Different month, same joke: There’s a “legendary” builder in The White House. That means US homebuilders should be lovin’ life, right?

Wrong. Definitely and demonstrably wrong.

To be fair, the homebuilder depression dates to the four-year interregnum when Donald Trump wasn’t president.

In 2022, Fed rate hikes collided with soaring property values to create a housing affordability crisis of existential proportions in America, a nation already bedeviled by a structural shortage of supply.

Persistently elevated costs made the situation worse for builders whose margins are being crunched both by pervasive incentives to lure cash-strapped buyers and expensive materials and labor.

But Trump promised to fix at least some of those problems and so far, he hasn’t delivered. (Imagine that.)

The marquee measure of homebuilder moods has accordingly spent every month of Trump’s second term deeply underwater.

Monday’s print for June, a God-awful 35, was the second-worst of 2026 trailing only April’s 34 readout.

Builder sentiment’s only been above 50 four times since 2022. It’s spent the last 14 months below 40, “a streak not seen since 2011-2012 during the foreclosure crisis,” the NAHB lamented.

In this month’s press release, the association focused on Congress and regulatory reform rather than macro issues and the war.

“With the nation short about 1.2 million homes, builder sentiment will remain soft until barriers are eased and conditions improve for home building,” new Chairman Bill Owens said.

Robert Dietz, the association’s long-serving chief economist, blamed “costly and inefficient regulatory policy” for “impeding the ability of builders to increase the housing supply.”

There was virtually no good news in this release. The main measure of future sales stuck at a lackluster 45, the share of builders cutting prices rose three points to 35% and the use of sales incentives ticked up to 62% in June from 61% in May.

Meanwhile, Redfin’s Dana Anderson noted that in a hypothetical scenario where all current and former SpaceX employees spent their IPO windfall on property in San Antonio, the closest major metro to Starbase, those employees could buy 40% of the city’s homes.

And not just the homes for sale. “Half of all homes in the entire metro area,” Anderson was quick to add.