Breaking down barriers between rural America and more housing

Discussion of the nation’s housing crisis tends to center on high-cost cities such as San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, where sky-high rents and sales prices make for clickworthy headlines. Many communities in rural America, however, face a much quieter housing crisis of their own. A 2025 White House report found that, between 2000 and 2023, inflation-adjusted rural rents rose 31.2%, while median real income among rural renter households increased just 5.5%. Meanwhile, rural home prices grew more than six times as fast as homeowner incomes.The report underscored the need to address housing affordability in rural markets a challenge that the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act sought to tackle through multiple provisions, including measures to preserve affordable housing supply and streamline environmental reviews to help ease barriers to rural housing development.This week, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU), one of the first tangible steps toward making the provisions in the bipartisan legislation a reality. The MOU addresses passages in the ROAD A...