In Midterm Toss-Up States of Ohio, Iowa, Texas, and Maine, Housing Affordability Is Top of Mind

As the country heads into the final days before the 2026 midterm elections, housing affordability weighs heavily on many voters’ minds.

A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 66% of Americans are “very concerned” about housing costs. And this past July, CNBC’s All-America Economic Survey found that housing affordability is the top concern for Gen Z voters and men aged 18 to 44. 

That’s likely because Americans are spending more money—and more of their incomes—on housing than they have in recent memory. 

A 2024 study from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that nearly half of all Americans—49%—spend more than the recommended 30% of their income on housing. 

Yet lawmakers and voters remain divided on how to ease the economic burden so many Americans now face. Is it an issue of building more housing or backing more programs to subsidize rents and mortgages? Will raising wages solve the problem, or will creating more tenant protections offer relief? Or is the answer some combination of all of the above?

That's why, ahead of the 2026 midterms, Realtor.com® examined the housing issues animating voters in the four states that Decision Desk HQ has deemed Senate race toss-ups, with no clear leader in the polls: Maine, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas. 

The goal was to understand better how housing issues are animating voters and what residents hope lawmakers will do once elected. 

Despite radically different local environments, several common themes emerged: People feel that owning a home has become increasingly out of reach. They worry about people on the lowest end of the economic spectrum. They are also skeptical that an election will really change much.

Read on to learn what housing advocates and average citizens across Iowa, Ohio, Texas, and Maine want lawmakers to focus on after the electionn. 

Maine voters are a mix of newcomers and longtime landowners

In the race for Maine's Senate seat, Democrat Troy Jackson is narrowly favored to defeat longtime incumbent Susan Collins, a Republican. Both agree that private equity investment in residential properties was a major problem in the state, though they don’t necessarily agree on how to solve it. 

Jackson criticized Collins for voting against an amendment from Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) that would support building 7 million new homes and expanding affordable housing opportunities. Collins has criticized Jackson for claiming two homes as primary residences for tax benefits. 

Dan Martin, 41, and his family moved to Freeport, ME, from New Jersey five years ago, trading proximity to New York City for more space and a better quality of life.

He’s one of more than 126,000 people who have moved to Maine since 2020, and he says he was struck by the disparity in housing access in the state. 

“Landowners here own a lot of land, and they’re often unwilling to give it up,” he says. “And that’s fine, but it does create a disparity in what’s available.

“We have a wide breadth of wealthy generational Mainers alongside Somalian refugees," he continues. "And we don’t have enough housing—low-income housing for those folks."

The National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates that Maine has a shortage of 20,000 rental homes for extremely low-income residents. 

Wages in the state also haven’t kept up with housing costs. At the state minimum wage of $15.10 an hour, a worker must put in 67 hours a week to afford a typical one-bedroom apartment at a fair market price of $1,323 a month, according to NLIHC. 

The town hall in Bangor, ME, is equipped with voting booths for early midterm voting on Oct. 16, 2026. Americans voting in the Nov. 3 elections will decide who controls Congress for the final two years of Donald Trump's presidency. (AFP via Getty Images)

Ohioans want affordable and 'attainable' housing 

On Tuesday, Republican incumbent John Husted faces Democrat challenger Sherrod Brown in the Ohio race for U.S. Senate. Brown, a former Senator, narrowly leads in the polls, according to Decision Desk.

Husted’s campaign has stressed increasing the housing supply, cutting federal regulations, and enabling private investment rather than direct government funding. Brown favors lowering housing costs, expanding inventory, and protecting affordable housing.  

Sonya Fix is a professor at Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, OH, and has lived in the city on and off for most of her life. She purchased her home in 2018, but says that many of her fellow 40-something friends are struggling to do so now. 

"I’ve seen friends who are even in better positions than me not be able to buy a house. All of a sudden, during the [COVID-19] pandemic, everyone wanted to buy a house, and rates started going up. So I consider myself pretty lucky to have bought what I did."

Some of those friends "might have owned a house at one point but got divorced and have been renting. You know, it's just, it's really hard to reenter the market as a buyer now because houses are so expensive."

Some of her friends who are renting are also feeling the squeeze.

"I am just absolutely shocked. I have no clue how working-class, lower-income, or even lower-middle-class families who have to rent are doing it," she says. Apartments that once rented for $500 to $600 a month now cost twice as much.

Fix would like to see stronger tenant protections, especially since two-bedroom rents in Ohio increased 28% between January 2020 and January 2025, according to the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio.

"Especially in Columbus and the surrounding areas, where there's a lot of big tech coming in,” she says. "There has to be rental protections to allow people to stay in their homes as opposed to getting shoved out so that the landlord can get someone with more money."

Marcus Roth, communications director of the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio, sees the housing crisis in the state as a multipronged problem, one that’s no longer just an issue for low-income Americans.

"The housing crisis is really reaching higher into the middle class," Roth says. "Elected officials themselves now have their, like, 20- and 30-year-old children living with them. They're seeing it  up close where [their children] can't afford to buy a place and are struggling to find a new place to rent. And so I think that has really helped to raise awareness."

But he says the greatest struggles still exist for the lowest-wage workers in the state—and it's the difference between being “inconvenienced” and being "in crisis."

Around 1.3 million Ohioans—around 9% of the state’s population—spend over half their income on housing and are considered severely housing cost-burdened.

The state also faces a severe affordable housing shortage. According to COHHIO, there are 37 units of affordable housing for every 100 extremely low-income renter households. 

"Leaders and candidates are generally more interested in homeownership and trying to help the middle class because, essentially, middle-class voters are more likely to vote and they have more political power," Roth says. "But the folks at the bottom of the scale are the ones who are really facing the crisis. It is a real shame when somebody can't afford to buy a home anymore, but folks who are working those lower-wage jobs can't afford their apartment, and they're at constant risk of eviction and homelessness. That's the real crisis."

More and more, low-income people in Ohio are finding themselves completely locked out of the rental market. The child of one of Fix’s friends has been living in an extended-stay hotel—at $2,000 a month—because they don’t have the credit or work history to qualify for a lease. 

"In Ohio, our challenge is to make sure that the people that need the help the most get that help, and that they're not just passed over as public resources go more toward the people who are dealing with inconvenience," Roth says. 

Iowa homeowners feel rocked by high property taxes

This election cycle, voters in the Iowa Senate race are choosing between Republican Ashley Hinson and Democrat Josh Turek, both running to replace retiring Republican Sen. Joni Ernst. Hinson holds a slight lead over Turek ahead of Tuesday’s election. 

Hinson’s housing platform focuses on expanding homeownership tax incentives and restricting large institutional investors. Turek supports banning private equity from buying single-family homes, increasing support for first-time homebuyers, and simplifying federal and local permitting for new construction projects. 

Unlike several other toss-up states, Iowa doesn’t face the huge housing deficits that other states do. It faces a shortage of around 8,000 homes but is expected to close it by 2028. 

Matt Kruegar, 33, began buying investment properties in and around Des Moines in 2015. He now owns 12 single-family homes and says his tenants stay an average of six years. 

"We enjoy being in Des Moines. It's a great place to invest. It's always been. Things have changed over the last three, four years for sure, but it's always been easier to invest here in my opinion," he says. 

As a homebuyer, Kruegar says it’s not simply home prices that have gone up—it’s also property taxes and insurance costs. 

Many of the older homes he purchased are not as well insulated as newer construction, so utility costs are also an issue.

"My electric bill throughout the summer is, you know, over $300 a month," he says.

He would like to see the state government work on getting property taxes down, Kruegar says. 

"I'm a statistics guy. Iowa was ranked 12th nationally for affordability versus earnings, which is great. But property taxes accounted for 18.4% of the monthly housing cost. So, you know, almost 20% of what you're paying each month is just in property taxes alone. So I think if we can figure out a way to mitigate some of those property taxes, it will become a lot more affordable for people to buy a house—even if the price of that house is increased from what it used to be."

In Iowa, the typical 20% down payment now requires 42% more income than the average household earns, according to the Common Sense Institute Iowa. However, Iowa remains ahead of the national average, where the gap is 47%.

Even so, Iowa is the ninth most affordable housing market when factoring in property taxes, the think tank found.

Texas voters are feeling the affordability crunch

In Texas, Decision Desk puts Democrat James Talarico slightly ahead of Republican Ken Paxton in a hotly contested race for the Senate seat currently occupied by Republican John Cornyn.  

Talarico has run on support for modular and factory-built homes and favors increased restrictions on institutional investors in single-family homes, as well as zoning reform and stronger corporate landlord regulation. 

Paxton supports increased first- and second-homebuyer deductions, corporate restrictions on single-family home purchases, and cutting the red tape around new builds. 

Betsy Seltzer, an educational instructional designer, is in her 40s and lives with her teacher husband and two children in Cady, TX. They purchased their home in 2014 for $230,000 and have been looking to move, but high prices and elevated interest rates have kept them tethered to their current home. 

In a place where temperatures regularly climb above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer months, Seltzer would like to move to a home with a pool, especially because her son with autism responds well to being in the water.

"He responds very well to being in the water,” she says. “It gives him some sensory feedback that helps regulate him."

But prices in her area have nearly doubled in the past decade while her family’s wages have not.

Compounding their problems, the family’s current home was built in the 1980s, and because of the extreme weather and heat in Cady, they’ve had to spend a lot on repairs—including replacing the water heater three times in 12 years. 

They still hope to move soon, but for now, she says they "feel stuck."

That sense of feeling "stuck" is common, says Favianna Orriols, statewide advocacy director for Texas Housers, a low-income housing information service that primarily works with renter populations in the state. 

"We’re of the position that if you look at the affordable housing bills passed in the last legislative session, there was a push by the governor and the lieutenant governor to address housing affordability," she says. "And they did so in a way that was almost exclusively through land use deregulation."

But she notes that the “barriers that are facing the hardest-hit renters are much more complex than land use regulation. It includes insurance, property taxes, operating costs, incomes. ... The prices of homes have greatly outpaced incomes.”

In the Rio Grande Valley, where Orriols is from, the population is overwhelmingly Hispanic, and "there is this culture down there of, you know, homeownership equals the American dream,” she says. 

Heading into the next legislative session in January, Orriols hopes lawmakers will focus on expanding the state housing trust fund, which offers Texans around $5 million per year through two initiatives: one is a “bootstrap fund” that provides dollars for prospective homeowners who want to build their homes. The other offers resources for people with disabilities who need to retrofit their homes to make them accessible. 

“What we are advocating for is to put more money into that bucket and create some different programs to make them more accessible to people,” she says. 

Kathryn Saar, who is the regional vice president for Texas at Ulysses Development Group and the president of the Texas Affiliation of Affordable Housing Providers, agrees that prospective homeowner support is part of the solution. But she also wants to see reform to state-level housing tax credit initiatives. 

Saar's group works primarily on affordable housing units. Texas is short around 864,000 affordable housing units and nearly half of all renters in the state are considered cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing.

Under current state regulations, a builder can receive up to $2 million in tax credits per approved project. In 2017, she built 115 units of housing with that $2 million credit.

"The deals that I'm looking at today, I might be able to do 65 to 70 units at most with the $2 million in credits."

Further, the value of that $2 million in credits is less these days. 

In 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed, which decreased the corporate tax rate and had the knock-on effect of making housing credits less valuable to banks. Saar says she now typically gets 80 cents on the dollar from banks, whereas she used to get $1 for every tax credit dollar.

That’s partly due to rising construction costs. Tariffs have increased the cost of materials, but general panic around increased ICE raids has made immigrant construction laborers fearful of going to job sites.  

“There's fewer people available to actually do the building,” Saar says. 

Because of rising housing costs and the general overall sense that the cost of living is unaffordable, Saar believes voters are going to be more motivated by "kitchen-table issues" this time around.

"We have, you know, a person who is talking about the things that the voters are concerned with. And then we have another ideological candidate on the Republican side," she says.

"I think there's probably a lot of disillusionment with the voting population because we, you know, send people to Congress, and then nothing changes," she continues. "Unfortunately, that's just kind of where we're at. This election next week, it will be interesting to see where things land. I don't have a crystal ball, but I really can't wait till next week, if only so that my inbox will stop being flooded by requests for donations."