By Peter Navarro | RealClearMarkets | February 19, 2026
This week’s residential construction report — with housing starts beating expectations and single-family starts rising again — signals that Trump’s policy shift is beginning to unwind the housing distortions of the Biden era.
Housing inflation was one of the clearest affordability failures of those Biden years.
For working families, rent or mortgage payments are not discretionary expenses — they are the single largest component of consumer spending. When housing costs surge, everything else feels expensive.
You cannot import millions of illegal aliens into tight urban rental markets, as the Biden administration did, without upward price effects. You cannot run inflationary fiscal and monetary policies without pushing mortgage rates higher. And you cannot over-regulate housing supply into paralysis and expect affordability.
When millions of additional renters enter dense urban markets in a compressed time frame, rents rise. The Council of Economic Advisers estimates that rents increase roughly one percent for every one million additional illegal immigrants entering affected housing markets. With an estimated 20 million illegal entrants during the Biden administration, that implies roughly a 20 percent national rent effect — with even greater pressure in sanctuary and border metros where inflows concentrated.
That is not politics. That is arithmetic.
Now the Trump affordability correction has begun under a hat trick of policies: deportations, deregulation, and disinflation.
With stepped-up deportations — both removals and voluntary departures — marginal rental demand is easing first in the same metros that absorbed the surge. When demand cools in high-density rental markets, vacancy rises. When vacancy rises, concessions follow. When concessions spread, effective rents soften.