Agents Brace for Election Day—Because Housing Data Was Too Boring

Ah, election season — that magical time when politicians suddenly discover housing affordability, the way they discover the deficit every four years and then misplace it again by February. NAHB’s Ken Wingert has been busy cataloguing the midterm landscape, and the picture he paints deserves a closer, less credulous read than the headlines will give it.

Start with the state ballot measures. Various jurisdictions are putting housing-related questions to voters — zoning reforms, tax tweaks, the usual grab bag. The consensus take is that local democracy is finally solving the affordability crisis. My take: voters routinely approve symbolic reforms and then show up at the next town meeting to oppose the apartment complex down the street. California has been “reforming” its permitting process for a decade; it still takes longer to get a shovel in the ground in San Francisco than it took to build the Interstate Highway System.

Then there’s the ROAD to Housing Act, Congress’s latest acronym-heavy entry in the “we’re serious this time” genre. Yes, it contains genuinely useful provisions — incentives for zoning reform, streamlining reviews, some support for infrastructure tied to development. But let’s be honest about federal power here: land use is local. Congress passing zoning incentives is like the Pope issuing guidance on your homeowners association. Well-intentioned, mildly helpful, structurally irrelevant. The NIMBYs on your planning commission don’t read federal statutes, and they certainly don’t obey them.

Wingert also flags tariffs and labor as persistent cost pressures — and here the mainstream narrative gets genuinely sloppy. Lumber and materials costs remain elevated thanks to trade policy that both parties support when their donors do and condemn when they don’t. Meanwhile, the construction labor shortage is not a cyclical blip; it’s a demographic hangover from 2008, when hundreds of thousands of workers left the trades and never came back. You cannot will a skilled workforce into existence with a press release. Ask anyone who’s waited eleven months for a framing crew.

And mortgage rates — the variable everyone pretends to forecast and nobody actually can. The hopeful story is that the Fed cuts, rates drift toward 6%, and the frozen existing-home market thaws. Perhaps. But remember why it’s frozen: the lock-in effect. Tens of millions of homeowners sitting on sub-4% mortgages aren’t selling at 6%, and a gentle glide lower doesn’t change that calculus much. Lower rates, ironically, could increase demand faster than supply, pushing prices right back up. Affordability is a function of rates, prices, and inventory — and policy keeps improving the first while sabotaging the third.

So yes, follow the midterms, read the ballot measures, skim the ROAD to Housing Act. Just don’t confuse legislative motion with progress. We’ve spent forty years making houses harder to build while expressing mounting theatrical alarm that there aren’t enough of them.

Source: https://www.inman.com/2026/10/30/housing-and-the-midterms/