The Trump administration overhauls cumbersome federal rules to curb the cost of building homes.
Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week’s newsletter covers stories on:
- A left-wing surge in Berlin elections with a pledge to seize 225,000 privately held residential buildings.
- A zoning and religious-liberty dispute from Idaho, where a college founded by the controversial “Christian nationalist” pastor Doug Wilson alleges discrimination by Moscow’s planners.
- A fresh assessment of how the housing crunch is pushing poverty rates higher.
But our lead piece examines the Trump administration’s progress in carrying out the president’s affordable housing directive.
Stormwater Runoff: Much Ado with Murky Rules
In March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order asking federal agencies to trim the red tape that affects the permitting and construction of new housing.
Rent Free Newsletter by Christian Britschgi. Get more of Christian's urban regulation, development, and zoning coverage.
As discussed in connection with the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, the federal government generally plays a limited role in setting land-use rules governing the siting and approval of new homes.
Zoning and permitting are chiefly handled by local authorities.
Thus, Trump’s “Removing Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Home Construction” order mainly directs agencies to trim the burdens tied to federal housing subsidy programs. It also urges them to advise state and local governments on ways to expand homebuilding.
To that end, in May, the Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a set of “best practices” for states and municipalities that encourages the adoption of permit-time targets and the designation of more land for single-family housing construction.
(This reflects the second Trump administration’s overall housing-policy stance, which emphasizes boosting single-family construction while saying nothing about raising residential densities.)
In the same month, the Department of Energy sought input on how it could alter its assessment of state and local building codes to better reflect the costs faced by consumers due to energy-efficiency standards.
In August, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) also proposed removing the energy-efficiency requirements it imposes on housing subsidized through rural programs. The USDA contends that housing funded by those programs already must meet state and local standards, making federal rules duplicative.
The most consequential deregulation of private homebuilding under the order occurs in the environmental permitting arena.
As noted, the location of new homes is chiefly determined by states and localities. During construction, builders must observe federal rules governing stormwater runoff into streams and lakes, among other things.
In short, projects that disturb one or more acres of land must comply with a “construction general permit” designed to curb sediment runoff into water bodies.
To curb runoff, builders typically install silt fences around sites and stabilize disturbed soil by matting or compaction.
The construction general permit also obliges builders to monitor and report soil runoff to EPA or state authorities and to adhere to specific timelines for stabilizing soil to prevent runoff.
These are, in essence, federal requirements set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). However, the EPA directly imposes construction-general-permit rules for only three states (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico), the District of Columbia, certain U.S. territories, and tribal lands.
In every other place, the EPA has delegated stormwater-permit administration to the states.
Regardless of whether a CGP is run by the EPA or a state agency, its demands add costs for builders, explains Evan Branosky, an environmental-policy expert with the National Association of Home Builders.
The installation of silt fences and soil-stabilization efforts carry direct price tags, and the monitoring and timing obligations for these measures raise construction costs.
Branosky notes that builders frequently hire third-party crews to promptly repair fences and stabilize soil to stay compliant with permit requirements.
The construction general permit is updated every five years, with the most recent update in 2022. In August, the EPA proposed a slate of reforms for the upcoming 2027 CGP.
Under the Trump order, the proposed changes aim to lower compliance costs by reducing the amount of information about stormwater runoff builders must share with the EPA and the frequency of such reporting.
“EPA’s proposed changes are targeted and practical, offering flexibilities such as streamlining and simplifying certain requirements to cut unnecessary costs for permittees,” the agency told Reason.
Branosky says builders generally welcome the proposed adjustments. He did, however, caution against an idea to obligate builders to upload stormwater-management plans to a public, online portal.
Mitigation plans often evolve during the project, so a “point-in-time” submission could expose builders to liability if their plans later change.
The EPA says it hopes to publish final CGP revisions before the current permit expires in February.
The revisions would apply only in the handful of states and territories where the EPA directly administers the CGP.
Yet the streamlined requirements could serve as a blueprint for states to update their own CGPs, notes Judge Glock, director of research at the Manhattan Institute.
“There is an ongoing question about how much the EPA’s standards and exhortations shape state permits,” Glock remarks. The EPA’s oversight of state permitting and its influence over federal clean-water grants at minimum gives it substantial sway over state policy.
In a February brief from the Manhattan Institute, Glock contends that the environmental impacts of runoff from construction sites are modest relative to other industrial and agricultural uses.
He also argues that it is debatable whether federal stormwater rules should even apply to construction sites, suggesting there is a credible case for removing CGP requirements from residential construction altogether.
So far, the EPA is not proposing anything that sweeping.
Berlin’s Far Left Secures Election Win with Promise to Expropriate Private Housing
Over the weekend, The Left Party won a plurality in Berlin’s state elections and is poised to lead the talks to form the governing coalition.
The housing-policy implications are substantial.
Berlin residents, like those in many major Western cities, have endured weak economic growth and rising rents. The Left’s early plan is to seize about 225,000 apartments owned by large real-estate groups.
Elif Eralp, the party’s leader, argues this would align with the public’s will, which in 2021 approved a nonbinding referendum calling for confiscation of apartments held by major corporations.
Expropriation “helps create a regime where rents can be regulated, something we currently cannot achieve with private owners,” Eralp told the magazine Wir. “This would take these apartments out of speculation and out of the possibility of profiting from the housing shortage.”
The drawbacks are evident. The city would have to compensate private owners for the units taken, funds that could otherwise finance public housing or, more efficiently, cuts in taxes to stimulate growth.
A sweeping government takeover of private housing would also dampen developers’ incentives to invest in new residential projects.
New Saint Andrews College Sues Over Zoning: Religious Freedom at Stake in Moscow
In a fresh lawsuit, New Saint Andrews College contends that Moscow’s zoning officials apply selective and arbitrary restrictions on its use of downtown office space, driven by hostility toward its Protestant tradition.
New Saint Andrews is a small Christian college founded by the controversial pastor Doug Wilson, who advocates transforming the United States into a Protestant confessional state with restraints on other religions and legal repercussions for behaviors deemed biblically prohibited.
Wilson maintains a close association with U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a member of the denomination Wilson established.
That connection fuels friction in Moscow, where some city officials have pledged to counter Wilson’s influence through the local Christ Church.
New Saint Andrews argues that the city’s zoning rules attack its operations in Downtown—restricting its ability to administer from office space there—and that the city’s actions reflect bias against its religious identity. The college has had to contract a private vendor to handle administrative tasks that the city bans the college from performing on-site.
The zoning constraints appear capricious and largely disconnected from any neighborhood impact, bolstering the college’s claim that federal protections for religious land uses are being violated.
As I noted last week in a piece for Reason, it’s somewhat ironic that a institution founded by Wilson would seek federal protection for religious land uses that he would deny to others.
That irony offers a useful moment to reflect on broad, neutral protections for religious liberty.
New Research Links Sky-High Housing Costs to Poverty
A fresh analysis from Pew Charitable Trusts ties housing shortages in tightly regulated, costly states to higher poverty rates and to diminishing the real value of major anti-poverty programs.
In Hawaii, California, Washington, D.C., New Jersey, Massachusetts, Colorado, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, and New Hampshire, Pew finds that 16 percent to 34 percent of poverty stems from rents that exceed the national average.
Moreover, Pew finds that rising housing costs offset more than half of the increases in SNAP benefits from 1989 to 2023. In New Jersey specifically, rising rents erase roughly 84 percent of the additional buying power provided by SNAP boosts.
The study argues that reducing rents through more housing construction would yield gains for low-income renters comparable to major federal anti-poverty programs.
Read the full report here.
Quick Links
- In San Francisco, a high-school student has managed to map every rent-controlled unit in the city, a task the city itself has not completed.
- New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill outlined a housing-policy vision that includes accelerating housing permitting.
- A ballot measure seeking to roll back California’s CEQA environmental review statute is turning into a proxy battle over data-centers.
- The Trump administration is pursuing a “pocket rescission” of $56 million allocated for housing counseling.
- U.S. Homeland Security is asserting that its deportations are helping to lower rents.
DHS is reducing your rent, especially in states that cooperate with @ICEgov.
Texas accounted for about a quarter of ICE arrests in July and posted the country’s sharpest rent drops, with San Antonio down 4.8%, Austin 4.3%, Dallas and Houston around 3%.
Miami’s average rent is…— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) September 25, 2026
