White House Pegs US Single-Family Housing Shortage At 10M

The White House issued its own take on how many homes the United States needs to keep up with demand.

The White House pinned the U.S. at short of 10 million homes, according to the Council of Economic Advisers’ recent Economic Report of the President reported by Bloomberg. That figure far exceeds previous estimates from other industry observers.

Government-sponsored enterprise Freddie Mac estimated a shortage of 3.7 million units in the third quarter of 2024, without specifying the type of housing. And the National Association of Realtors put the shortage at 5.5 million units in June 2021, comparing tracking trends over two decades with construction rates dating back to the 1960s.

The White House report, the 10 million figure came to be based on the pace of homebuilding before the economic downturn in 2008. The “rate of homebuilding has fallen by half relative to what had been a stable pace of 6,000 new single-family homes per million people per year for decades,” according to the report.

The report comes amid a multitude of proposals from President Donald Trump’s administration as it seeks to follow through on his stated priority of tackling housing supply and affordability in his second term.

Last month, Trump signed two executive orders aimed at improving housing affordability by easing community bank mortgage rules and cutting red tape for housing construction permits. The latter order pushes federal agencies to incentivize state and local governments to accelerate permit processes and reduce bureaucratic delays in housing construction.

Also on the homebuilding front, the Department of Justice was reported in February to be considering an antitrust investigation into the homebuilding industry, possibly focusing on the Leading Builders of America trade group. It’s unclear if that’s still on the table, as that was being mooted under former Attorney General Pam Bondi.

In terms of affordability, Trump unveiled a proposal to bar many institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes. The president vowed to uphold values for those who already own homes.

Trump in January ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy up to $200 billion of mortgage-backed securities in what the White House framed as a bid to make homeownership cheaper.

— Holden Walter-Warner