On housing, Trump’s problem isn’t willpower. It’s time.

President Donald Trump is eager to show voters that he’s making housing more affordable. But even some allies admit that his policies are unlikely to have a meaningful impact on Election Day.

Over the past few months, as it has become clear that affordability will be a central theme in the midterm elections, the White House has floated a bevy of proposals aimed at addressing high housing costs.

Trump administration Directed purchases to government-controlled mortgage finance agencies Billions in securities to lower mortgage rates. President Signed an executive order blocking institutional investors From receiving government support when purchasing single-family homes as an investment, that has increased home prices for individual buyers. and the White House floated away, and eventually returnedAn offer for a 50-year mortgage.

But economists say those policies, to the extent of any lower costs, are likely to have only a minimal impact at best.

“I don’t think there’s a magic bullet — certainly not in the next 10 months,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “The proposals that have been put forward are really at the margin. They’re not really going to move the dial to any meaningful degree.”

Against that backdrop, some White House aides acknowledge that what they face in the coming months is less a policy battle than a messaging campaign. The challenge, they say, is for the president to show voters through his housing policies that he feels their pain — even if it does little to materially reduce housing costs in the near term.

“I don’t think it solves affordability,” said one person close to the White House, requesting anonymity to speak openly about the administration’s housing agenda. “Moving the housing market is like turning a supertanker. It’s not easy.”

“But,” the person added of the administration’s housing policies, “it’s important to show that you give a shit.”

The House passed a bipartisan bill Monday night that expands access to home loans, streamlines environmental reviews for some housing construction and establishes voluntary zoning guidelines to make it easier for local governments to build housing. The Senate passed a version in the fall, and the president supports the package.

But there are important differences between the House and Senate versions — such as the community bank deregulations in the House bill that Senate Democrats may ignore. The White House is also pushing to include an amendment to codify its institutional investor executive order, which is not favored by Republicans. Those tension points will make it difficult to reach an agreement to send to Trump’s desk.

Economists stress that even the best policies will take a long time to materially affect the $55 trillion housing market. A problem that has been brewing for decades, they add, will not be solved overnight. The national median single-family home price is now five times the median household income Center for Joint Housing Studies at Harvard UniversityCompared to households with about three times the income in the 1990s.

But there is a political imperative to address an issue that is increasingly important to younger voters, as the average age of first-time homebuyers is now 40, a record high, according to an analysis by the National Association of Realtors. And the president’s stance that he wants to make housing more affordable without lowering home prices doesn’t sit well with that group, said GOP pollster Brent Buchanan.

“It’s hard to message voters under 40 when the president wants to raise home prices,” Buchanan said, adding that the president’s comments “concerned young voters.”

White House aides acknowledge that some policies will take time to pay off. But they argue that voters will see results before the November election, with the president pushing for continued interest rate cuts, which could indirectly lower mortgage rates, in addition to overall efforts to raise wages, fight inflation and free up the housing stock through his immigration enforcement efforts.

“We’ve done and continue to do a lot of physical work here to create housing affordability, especially for young people,” said a White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity to share the administration’s thinking. “These things take time. It’s not a super liquid market, housing is.”

White House spokesman Davis Ing said in a statement that the administration is “committed to exploring every tool available to the American people.”

“President Trump’s successful and common-sense economic policies are making housing more affordable by cutting red tape, easing borrowing costs, and creating an economy where income growth is growing faster than housing costs,” Trump said. “Under President Trump’s leadership, more Americans will be able to achieve the American dream of home ownership.”

So far, the White House seems primarily interested in policies that entice buyers into the existing market, such as lowering mortgage rates, as opposed to increasing the housing supply, which would, in theory, lower average home prices. But the impact of some of those policies was short-lived.

When Trump ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities in an effort to lower mortgage rates, the 30-year fixed rate fell — though it quickly rebounded as markets saw the prospect of Trump attacking Greenland.

Others have failed to take off, such as the president’s proposal to create a 50-year mortgage, which would have helped homeowners with their monthly payments but created more financial risk in the long run. Trump seems to have given up, too An idea that allowed People buy down payments to dip into their retirement and college savings accounts.

Federal Housing Finance Director Bill Pulte, who led mortgage bond purchases on behalf of Trump, disputed the idea that the administration is facing a time crunch to address voters’ housing affordability concerns.

“Contrary to what this article tries to portray, mortgage affordability is at a four-year high after President Trump’s $200 billion purchase of mortgage bonds lowered Biden’s sky-high mortgage interest rates,” Pulte told Politico.

Mortgage rates are at 3-year lows According to statistics Collected by the government-controlled home loan corporation Freddie Mac, but those rates are still significantly higher A comparison between before and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic.

And rates aren’t the only concern.

There aren’t enough new homes being built, according to housing experts, keeping prices high and buyers on edge. The median price of a new home in October was $392,000, according to Census BureauUp from $331,000 in 2020.

According to A June report from the White House Council of Economic AdvisersThe average number of new units that start construction in a given year has fallen from about 6,000 per million people over two decades and has since dropped to just 3,000 as homes are torn down.

“It’s a very frustrating thing: all you have to do is look at this and that and go, ‘Oh, there’s a supply problem.’ … It’s not, like, advanced astrophysics,” another person familiar with the administration’s conversations on housing policy said on condition of anonymity to speak openly about the approach. “We’ve built less for 18 years. There’s nothing they’re going to do now that’s going to dramatically affect housing prices.”

And while the most straightforward way to help buyers is to bring down prices, this presents a political problem. While lowering home prices is a surefire way to anger the millions of Americans who own homes and have benefited from increases in their values, Trump has repeatedly emphasized in recent weeks that his goal is not to lower prices but rather to increase equity for homeowners.

White House aides argue that any move to lower prices would also reduce supply, reduce incentives to build new homes, and hurt young homeowners who have bought in recent years. They argue that policies aimed at reducing mortgage rates will benefit not only potential home buyers but also existing ones looking to buy a new home.

Lowering prices, on the other hand, “could cause huge economic problems for the very demographic we’re trying to help,” a White House official said.

Builders, meanwhile, complain of high insurance, financing costs, local regulatory burdens, fees and labor barriers, all exacerbated by Trump’s immigration agenda.

However, they applaud deregulatory steps aimed at streamlining environmental reviews, slowing fair-housing enforcement and reducing compliance requirements for federally supported projects.

“The regulatory actions taken by the administration are critical,” said Jim Tobin, president and CEO of the National Association of Home Builders.

Some of the administration’s splashier ideas — such as pushing builders to build 1 million rent-to-buy “Trump Homes” An opinion reported by Bloomberg – Be more of a concept than a concrete policy, even allies are not sure what effect it will have on the ground.

“A lot of oxygen is siphoned off by ideas that seem promising at first blush but all of these have unintended consequences,” said Tobias Peter, senior fellow and co-director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center.

Still, Seth Appleton, president of American Mortgage Insurance and a former senior HUD official during Trump’s first term, argued that some changes will be felt this year: Changes in requirements for manufactured housing could increase supply; An increased tax refund can help improve a family’s financial situation; And more supplies are coming online in parts of the country.

“From a broader level there are things that are happening now that will be fully realized this year,” Appleton said. “This is a big year of opportunity for housing policy.”