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President Donald Trump 's plans for bringing homeownership within reach of more Americans involve pushing for lower interest rates on home loans and credit cards, and banning large institutional investors from buying single-family homes. In his address Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump outlined four policies his administration is pursuing in a bid to make homeownership more affordable. Each had been previously mentioned by him or his administration in recent weeks, part of a broader push to address affordability generally, a hot-button issue with voters heading into the midterms. The US housing market has been in a sales slump dating back to 2022, when mortgage rates began to climb from pandemic-era lows. The combination of higher mortgage rates, years of skyrocketing home prices and a chronic shortage of homes nationally following more than a decade of below-average home construction have left many aspiring homeowners priced out of the market. Sales
President Donald Trump plans to use a key address Wednesday to try to convince Americans he can make housing more affordable, but he's picked a strange backdrop for the speech: a Swiss mountain town where ski chalets for vacations cost a cool $4.4 million. On the anniversary of his inauguration, Trump is flying to the World Economic Forum in Davos an annual gathering of the global elite where he may see many of the billionaires he has surrounded himself with during his first year back in the White House. Trump had campaigned on lowering the cost of living, painting himself as a populist while serving fries at a McDonald's drive-thru. But in office, his public schedules suggest he's traded the Golden Arches for a gilded age, devoting more time to cavorting with the wealthy than talking directly to his working-class base. At the end of the day, it's the investors and billionaires at Davos who have his attention, not the families struggling to afford their bills, said Alex Jacquez, .
President Donald Trump has said that he wants to block large institutional investors from buying houses, saying that a ban would make it easier for younger families to buy their first homes. Trump -- who has been under pressure to address voters' concerns about affordability ahead of November midterm elections -- is tapping into long-standing fears that corporate ownership of homes has pushed out traditional buyers, forcing more people to rent. But his plan does little to address the overarching challenge for the housing market: a national shortage of home construction and prices that have climbed faster than incomes. People live in homes, not corporations, Trump said in a social media post as he called on Congress to codify his ban. Last month, Trump pledged in a prime-time address that he would roll out some of the most aggressive housing reform plans in American history this year. The president said he would discuss housing and affordability in more detail in two weeks at the ..
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is standing behind a newly-appointed housing official as she faces backlash for years-old social media posts, including messages that called for the seizure of private property and linked homeownership to white supremacy. Cea Weaver, a longtime tenant activist, was tapped by the Democrat last week to serve as executive director of the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants. The mayor has vowed to expand and empower the office to take unprecedented steps against negligent landlords. But in a sign of the high-level scrutiny on Mamdani's administration, Weaver's since-deleted posts have sparked condemnations from officials in the US Department of Justice and the editorial board of The Washington Post. The posts, which were circulated on social media in recent days by critics of Mamdani, included calls to treat private property as a collective good and to impoverish the (asterisk)white(asterisk) middle class. A tweet sent in 2017 described homeownership as
In the summer of 2023, New York Attorney General Letitia James helped her niece buy a modest house in Norfolk, Virginia, by becoming a co-borrower on the mortgage loan. A top housing official in the Trump administration has now seized on a document in that transaction to argue that James should be prosecuted for bank fraud, asking the US Justice Department in a letter to open a criminal investigation into the Democrat. The request for an investigation comes as the administration has pursued a campaign of retribution against President Donald Trump's longtime foes in the legal world. James won a $454 million judgment against Trump last year in a lawsuit claiming he had lied about the value of his assets on financial statements given to banks. James called the allegations against her baseless." It is nothing more than a headline, nothing more than retaliation against all the actions I have taken successfully against Donald Trump," she said Wednesday in an interview on the New York cab