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America’s housing affordability crisis is rooted in a severe shortage of homes, restrictive zoning and rising costs. Can Congress’s new housing law fix the foundation?
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America’s Housing Crisis Needs More Than Simple Repairs
Aug 21, 2026
My wife and I recently moved into a charming Victorian house built in 1879, when Rutherford B. Hayes was president. Despite nearly a century and a half of wear, it remains a beautiful home. But living in it has taught me an important lesson: there’s a world of difference between a house that looks sound and one that is structurally sound.
The floors slope noticeably from room to room. Windows stick on humid days. Doors don’t always close quite right. None of these problems is catastrophic. They are reminders that beneath the attractive exterior, a house this old carries structural issues that no amount of fresh paint can conceal.
I’m reminded of that distinction between cosmetic repairs and structural ones as I think about Congress’s recently enacted bipartisan housing law.
It represents a genuine effort to address one of America’s most pressing economic challenges, and lawmakers deserve credit for working across party lines. It also couldn’t have come at a better time. America’s housing affordability crisis has reached historic proportions.
According to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, a record 43.5 million households spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing in 2024, while 21.6 million spent more than half their income simply to keep a roof over their heads. The burden reaches well into the middle class: 49 percent of renters earning between $45,000 and $75,000 a year were cost-burdened. Meanwhile, the median single-family home price reached five times the median household income in 2024, compared with roughly three times income during much of the 1990s.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act attacks the problem from several directions. It seeks to streamline some reviews and permitting, encourages local governments to reconsider barriers to new housing, expands support for manufactured and modular housing and housing finance, and restricts additional single-family-home purchases by large institutional investors. These aren’t trivial changes. Some could make it easier and cheaper to build housing.
But zoning illustrates the limits of even well-intentioned federal action. Congress can encourage communities to permit duplexes, apartments, accessory dwelling units, and greater density, but most land-use decisions remain state and local responsibilities. Indeed, the new law itself prevents federal officials from using its zoning provisions to preempt local zoning or land-use policy. Washington can provide incentives. It cannot simply rewrite thousands of local zoning codes.
The law therefore improves pieces of the system without fundamentally restructuring it. The nation’s housing system is decentralized by design, while the housing shortage has become a national problem. The result is a familiar pattern in American policymaking: filling in the visible cracks while leaving the foundation largely untouched.
The Foundation Is Still Cracking
The housing affordability crisis wasn’t created overnight, nor was it caused by a single policy. It is the product of decades of underbuilding, restrictive zoning, cumbersome approval processes, rising construction costs, shortages of skilled labor, and persistent local opposition to higher-density development.
Freddie Mac estimates that the United States remains 3.7 million housing units short of what is needed to meet long-term demand. Its researchers identify inadequate supply as a root cause of deteriorating affordability: when too few homes are available, buyers and renters bid up the price of those that are.
Consider, for example, a middle-class couple in Seattle. She is a public school teacher; he is an EMT. Together, they earn a solid, steady income and have done everything previous generations were told to do: work hard, save diligently, and plan for the future. Yet homeownership remains beyond their reach as housing prices have climbed faster than their savings and mortgage rates have remained high.
Their predicament is hardly unusual. The National Association of Realtors reported in 2025 that first-time buyers accounted for just 21 percent of home purchases, the lowest share since it began keeping records in 1981. The median first-time buyer was 40 years old, another record.
These are the foundation problems. No single federal law, however well intentioned, can solve them. Yet unless they are confronted, broadly affordable housing will remain out of reach for millions of Americans.
Why Congress Patches Instead of Rebuilds
The structural problems in housing are politically difficult precisely because they involve trade-offs. Local zoning reform can mean denser neighborhoods, smaller lots, more apartments, and changes that existing homeowners may resist. Faster permitting can reduce opportunities for public input. Expanding supply can provoke opposition from residents concerned about congestion or changes in neighborhood character.
Congress therefore gravitates toward measures that are easier to enact and defend. Incremental reforms can attract bipartisan support while avoiding direct confrontation with organized local interests. They allow lawmakers to claim progress without forcing them to absorb all the political costs of structural change.
But congressional timidity is only part of the explanation. Federalism matters. Some of the most consequential decisions affecting housing supply are simply not Washington’s to make. That does not absolve Congress of responsibility. It means that repairing the foundation requires coordinated action from federal, state, and local governments.
Housing is hardly unique in this respect. It exposes a recurring weakness of American policymaking: large national problems often require action across a fragmented political system that is much better at dividing authority than coordinating it.
Fixing the Foundation
Living in an old house has taught me that there is nothing wrong with making modest repairs. Sometimes a patched wall or repaired window is exactly what is needed. But eventually, if the foundation is shifting, someone has to do the harder work.
Congress’s new housing law may be a useful repair, and its bipartisan passage is certainly preferable to the paralysis we have come to expect from Washington. But simply passing a law is a remarkably low standard for success. Americans struggling to buy or rent a home don’t need another bipartisan victory lap. They need policies equal to the scale of the problem.
Filling the cracks may make the house look better. It won’t keep the foundation from shifting.
Robert Cropf is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Louis University.
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U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, left, during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House on Nov. 21, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Trump congratulated Mamdani on his election win as the two political opponents met to discuss policies for New York City, including affordability, public safety, and immigration.
(Tribune Content Agency)
Everyone is campaigning on ‘affordability’ that no one can deliver
Aug 21, 2026
Remember “affordability” mania?
The time was 2025. A young, charismatic democratic socialist candidate for New York City mayor named Zohran Mamdani became a viral sensation. His secret? “Affordability.”
Ask him about almost anything and he’d turn the conversation to affordability. When a reporter asked Mamdani to respond to President Trump’s claim that he was the better-looking politician, Mamdani responded, “My focus is on the cost-of-living crisis, bro.” Queried about whether Hamas, the terrorist organization, should disarm, he began with “I believe that any future here in New York City is one that we have to make sure that’s affordable for all.”
Mamdani won the election, and pretty much everyone agreed that “affordability” was the key that unlocked City Hall.
“Affordability” was “the mantra that carried” Mamdani to victory, proclaimed Vox. Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and political strategists like David Axelrod, James Carville and Waleed Shahid all agreed. As Shahid put it, “Zohran cracked the code so many Democrats are searching for: laser-focus on affordability … this is a playbook.”
All this annoyed Trump, who’d campaigned on lowering prices in 2024. Affordability was a “con job by the Democrats,” he told reporters. “Affordability is a lie when used by the Dems. … We are the Party of Affordability!” he declared on Truth Social.
One of Mamdani’s first priorities as mayor was to impose a partial rent freeze on more than a million apartments, about 40% of NYC’s rental stock. That was temporary good news for people in those apartments, but good luck finding an economist who doesn’t think this will make housing less affordable over the long term.
More recently, Mamdani endorsed a plan to require Amazon and other companies to stop using third-party contractors to deliver packages to New Yorkers. It’s a naked sop to the Teamsters, who’ve long wanted unionized drivers to have a monopoly on deliveries.
If passed, the Delivery Protection Act will create some jobs for drivers, while killing more jobs for gig workers. More important, it would surely make deliveries slower and more expensive. The only study estimating the costs — sponsored by its opponents — found that it would add $664 in delivery fees per household annually.
Take that with a grain of salt if you like, but it’s telling that the affordability-obsessed Mamdani administration didn’t even bother to study the question of how this plan would affect affordability. If they’re so laser-focused on the issue, you’d think this would be the first question they’d ask. Mamdani hasn’t even mentioned improving affordability when touting the plan. It’s almost as though Trump was right about affordability being a con job.
Speaking of Trump, let’s take a gander at what he’s done of late. For starters, his tariffs — by design — make goods more expensive. We don’t need to belabor that, but to pick just one example, his recent 50% tariff hike on Canadian lumber, set to go into effect this week, will make housing construction — a key component of affordability — more expensive, adding more than $10,000 to the cost of building the average home.
Trump’s immigration crackdown has made food costs rise, according to his own Department of Labor.
And of course there’s the Iran war. Even Trump admits it’s causing gas prices to go up. We hear less about how the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is also pushing up the costs for fertilizer, plastics and jet fuel, among other things.
There are defenses for Trump’s immigration and Iran policies (his blunderbuss approach to tariffs is simply indefensible). There are also defenses of Mamdani’s plan to make home deliveries more expensive (his rent freeze is economically indefensible). But, it needs to be said, none of those defenses have anything to do with affordability.
You might think my point is that our political leaders are lying hypocrites when they say their top or only priority is affordability. I won’t argue against the claim, but that’s not my point.
Rather it’s that populist appeals are always simplistic. They blame sinister forces for deliberately standing in the way of simple fixes that are good for everybody, save perhaps for the evil elites, special interests or millionaires and billionaires conspiring against the common good.
The reality is that populist promises of easy fixes are easy to make, but governing is hard and complicated. Elected officials have to balance any number of priorities and considerations — good, bad and ugly — that undermine simplistic slogans. The problem with populist pandering is that it always leads to disappointment with leaders who fail to deliver, which only invites more populist ire and more pandering.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
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The Trump Administration Is Losing Its Fight to Take Over Elections
Aug 21, 2026
The Trump administration has expended significant resources trying to meddle in elections ahead of the midterms. This coordinated campaign includes attempts to limit who can vote, wrestle away states’ authority over elections, and undermine public confidence in election outcomes. So far, virtually everything the administration has tried has been blocked by courts, failed in Congress, or simply fizzled out.
Currently, the administration is 0–21 in its court cases seeking to amass state voter data. In dozens of states, election officials from both parties have refused to turn over their complete voter rolls, which contain confidential personal information, to the Justice Department. Federal courts from Arizona to Maine have thrown out the department’s lawsuits, ruling that the federal government lacks the power to force states to hand over this data on a mass scale.
Both of Trump’s executive orders aiming to overhaul election rules have also failed in court. The first one purported to require people to show a passport or another document proving citizenship to register to vote using the federal voter registration form. Several courts have blocked the policy. The second executive order would have the U.S. Postal Service refuse to deliver the mail ballots of voters who aren’t on new, ill-defined lists that states and USPS would be asked to create. In June, a court prevented it from taking effect. (The Brennan Center represents parties in lawsuits against both executive orders.) These cases are on appeal, but courts have consistently held that the Constitution gives the president no authority to regulate elections.
In a separate case, a court ruled that the administration may not expand the use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, a federal database, to comb through state voter rolls for potential noncitizens. This is an important ruling because the program is incomplete and likely to incorrectly flag citizens for removal from the rolls. Voting by noncitizens is already illegal and extremely rare.
The administration’s losses extend beyond the courtroom. In the halls of Congress, President Trump has consistently demanded passage of the unpopular SAVE Act — legislation that would require Americans to show a passport or birth certificate in order to register to vote. If passed, the bill could block tens of millions of eligible American citizens from voting. So far, that effort remains stalled in the face of nationwide public opposition.
Another prong of the administration’s attack on elections is to demonize and prosecute election officials who refuse to go along with its schemes. The Justice Department recently sent a letter threatening jail time for officials in states that don’t tighten their voting rules under the guise of preventing noncitizens from casting ballots. The secretary of homeland security also claimed that officials who didn’t follow the administration’s instructions to remove voters from the rolls could go to prison. The point of these threats is to intimidate election officials into voluntarily enacting the policies Trump can’t get passed in Congress or approved by courts.
Attempted prosecutions of political adversaries have failed in other contexts. The administration shattered prosecutorial norms to charge New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey. A judge threw out the charges and rebuked the lawyer (one of Trump’s former personal lawyers who had no criminal law experience) who brought them, while another judge found she may have committed misconduct. Comey now faces a second prosecution over arranging seashells into the pattern “86 47,” which prosecutors say is a threat to Trump (the 47th president). That, too, seems likely to fail, and his lawyers have accused prosecutors of making false statements to obtain warrants.
The crumbling of the cases against James and Comey shows the emptiness of Trump and his allies’ similar threats against election officials. They promised to prosecute those who dispute his election lies, yet they have no cases with a serious chance of ending in a conviction. That’s not to say this tactic has no impact — defending against even a baseless prosecution can be extremely costly and stressful — but prosecutions based on conspiracy theories aren’t resulting in convictions.
One place where the administration is trying to forge ahead with this tactic is in Fulton County, Georgia. In January, FBI agents seized documents from election offices on the basis of debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election. Reports indicate that Trump spoke to the agents after they conducted the raid, an unprecedented occurrence, which suggests the mission was politically motivated. All known evidence refutes the notion of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, and most likely this, too, won’t prove the salacious allegations.
Last month, Trump gave a speech on elections that underscored his desperation for a win before the upcoming midterms. After promising to reveal “shocking” information about the 2020 election being “rigged,” Trump instead merely repeated years-old conspiracy theories and claimed vague “intelligence” showed “vulnerabilities” in election systems.
Trump’s losses in the battle to take over elections don’t mean there hasn’t been collateral damage. False claims about inadequate election security have been a driving factor in states enacting well over a hundred voting laws during the last five years. Every time Trump cries foul or demonizes election workers, it causes more Americans to question legitimate election results. Nor is the fight over elections over. Trump and his allies may try increasingly aggressive maneuvers before or after Election Day, such as seizing voting machines or refusing to certify results — even though those tactics are against the law.
During Trump’s second term, the courts, election officials, Congress, and the people themselves have shown the strength to stand up to a president who wishes to trample the election system and cement his power. In the months to come, we must keep up the fight.
The Trump Administration Is Losing Its Fight to Take Over Elections was originally published by the Brennan Center and is republished with permission.
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Peptides like BPC-157, MOTS-c and Semax are surging in popularity despite limited human evidence. Here’s why FDA regulation, research and safety matter.
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Millions Using Unapproved Peptides as FDA Debates Regulation
Aug 20, 2026
Peptides, the short chains of amino acids that help regulate biological functions, have become the latest obsession in health, fitness, and longevity.
Online clinics and wellness influencers promote them as ways to heal injuries, reduce inflammation, improve metabolism, sharpen thinking, and slow aging.
Today, these substances are part of a growing gray market. A recent Forbes report estimates millions of Americans are injecting unapproved peptides, often purchased from suppliers in China whose manufacturing quality, purity, and contents are difficult to verify.
Federal regulators now face a milestone decision: whether six popular — but experimental — peptides should be made available through licensed compounding pharmacies, which customize medications for patients based on physicians’ prescriptions.
The financial stakes of this decision are substantial. If the FDA authorizes them, analysts at Leerink Partners estimate that telehealth sales of these peptides could approach $2.2 billion in 2027.
The FDA Debate: To Authorize Or Not
Last month, the Food and Drug Administration’s Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee narrowly recommended adding six experimental peptides — BPC-157, KPV, TB-500, MOTS-c, Epitalon, and Semax — to the Section 503A Bulks List. This designation identifies ingredients that pharmacies can use to prepare compounded medications.
The committee’s recommendation drew scrutiny for two reasons. First, FDA staff cited insufficient evidence about the safety and effectiveness of the six peptides. Second, at least six newly added members had ties to peptide-related businesses or medical practices, which prompted FDA officials to raise concerns about potential conflicts of interest.
No decision date is set. It could be days or months before a final ruling.
Why ‘Yes’ Or ‘No’ Isn’t The Right Answer
The central problem is that whether the FDA approves or rejects the advisory committee recommendations, Americans won’t know whether these peptides are effective or safe. Scientific research is needed to answer both questions.
If the peptides improve health, more patients would benefit from using them. If they are ineffective or dangerous, people need to be warned.
Neither the previous administration nor the current one has created a credible way to generate those answers. Under the Biden administration, regulators effectively barred these peptides from being sold in the United States. That policy, along with stepped-up enforcement against suppliers and pharmacies, did not eliminate demand. Large numbers of Americans continued obtaining the peptides online from gray-market and overseas sources.
The Trump administration, with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. among the most prominent supporters of peptides, appears poised to move to the opposite extreme by permitting broad access through licensed compounding pharmacies.
Either way, doctors won’t have sufficient research data to determine whether to recommend these peptides or limit their use.
What The Six Peptides Do (And Don’t Do)
There are thousands of biological and synthetic peptides. Many occur naturally in the body and act as chemical messengers, influencing metabolism, inflammation, reproduction, and other physiological processes.
More than 100 peptide drugs are currently FDA-approved in the U.S., including insulin and GLP-1 drugs for diabetes and obesity.
For the six peptides now under final consideration by FDA leadership, public enthusiasm has advanced much faster than the science:
1. BPC-157 is promoted for gastrointestinal conditions, injury recovery and tissue repair.
2. KPV is marketed for inflammation, wound healing, and skin conditions.
3. TB-500 is promoted for healing muscle and tendon injuries.
4. MOTS-c is marketed for metabolic health, weight loss, exercise performance, and healthy aging.
5. Epitalon is promoted for sleep and longevity, including claims that it lengthens telomeres.
6. Semax is promoted for migraines, cognition, and neurological conditions.
Across all six, high-quality human evidence remains limited. Much of the available research consists of animal studies and limited human trials without control groups. As a result, patients can’t determine whether their benefits will outweigh their risks.
A Better Federal Strategy
Supporters of FDA authorization point out that Americans already use these substances. Acquiring them through physicians and regulated U.S. compounding pharmacies would be safer than relying on gray-market suppliers.
Critics argue that expanded access would encourage far more Americans to use products, despite uncertainty about their benefits and long-term risks.
The FDA won’t resolve these competing concerns with a simple yes-or-no choice. If it authorizes these substances, the best path would be to pair that decision with a federally coordinated research program.
The NIH could lead a one-year research effort, with FDA and CDC contributing regulatory and safety-surveillance expertise.
- People already using the peptides would continue receiving them if they agreed to submit data on their health and any adverse events.
- New patients would gain access under a scientific double-blind research protocol. Researchers would conduct controlled clinical trials of individual peptides for specific medical uses (with appropriate comparison groups to evaluate efficacy and short-term safety).
- At the end of one year, the FDA could review the findings and decide whether to continue the research expectations and expand or restrict access based on the data.
Although a one-year program would not answer every question, particularly about rare or long-term risks, it would generate far more evidence than exists today.
This type of approach has precedent. The federal government has previously linked access or coverage for certain treatments to participation in research when important questions remained unanswered. Medicare, for example, used “coverage with evidence development” for certain Alzheimer’s treatments, requiring qualifying patients to participate in approved studies.
Companies that stand to profit from expanded access to peptides should help finance the research. That principle also has precedent: pharmaceutical and medical-device companies already pay FDA user fees that support product review and certain post-market safety activities.
Both Democratic and Republican administrations have failed to resolve basic questions about the safety and efficacy of the six peptides. The best path now is to pair regulated access with scientific research.
Robert Pearl, the author of “ChatGPT, MD,” teaches at both the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group.
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