Everyone Running for Office Is Talking About Housing, But Almost No One Is Talking About the Plumbing.

Congress has said the word “housing” more this year than in any midterm cycle on record. Since January 1, 1,387 separate items in the Congressional Record have mentioned housing, compared with 1,011 over the same stretch of 2022. Adjusted for the overall volume of the Record, housing turned up in 7.1% of everything Congress put on paper this year, against 5.8% four years ago.

That is what an issue looks like when it stops being a policy area and becomes a campaign.

The pressure is concentrated exactly where you would expect. The ten states with the closest Senate races going into the home stretch, Maine, North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Alaska, Texas, Minnesota, and New Hampshire, are also where housing costs have moved fastest against local wages. Add the governors’ races, and the map widens considerably.

Thirty-six governorships are on the ballot in 2026, which means close to three out of four governors are facing either an election or a term limit this year. Governors hold the levers that matter most for supply, including zoning, permitting timelines, and state housing finance agencies. Candidates in both parties have figured this out. Housing is now a plank in gubernatorial platforms from California to Wisconsin.

So the talking is happening. The question worth asking is what the talking has produced.

They Already Voted for It

The candidates now promising action on housing have, for the most part, already taken it.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act cleared the Senate 85 to 5 on June 22 and the House 358 to 32 the following day. It became law on July 11. The five senators who voted no were Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Rick Scott, and Tommy Tuberville. Not one of them represents a battleground state. Every senator in the ten closest races voted yes.

It was a serious bill. It streamlined key regulatory and financing processes, including NEPA reviews, FHA multifamily loan limits raised by roughly 4.4 times for some property types, the public welfare investment cap for banks lifted from 15% to 20%, FHA directed to study the draw schedule mismatch that holds back modular construction, and an 18-month exam cycle opened to banks with up to $6 billion in assets, double the previous $3 billion threshold. It was the most substantial federal housing supply legislation in decades, and it passed with the kind of margin that almost nothing gets anymore.

Then housing starts fell.

In July, overall starts dropped 12.4% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.24 million. Single-family starts fell 9.9% to 808,000, down 15.7% from a year earlier. Multifamily fell 16.8%. Builder confidence sat at 34 on the NAHB/Wells Fargo index, well below the neutral 50 mark and below 40 for the fifteenth consecutive month, the longest such stretch since 2012.

A candidate can defend that record honestly. Rulemaking takes time, and most of what the law does won’t show up in a starts number for another year or two. That is a fair answer, But it’s also an incomplete one because it assumes the only things standing between capital and a finished home are regulation and loan limits. They are not.

Why Costs Are the Whole Election, Again

Two years ago the presidential election turned on prices. This midterm is turning on prices again, for the same underlying reason, which is that the country has never fully worked off what it did to itself in 2020 and 2021.

Close to $4 trillion moved into the economy through the CARES Act under Trump and the American Rescue Plan under Biden. This was a bipartisan act of emergency spending, and arguing about which half mattered more misses the point. Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco estimated that fiscal support of that scale added roughly three percentage points to inflation by the end of 2021. Prices took off, and they have proven remarkably hard to bring back down.

July 2026 CPI came in at 3.4% year over year. Core was 2.5%. Five years after the initial surge, the government still hasn’t gotten a clean handle on it.

Housing is the single biggest reason why.

This is where the conventional framing gets it backwards. Gas prices and grocery bills dominate the political conversation about affordability because people see those numbers weekly. But shelter carries a weight of roughly 35% in the Consumer Price Index, the largest single component by a wide margin. Energy carries about 6.3%. Shelter outweighs energy by more than five to one.

The July CPI release made the point plainly. Shelter rose just 0.1% for the month and still accounted for roughly two-thirds of the entire monthly increase in the all-items index. A category that barely moved drove most of the inflation number because it’s that large.

That means there is no version of getting inflation under control that doesn’t run through housing. Not gas. Not groceries. Housing. Any candidate campaigning on cost of living is, whether they frame it that way or not, campaigning on housing supply.

The Part Nobody Is Campaigning on

Cutting regulation is necessary. Freeing up capital is necessary. The ROAD to Housing Act did both, and it deserves credit for it.

Neither one addresses what happens after the capital is committed.

A construction loan isn’t a mortgage. It funds in stages, over eighteen to thirty-six months, against inspections and lien waivers and budget reconciliations, with money released only as work gets verified. That machinery is where the housing pipeline actually lives, and at most institutions it still runs on spreadsheets, email threads, PDFs, and manual document review.

The cost of that shows up in the numbers. Eighty-two percent of contractors now wait more than 30 days to get paid, up from 49% just two years ago. Subcontractors wait roughly 50 days on average from the day work is billed to the day money lands. Slow payment cost the industry an estimated $280 billion in 2024 and adds roughly 14% to total construction spending. More than three out of four subcontractors raise their bids to cover the risk of being paid late.

Read that last one again. Subcontractors are pricing in the cost of waiting. That premium is embedded in the cost of every home and every apartment built in the U.S., and it’s a pure friction cost. It buys nothing. It exists because money that has already been approved can’t move fast enough to reach the people doing the work.

You can deregulate every permit in America, and that number won’t change because the delay is sitting in the middle of the capital stack, between a lender who has committed the money and a contractor who has already done the work.

Pricing risk correctly at that stage requires knowing, in real time, what has been built, what has been inspected, what has been paid, and what the budget actually looks like today rather than at the last quarterly reconciliation. That’s a technology problem, and it has a technology answer, which is one system, one source of truth, and a measurable time to payment.

An Open Invitation

We aren’t neutral here. More than 300 lenders run construction and real estate finance on our platform, including 45 of the top 100 U.S. banks, and more than 86,000 active projects representing over $300 billion in real estate value sit on it today. We built a business on the belief that this middle layer is where housing production gets stuck. We would obviously like people to agree with us.

But the invitation is genuine, and it isn’t a sales pitch. If you’re running for the Senate or for governor this cycle and your platform includes housing affordability, we’ll tell you what we see in the data. Where draws slow down. How long money actually takes to travel from a committed loan to a contractor’s bank account. What the difference looks like between institutions that have modernized that process and institutions that haven’t. We’ll do it for candidates in either party, and we’ll do it whether or not you ever become a customer.

The supply side of housing policy has a plumbing problem. Congress just did the hard political work of opening the valve. If the pipe in the middle stays the same diameter, the water won’t move any faster, and voters will be asking the same question about costs in 2028 that they are asking now.