President Pushes for Lower Interest Rates : Housing: Bush tells home builders of plans to stimulate the industry. He says commission will study problem of affordability.

President Bush told the slumping home building industry today that he wants interest rates to drop further and said a federal commission will study ways to make home ownership more affordable.

Bush, on the eve of the first anniversary of his inauguration, declared, “The 1990s must be another decade of lower taxes and lower interest rates.”

The President told several thousand members of the National Assn. of Homebuilders that Congress must adopt “fiscal policies as sound as those of the average American household.”

Bush’s comments added impetus to Administration efforts to pressure the Federal Reserve Board into an easier credit policy.

“We cannot allow the high costs of housing to suffocate the financial life of America’s young people,” the President said. “When it comes to housing, this must not become a society of haves and have-nots.”

Observing that the cost of new homes has been steadily increasing for the last “decade and a half,” Bush said more and more young Americans are finding themselves priced out of the home market.

He vowed to work with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp to cut federal red tape “to create decent housing that people can afford.”

He noted that he had asked Kemp to convene a commission that would study burdensome bureaucratic barriers to affordable housing construction “and make recommendations on how to eliminate them.” He offered no details.

“But the truth is, there’s one housing policy and one sales strategy that’s better than all others combined--a healthy, growing economy with low, long-term interest rates,” Bush declared.

“Vital to home buyer and home builder alike are low and stable rates of interest,” he added, claiming that each increase of one percentage point in the interest rate “knocks millions of families out of the market.”

Bush’s comments and those by other Administration officials come amid speculation that momentum at the Fed for easing credit policy had ended.

As he has done in nearly all of his speeches this year, Bush also called on Congress to act on items that he proposed last year, especially his proposal for a cut in the tax rate on capital gains--the profit from sales of investments.

“I call on the Democrat leaders of Congress to give the American people a break and to let the House and Senate work their will by having an up-and-down vote on the capital gains tax cut,” Bush said.

He also told the home builders organization that he stands firm in his opposition to massive new government public housing projects.