Built-for-rent multifamily starts jump 18% in Q4 2025

Built-for-rent multifamily construction surged at the end of 2025, extending the cycle’s heavy tilt toward rentals and keeping average apartment sizes below pre-Great Recession levels, according to a National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) analysis of Census Bureau data. NAHB Chief Economist Robert Dietz reported that 96,000 multifamily units started construction in the fourth quarter […]

Spanberger’s Virginia housing agenda falls short on local pushback

New Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s first-year housing agenda delivered new money and new tools for affordable housing preservation, but it fell short on the package’s biggest supply-side proposal: a statewide push to allow multifamily housing by right in many commercially zoned areas. A pair of bills would have required local zoning codes to allow multifamily […]

Wyoming refund exposes legal risk for local housing fee ordinances

Small wins on impact fees occasionally occur in costly U.S. housing markets. Teton County, Wyoming, officials agreed last week to refund a $24,325 “affordable workforce housing” fee that a homeowner had to pay to obtain a permit to build a single-family home. The payment settles a lawsuit the homeowner filed last year in a Wyoming […]

Housing muni market swells amid affordability policy debate

Financing affordable housing development – typically for lower-income households – is one of the most challenging matters in real estate. Making the economics work on a deal requires layered “hard and soft” funding sources as developers navigate rising costs, policy instability, and structural gaps in the subsidy system. The process is so complicated that professionals […]

Trump executive order targets regulatory barriers to homebuilding

The White House announced on Friday afternoon its effort to challenge what it calls “unnecessary regulatory barriers” to homebuilding by issuing a broad executive order to reduce environmental, permitting and programmatic restrictions that federal officials say are contributing to the nation’s housing affordability crisis. The order, signed by Donald Trump, directs multiple federal agencies to […]