A New Executive Order Targets Housing Affordability. Here's What It Actually Does

The White House issued a new executive order on housing affordability this month, and Zillow Chief Economist Mischa Fisher called it a real step forward, alongside the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act that Congress passed earlier this year. Together, the two are aimed at the same problem from different directions: lowering the cost of owning a home and getting more homes built in the first place.

What the order actually changes

According to Fisher's write-up, the order promotes three specific things: an easier path for homeowners to cancel their mortgage insurance, faster adoption of manufactured housing, and more flexible refinancing options. None of these are flashy, but each one chips away at a real cost. Mortgage insurance alone can add hundreds of dollars a month to a payment long after a homeowner has built up real equity, so an easier cancellation path is worth paying attention to if that applies to you.

The problem this is trying to solve

The scale of the shortage is the part that puts all this in context. Fisher says the US is short nearly 5 million homes, a gap big enough to keep pushing both demand and prices upward. He points out that a median-income household making a 10% down payment on a typical home today would need to spend more than 40% of its earnings on housing. That's the number this entire push is trying to bring down.

Why manufactured housing keeps coming up

Faster adoption of manufactured housing is one of the order's bigger swings. Done right, it's a way to add housing stock faster than traditional construction allows, which matters when the shortage is measured in the millions. Fisher is clear, though, that an executive order alone doesn't fix this. He says lasting progress needs Congress, state capitals, and city halls all pulling in the same direction on permitting and zoning reform and modernized financing for manufactured and modular homes.

A more local angle: vacant lots

One of the most interesting data points in Fisher's piece is land already sitting ready to build on. Zillow identified more than 300,000 vacant lots under five acres currently for sale nationwide. Building just one home on each of those lots would cut the national housing deficit by 6.3%. Zillow is also working with the Census Bureau's Opportunity Project on a 12-week federal tech sprint looking at expanding small-dollar loan access for rural buyers who want to build on lots like these, which is often a harder financing problem than buying an existing home.

The bigger push behind this

Zillow is a founding partner of Let America Build, a 14-partner coalition working on local zoning and regulatory reform, and has also teamed up with the Casita Coalition on a resource called the Build the Middle playbook, covering duplexes, townhomes, and other neighborhood-scale housing types that often get left out of single-family zoning. Fisher closes by framing this as nonpartisan work, and says plainly, "housing affordability is a problem we can solve."

What this means for you

Federal policy moves slowly, and most of what's described here plays out over years, not months. But it's worth knowing where things are headed, especially if you're a current homeowner who might be able to drop mortgage insurance sooner than you thought, or a buyer wondering whether more housing supply is actually coming. If you want to talk through what any of this means for your specific plans, reach out and let's go through it.