President Donald Trump Announces Intent To Drive Housing Prices Up
"I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up."
Published Feb. 2 2026, 6:12 p.m. ET
Sometimes, President Donald Trump executes actions that may help untold numbers of people; other times, he makes questionable decisions that could harm countless living things.
Case in point: at a recent Cabinet meeting on Jan. 29, President Trump announced that he actually intends to drive housing prices up — not down — in an effort to increase home ownership among Americans. The startling comment was made as part of a speech about affordability and housing policies.
Why, if President Trump seeks to increase the number of homeowners in the U.S., would he want to increase the prices of houses, rather than slashing prices? It's a head-scratching comment, to say the least, but at least it made sense to President Trump.
Below, we attempt to make sense of the broader context of President Trump's comments and how, in theory, such a move is expected to increase home ownership in the U.S.
President Donald Trump says he wants to drive housing prices up.
The soundbite from President Trump has been captured and recycled over and over again across social media, from laypeople to news organizations astounded that he would so brazenly admit to wanting to increase the cost of housing amid another affordability crisis.
According to a report in USA TODAY, President Trump's comments came at a Jan. 29 Cabinet meeting. At that meeting, President Trump suggested that lowering interest rates would allow more Americans to purchase homes.
"People that own their homes, we're going to keep them wealthy. We're going to keep those prices up," President Trump remarks, before giving the remarkably tone-deaf soundbite that has been passed around the Internet ever since.
"I don't want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes," Trump said. "And they can be assured that's what's going to happen."
Per the USA TODAY report, President Trump's executive order on Jan. 20 banned institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes.
That executive order, titled Stopping Wall Street from Competing with Main Street Homebuyers, sought to prevent "Wall Street investors" from "crowding out families seeking to buy [single-family] homes," a common-sense policy that most non-wealthy people would probably agree with.
Then, President Trump said this in the Jan. 29 Cabinet meeting: "We're not going to destroy the value of their homes so that somebody who didn't work very hard can buy a home...I want to protect the people who, for the first time in their lives, feel good about themselves. They feel like, you know, that they're wealthy people."
According to USA TODAY, the median price for a home in the U.S. "soared to a record $433,000 in November 2025," with Zillow projecting housing prices to increase by almost 2% more in 2026.
Finally, President Trump said next week he plans to announce his nominee for the chairman position of the Federal Reserve. President Trump unsurprisingly disagrees with current Chair Jerome Powell, who has refused "to aggressively lower interest rates as Trump has demanded," according to the report.