027 construction general permit.
In keeping with Trump's executive order, the proposed changes generally attempt to make the permit less costly to comply with by reducing the amount of information about stormwater runoff builders would have to submit to EPA and the frequency with which they'd have to report that information to the agency.
"EPA's proposed changes are specific and targeted, including commonsense flexibilities such as streamlining and simplifying some requirements to reduce unnecessary costs to permittees," said the EPA in a statement to Reason.
Branosky says homebuilders are generally pleased with the proposed changes. He did offer some criticism of a proposal to have builders upload stormwater management plans to an online, publicly available portal.
Builders' mitigation efforts often change during the course of construction. Having builders file a point-in-time plan could open up builders to litigation over their mitigation plans that are outdated.
The EPA says that it hopes to unveil final revisions to its construction general permit in advance of the current permit's expiration in February.
These changes would only apply in the few states and territories where the EPA directly administers the construction general permit.
But the new, streamlined requirements could serve as a model for states to update their own construction general permits, says Judge Glock, the director of research at the Manhattan Institute.
"It's an open debate how much the EPA permits and exhortations have on the state permits," says Glock. The EPA's oversight of state permits, as well as its power over federal clean water grants, does at a minimum give it significant influence over state policy.
In a brief published in February by the Manhattan Institute, Glock said that the water impacts of runoff from construction sites are minimal compared to other industrial and agricultural uses.
He also argues that it's debatable whether federal stormwater regulations should even apply to construction sites. There's a colorable argument that the EPA could remove its requirements on residential construction sites altogether.
So far, the agency is not proposing anything so sweeping.
In Berlin, the Far Left Wins Election on Promise of Seizing Private Housing
This past weekend, in Berlin's state elections, The Left Party captured a plurality of the vote and will now take the lead in forming a governing coalition.
The implications for housing policy are significant.
Berlin's voters, like residents of many major western cities, have been bearing the brunt of anemic economic growth and rising housing costs. The Left's preferred solution is to expropriate some 225,000 apartments currently owned by large real estate corporations.
The party's leader, Elif Eralp, argues this would satisfy the will of Berlin's voters, who in 2021 overwhelmingly approved a non-binding referendum calling for the seizure of apartment buildings owned by large corporations.
Expropriation "serves the purpose of being able to regulate rents, which we can't currently do with private owners," Eralp told the Russian-German magazine Wir. "This takes these apartments out of speculation and out of the possibility of profiting from the housing shortage."
It's not hard to see the downsides of such a proposal. It would require Berlin's government to compensate private owners for their lost units. That's money that could be dedicated to public housing construction (something Eralp has endorsed) or, better yet, to tax cuts that would increase the city's economic growth.
A massive government takeover of private housing would also be a major disincentive for developers to invest in new residential construction.
College Founded by 'Christian Nationalist' Pastor Doug Wilson Claims Religious Discrimination by Zoning Officials
In a new lawsuit, New Saint Andrews College claims that officials in Moscow, Idaho, are imposing selective and arbitrary zoning restrictions on its use of office space in the city's downtown out of animus towards its own brand of Protestantism.
New Saint Andrews is a small Christian college founded by the controversial pastor Doug Wilson, who has endorsed remaking America into a Protestant confessional state with restrictions on the public expression of other religions and legal sanctions for biblically proscribed behavior like adultery and same-sex relations.
Wilson has a close relationship with U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is a member of the denomination Wilson founded.
This has made Wilson a controversial figure in Moscow, where some city officials, who have pledged to fight the influence of his Moscow-based Christ Church.
New Saint Andrews argues in its lawsuit that this animus has motivated the city to impose a long list of zoning restrictions on the college that apply to no other institution. Most recently, the city has blocked its ability to use downtown office space for college administrative purposes.
The college has had to hire a vendor to perform those administrative functions, which the city, citing restrictions on university activity in the city's downtown, is preventing New Saint Andrews from doing directly.
The zoning restrictions imposed on New Saint Andrews do indeed appear to be arbitrary and have little to do with mitigating any neighborhood impacts the college might have. That would seem to give the college a strong case that the city is violating federal land use protections for religious institutions.
As I noted last week in a piece for Reason, it's a tad ironic that a college founded by Wilson is claiming federal protections for religious land uses that the pastor would deny other faiths.
Call it a teachable moment about the value of broad, neutral religious liberty protections.
New Study Shows the Link Between High Housing Costs and Poverty
New research by Pew Charitable Trusts reports that housing shortages in high-regulation, high-cost states are driving up poverty rates and reducing the real value of the government's anti-poverty programs.
In Hawaii, California, Washington, D.C., New Jersey, Massachusetts, Colorado, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, and New Hampshire, Pew found that 16 percent to 34 percent of poverty stems from those states' above-average housing costs.
Additionally, Pew found that rising housing costs offset more than half of the increase in SNAP benefits from 1989 to 2023. In New Jersey, specifically, it says that rising rents offset roughly 84 percent of the additional purchasing power provided by increases in SNAP benefits.
The Pew study argues that lower rents caused by more housing construction would have a benefit to poor renters comparable to major federal anti-poverty programs.
Read the whole report here.
Quick Links
- In San Francisco, a high school student has managed to do what the city has not: map all of San Francisco's rent-controlled units.
- New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill laid out her housing policy vision in an address that called for speeding up home permitting.
- A ballot initiative that would significantly roll back California's landmark environmental review law, CEQA, is now becoming a proxy fight about data centers.
- The Trump administration is attempting a "pocket rescission" of $56 million appropriated for housing counseling.
- The Department of Homeland Security is claiming that its deportations are lowering people's rent.
DHS is reducing your rent, especially in states that cooperate with @ICEgov.
Texas accounted for about a quarter of ICE arrests in July and posted the country's sharpest rent drops, with San Antonio down 4.8%, Austin 4.3%, Dallas and Houston about 3%.
Miami's average rent is…— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) September 25, 2026
