The rent is the biggest number in most family budgets, and it is the number this country has quietly let break. America is almost four million homes short. Half of renters now pay more than they can afford. More people slept outside last year than in any year on record. None of this is weather. Every piece of it is a policy choice. We propose four reforms that work as one argument: legalize homes where people want to live, finance the builders who make them, make rental help real for everyone who qualifies, and end street homelessness with the housing that ends it.
STATE :: THE RENT
The chart below is the argument in one picture: in the metros that
built the most homes since rents peaked, asking rents fell. In the
metros that built the least, rents kept climbing. The four proposals
here work as one argument, in order. Homes must be
legal to build before anyone can build them. Builders must be financed
before legal homes become real ones. Rental help must reach everyone
who qualifies, and it can only do that honestly where the homes exist,
which is why the help is sequenced behind the supply. And street
homelessness ends the way it has always ended, with housing, funded to
the scale of a record problem and judged by published results. The
rent bends everything else in a family’s budget. These four bend it
back.
RENTS THROUGH 2026-05 · PERMITS 2024 · SELECTED MATCHED METROS
WHAT WE PROPOSE
Last updated :: September 10, 2026
These proposals would begin no earlier than January 2029, after the
next presidential term starts. Each depends on the laws, funding,
and preparation it requires.
01▸Build More Homes
Mechanism: Your kids can afford to live in the town they grew up in, and the teacher and the nurse can afford to live in the town they serve. America is about 3.7 million homes short. That is not bad luck. In most of the country it is illegal to build anything except one house on one lot. Permits take years. The delay is priced into every lease.
The fix: federal money as a reward for legalizing homes. Cities and states that allow apartments and townhomes near jobs and transit, legalize backyard cottages, and decide permits in months unlock bonus money from the roads-and-transit funds Congress already spends. It is opt-in. No town has to change anything, and a town that keeps its zoning keeps every dollar it gets today. Framework's transit compact is the same idea near train stations. This is the whole map.
We are millions of homes short, and the shortage shows up in your rent every month. It shows up everywhere else too: teachers can't live where they teach, and the record homeless count is mostly a housing count. The compact publishes its results, homes permitted and rents against the region, so everyone can see whether legal homes become built homes.
Mechanism: The starter home gets built, because the builder who wants to build it can finally get financed. The homes America is missing are mostly modest ones: townhomes, small apartment buildings, starter houses. The builders who make them are mostly small, and small builders have the hardest time getting construction loans. Meanwhile building costs have exploded. Materials are up more than 40 percent since 2020. Construction labor is up a quarter.
Three parts. Grow the affordable housing credit: Congress already expanded it for good in 2025, and the bipartisan plan on the table goes further, enough to help finance roughly two million more homes over a decade. Back small builders and factory-built homes with loan guarantees, the same tool our grid plan uses: a small public reserve unlocks a lot of private lending, and builders pay it back. And train the workforce: the electricians and carpenters from our education plan build these homes, and their shortage is a housing cost too. Be honest about the squeeze: this platform also proposes a grid buildout and an infrastructure push, and all three bid for the same trades. That is why the training pipeline, factory-built homes, and phased rollouts are load-bearing here, not decoration. More hands and more factory floors, or the agendas just bid up each other's wages.
Legal homes still need someone to build them, and the building industry that survived 2008 is smaller and more starved for credit than the one before it. Factory methods and financed small builders attack the cost of building itself, the part of the rent that zoning reform can't touch.
Mechanism: Rent help should reach families who qualify. Today, eligible families can spend years waiting for a housing voucher. A voucher helps pay rent in a home the family rents. The family's share depends on income and local rent rules.
First, we guarantee funding for rent help for every household that meets the other program rules and falls within HUD's extremely low-income band. This means roughly 30% of local median income, with adjustments for family size and poverty guidelines. We use HUD's published limits for the year help begins. This income limit sets who qualifies; it does not set the share of income a family pays in rent.
That first phase reaches every region, even where home-building stalls. Families should not lose this help because their town blocks new homes. The law must fund eligible need, rather than leave families waiting when a fixed pot runs out.
Then help expands to more eligible households as regional home-building benchmarks are met. Proposal 1's new homes support this wider growth. The benchmarks and a path for regions that remain short of homes still need to be set.
A funded voucher still needs a home a family can rent. The plan must address failed searches and landlords who refuse vouchers. The rent share, other eligibility rules, rollout dates, and help when a voucher cannot be used remain open. Full coverage is the goal; this first phase does not yet establish a path for every eligible household.
04▸End Street Homelessness
Mechanism: The tents leave the park because the people in them had somewhere to go. More than 770,000 people were homeless on one night in January 2024, the highest ever counted and the biggest one-year jump on record. The encampment argument is loud and mostly beside the point. Sweeps move people. Housing ends homelessness. Every city that tried to police its way out got the same tents in a different park.
We scale what works. Housing First puts people in permanent homes and attaches the help, addiction treatment, mental health care, case management, to the home, instead of making sobriety the price of a roof. Most people housed this way stay housed, city after city. Federal money funds the units, matches local services, and carries this platform's standard condition: published results. Stay-housed rates, cost per person, and street counts, city by city.
This one is solvable, and we know how. That can't be said of every problem on this site. And the street is the most expensive address in America: emergency rooms, jails, and shelters bill the public far more per person than supportive housing does.
STATUS :: THE PRICE OF BUILDING▸ The materials that go into a new home cost 42% more than in January 2020, and construction labor costs are up 24%. Rising build costs push new construction toward the high end of the market, which is why supply-side reform has to attack the cost of building, not just the right to build.
◇ Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, "The State of the Nation's Housing 2025" ↗
METHODOLOGY :: KEYSTONEHOUSINGSCATTER
▸ HOW THE SCATTER IS BUILT
Each dot is one of 50 selected metros matched across sources. The selection omits source rank 33 and includes rank 51; it is not exactly the largest 50. Horizontal: homes
permitted in 2024 per 1,000 residents (Census Building Permits
Survey, CBSA annual file; population from Census CBSA-EST2024).
Vertical: the change in asking rents from June 2022, when
national rent growth peaked, through the latest month of the
Zillow Observed Rent Index (metro, smoothed, all homes plus
multifamily). The dashed line is an ordinary-least-squares fit.
The two labeled metros are chosen by the horizontal axis alone,
the fastest and slowest builders among the 50, whatever their
rents did. That rule, not editorial taste, picks the labels
when the data refreshes.
Metros are joined across sources by principal city and state.
The displayed correlation is computed from the current data. Tests check the calculation, not a required negative result. A data refresh may change the interpretation.
Three honest limits. Correlation is not causation, and building
follows demand too. The fastest builders are mostly Sun Belt
metros where rents spiked hardest in 2021 and gave some back,
and where land and permitting were already easy, so part of
the slope is geography, not policy. And 2024 permits stand in
for each metro's building capacity across the whole window,
since the homes that cooled 2024 rents were permitted earlier.
This chart describes an association in selected metros; it does not estimate how a specific zoning rule or housing subsidy changes rents.
Rerun scripts/fetch-keystone-viz-data.py to refresh the
dataset; all sources are public and keyless.