Housing in America.

Depending upon your preferred source, the average age of the first-time home buyer in the United States is between 33 and 40 years old.

The last available Point-In-Time count of unhoused Americans from 2024 showed that 771,480 people slept without a roof over their heads.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), as of 2025 there were 35 affordable homes available for every 100 families in need of one.

The Harvard State of Housing report in 2025 said, “The number of apartments renting for less than a thousand dollars a month has dropped by seven million in the last decade,” and, “Three in four American households cannot afford the median-priced new home.”

It’s why the word “housing” is usually followed by the word “crisis.” It’s both a supply and a demand issue. A matter of affordability and distribution. It’s a topic so complex and intertwined with other economic factors that it has induced a state of policy paralysis. And yet, this month a miracle was performed in Congress. More on that in a moment.

First, let’s talk about the concept of housing and property as a function of the economy and natural rights.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The celebrated and controversial French theorist, known above all for one axiom: property is theft. In fact, he called it “the grand cause of privilege and despotism.”

Proudhon was an anarchist. A proper one. He didn’t want followers. He didn’t want credit for founding a governing system. He wanted to dismantle the mechanism by which property becomes power.

Proudhon, like many of his contemporaries, was wrestling with property as the means of production—a farmer’s land, a carpenter’s tools. Control the property and you control the person.

In modern times, we may just as well extend that notion to the American Dream.

Housing is a loaded issue in the United States. Depending on who you ask, we have either an oversupply or an undersupply. We have endless debates on the quantity and availability of affordable housing. We argue bitterly over zoning rights, regulations, codes and standards, the fairness of assessment and taxation. There is a class divide between owner and renter. Debates over federal assistance for disability, veteran, and elder housing. Whether housing is a right or a privilege.

Housing is one of the most complex and consequential issues in America. And one that reveals stark divides among us.

And yet, the most incredible thing just happened.

A bill was passed and is awaiting the president’s signature, which isn’t a slam dunk, even though he got what he asked for in the bill. Point being, we have a bipartisan bill that doesn’t involve military funding. Astonishing! The bill was developed by liberal Democrat Elizabeth Warren and Republican stalwart Tim Scott. A unified effort on one of the most contentious policy issues in the nation, during the most contentious and fractured time in modern American history.

I suppose if something is to make sense in the Trump era, it would be that something which has never made sense to our legislators before somehow does now.

Today we’re exploring the divisive nature of housing in America. What this bill means for the future of it. And how Proudhon’s words challenge us to this very day. Because while a house may not be exactly what the great anarchist thinker had in mind, it is very much the embodiment of today’s capitalist system.

Road to Housing Act

Let’s begin with the legislation. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. H.R. 6644, co-sponsored by Tim Scott, (R) South Carolina, and Elizabeth Warren, (D) Massachusetts. Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren. On the same bill.

The House passed it 390 to 9 on February 9th. The Senate passed it 89 to 10 on March 12th. Now it’s back in the House for reconciliation.

The bridge was a Trump executive order (EO) from January titled, “Stopping Wall Street from Competing with Main Street Homebuyers.” The EO directed federal agencies to stop supporting transactions that sell single-family homes to large institutional investors, and was purportedly the addendum required to get Trump on board with the bill.

The order became section 901 that codifies a ban on entities owning more than 350 single-family homes from purchasing any more. There’s also a seven-year forced sale and an exception for existing portfolios followed by an auto-repeal after 15 years.

It’s a great populist talking point, one that Trump will be able to exploit at his rallies for sure. In reality, it’s a drop in the bucket as institutional investors only own roughly 0.7% of all U.S. single-family homes.

Fair enough. The substance, of course, lies beneath the headlines. So let’s talk about what it does and doesn’t do.

What It Does

The bill streamlines National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews; expands categorical exclusions for infill housing. For example, if you’re building on a vacant lot in a developed neighborhood, you skip the multi-year review. It also creates a $200 million annual competitive grant for localities that demonstrably increase housing supply. This is real money. Not a pilot. It’s an actual grant tied to measurable production.

It lifts the manufactured housing chassis requirement. Manufactured homes cost roughly 45% less per square foot than site-built homes. The chassis rule, requiring a permanent steel frame, was a regulatory barrier with no functional purpose so removing it opens an affordable pipeline.

The bill also raises the bank affordable housing investment cap from 15% to 20%. Includes the Revitalizing Empty Structures Into Desirable Environments (RESIDE) Act—essentially converting vacant commercial buildings into affordable housing. Removes the cap on Emergency Solutions Grant funding for shelter beds. Reauthorizes the Housing Opportunities Made Easier (HOME) program. And ties some Community Development Block Grant funding to local production targets.

What It Does Not Do

There’s no zoning preemption. Section 1102 explicitly states that there shall be no override of local zoning. The Housing Supply Frameworks Act was dropped. The Build More Housing Near Transit Act was dropped. No new rental vouchers. And no rent stabilization.

And simultaneously, HUD is proposing two-year time limits and 40 hour/week work requirements on Section 8 recipients. One hand builds. The other hand cuts.

And there’s one more complication. Trump has said he won’t sign non-SAVE America Act legislation until that voting bill passes. So the ROAD Act sits. Waiting on a voting bill that has nothing to do with housing and everything to do with destroying democracy. Oh well.

Nevertheless, this bill exists inside a problem that is vast, interconnected, and older than any single piece of legislation. There is no single housing crisis in America. There is a web.

Ownership

The homeownership rate in Q4 2025 was 65.7%, down from 69% in 2005. This basically tells us that those holding deeds are holding onto them, as younger populations aren’t coming into home ownership at the same rate. If we had real wage growth and wealth growth parity, this number would be moving forward, not back.

Renters

Twenty-two and a half million renter households are what is called “cost-burdened,” meaning they’re spending more than 30% of their income on housing. And 12 million are severely cost-burdened, spending more than half their income. And fully 65% of working-age renters can’t cover basic daily needs after rent. Hence the consumer debt crisis.

Supply

The national deficit is anywhere between 1.5 to 3.7 million units. The stock of rental units below a thousand dollars a month dropped 30% in a decade: 24.8 million to 17.2 million. Average professionally managed rent in Q1 2025: $1,830 a month. That’s 32% higher than 2019.

Thirty-five affordable and available units for every 100 extremely low-income households. That’s the NLIHC’s 2025 number. A catastrophe.

Record Homelessness

771,480 people on a single night in January 2024, The HUD Point-In-Time count. As we’ve spoken about before, there’s a good chance we’re not going to get updated figures on this now that Trump is in charge. The cuts to the agencies that track this have been devastating.

Geography

This is a major consideration. Coastal metros are severely undersupplied and unaffordable. Economically depressed regions have an apparent oversupply, but the housing stock is dilapidated and disconnected from employment centers. You can’t take a job you can’t get to, and you can’t afford housing where the jobs are.

Education

The school funding trap. U.S. public school funding is tied to the local property tax base. That is not an accident and it is not neutral.

High-value districts fund better schools. Better-funded schools produce better outcomes. Better outcomes raise earning potential. Higher earners drive up property values. Which prices out lower earners. Which concentrates poverty. Which underfunds the schools.

That’s the housing economy doom loop that has vexed us since our founding.

The Racial and Social Elements of Housing

The housing crisis in America is not an accident of market forces. It was designed. And the design has a racial architecture. Take my home as a prime example: Long Island.

1947. William Levitt built 17,000 homes on former potato fields. Mass-produced. Identical. Affordable. America’s first suburb at scale. The template for everything that follows—the sprawl, the car economy, the lawn, the picket fence, the American Dream IRL.

The GI Bill made it possible with low-cost federally backed mortgages ensuring that millions of returning veterans could finally own a piece of the pie.

Levittown’s lease agreements, however, explicitly barred Black residents. Verbatim: “No dwelling shall be used or occupied by members of other than the Caucasian race.”

It wasn’t just Levittown. FHA underwriting guidelines—federal guidelines—redlined Black neighborhoods as hazardous investments. Banks wouldn’t lend. Not because the market said no; because the government told them to.

Black GIs who fought the same war, came home to the same country, were systematically locked out of the primary wealth-building mechanism in American capitalism. If you want a deep dive on this one make sure to check out our episode, The Economics of Racism, or read The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein and The Color of Money by Mehrsa Baradaran; when read as companion pieces these books will give you an unvarnished and comprehensive understanding of the racial problem around housing, banking and mobility.

The long tail of redlining, which took many forms, locked-out equity compounds over 80 years. It is still compounding today. The wealth gap between Black and white American families is, in very substantial part, a housing equity story.

The same year as Levitt was defining suburban sprawl, just a few miles west in Manhattan, Metropolitan Life built Stuyvesant Town—11,250 units. Built with city tax breaks and the same race prohibitions. Their president, Frederick Ecker said, “Negroes and whites don’t mix.”

Now, the New York State Court of Appeals struck it down. But by the time the legal battle was over, Stuyvesant Town was fully occupied. The legal victory was real. The material outcome for Black families was the same as it ever was.

Now. I want to be careful about making this partisan. I’m not. This is history.

Fred Trump—Donald Trump’s father—was investigated and sued by the Justice Department in 1973 for refusing to rent to Black tenants in Brooklyn and Queens. Agents marked applications from Black prospective tenants with a “C”—for colored—to flag them for rejection.

The family fortune Donald Trump inherited was built, in part, on discriminatory housing policy that benefited from the same system that locked Black families out of Levittown. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he will most likely sign the first major federal housing legislation in a generation. History has a strange sense of irony.

And yet. The Fair Housing Act is being gutted in real time.

The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity has been cut from 31 staff to 6. Annual discrimination settlements: from $4 million a year to less than $200,000. Formal discrimination charges: from roughly 35 per year to four.

The law is still on the books. It’s just not being enforced.

Tweaking at the Margins

You might recall one of the ideas Donald Trump floated recently was the idea of a 50-year mortgage. Before we talk about why this is not helpful, it is in fact a terrible idea, let’s talk about the 30 year mortgage and why it marked a turning point in the United States.

The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was a New Deal-style policy designed to democratize homeownership. It was not a natural market creation. And it worked. For millions of Americans, it was the first time their family could own a true asset with appreciable value.

But it also created a permanent demand floor. Millions of buyers, every year, were competing for the same fixed stock of housing. Federal backing of loans that were cheap and available naturally resulted in housing price inflation. Access wound up becoming a trap over time to the point where today, 75% of American households cannot afford the median-priced new home. It’s one of the reasons the average first-time homebuyer is in their late thirties, not twenties.

Add to the mix the relatively new phenomenon of supply constraints.

Post-COVID supply chain disruption structurally elevated lumber, concrete, and steel costs. Those costs have not come back down. Trump’s mass deportation agenda has led to a skilled trade worker deficit. The undocumented labor pool has been load-bearing in American construction for decades. In high density areas zoning has also become a major issue. This was the crux of Ezra Klein’s Abundance agenda as it relates to housing. The bureaucratic bloat, red tape and NIMBYism—meaning not in my back yard—present in major economic hubs is a real thing, it’s just not the thing. That is why Klein took so much heat for plucking this detail out from among myriad issues that plague the U.S. economy.

Another developing phenomenon that we are just beginning to feel the effects of is the insurance market. In coastal areas especially, costs are rising so sharply that new construction is becoming economically unviable in the regions that need it most. And many homeowners are now going “naked,” as in without insurance altogether. The premiums are so onerous if you can get them that it’s easier to just walk away from a disaster.

So while I’m impressed that lawmakers were able to get over themselves, you can understand why this is a bandaid on an amputation. Now layer Trump’s 50-year mortgage plan on top of this mess and our average 38 year old home buyer would be 88 when the loan finally matures. That sounds more like a prison sentence than the American dream.

Housing and Inequality

Housing exposes something interesting about the nature of inequality. We talk about inequality like it’s one thing, but it isn’t. There’s a difference between income inequality and asset inequality. There are regulatory, or statutory ways to address income inequality. Levers like wage floors, labor organizing, tax policy and so on. But asset inequality gets to the structural heart of the issue. The ownership gap. Stocks. Real estate. Business equity. This is where the gap truly compounds.

One of the modern accelerators of asset inequality, or asset inflation really, was our response to the Global Financial Crisis. Fed policy of near-zero interest and trillions in liquidity through quantitative easing poured money into pockets that were already stuffed.

When the asset owning class is flush with cash, a fraction of it goes into the real economy in the form of consumer spending. Some of it does, which is why half of all consumer spending in the U.S. is done by the top 10%. But even billionaires sleep at some point. What they really love is making money while they sleep. So they invested all that excess cash into paying down debt and bulking up on assets.

This was the “trickle-down” fallacy on steroids. The cheap and abundant money didn’t create wage growth. It inflated asset prices. Stocks, real estate, private equity. Everything the high net worth crowd already owned got dramatically more valuable. The flip side of the coin is that anyone trying to get into the asset market was suddenly priced out.

The asset price chasm was already uncomfortable heading into the new millennium. The Fed’s response to the Global Financial Crisis supercharged it. Housing is where you see it most viscerally. Everyone needs a place to live. The stock market is optional. Shelter is not.

So here’s the dilemma in a nutshell. We’re in a situation where baby boomers hold an estimated 18 trillion dollars in home equity. The single largest asset class in their retirement portfolio. The system requires home values to stay high for that retirement to be secure.

But high values mean the next generation cannot afford entry. This is the central contradiction of American housing economics. It has no comfortable resolution. Lower prices fix affordability and destroy boomer retirement security simultaneously.

The only correction that would make housing broadly affordable again—and I want to be plain—is a depression. Not a recession. A depression. The entire asset inflation system would have to unwind. If that happens, we might have bigger problems on our hands.

Bring It Home, Max

Proudhon was writing about a labor economy. The means of production were literal—land, tools, capital equipment. Control those, and you controlled a man’s livelihood.

We don’t have a laboring economy anymore. We have a service economy, highly financialized. The means of production today are abstract—credentials, networks, access, capital.

But the house. The house is concrete. Physical. Undeniable.

It determines which school your children attend. Your physical health outcomes—stable housing is one of the strongest predictors of health in the literature. Your mental health—housing insecurity is a documented crisis. Whether you have collateral. Whether you build equity. Whether you leave something to your children.

Housing in America is not just shelter. It is the mechanism by which everything else in your life is determined.

If that’s not the means of production, I don’t know what is.

Think about the generational weight of it all. If you bought before 2010, you built equity on cheap money. If you bought before 2000, you rode two full asset inflation cycles. If redlining locked your grandparents out of Levittown, you start the race eight decades behind.

The generational effects of housing exclusion are not history; they are ever present and expressed in the racial wealth gap.

In fairness to our current legislators, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is real legislation. The investor ban sends a signal. The chassis removal is quietly one of the most consequential provisions—45% less per square foot, a regulatory barrier that existed for no good reason, now gone. The Innovation Fund is real money tied to real production. The Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) cap lift and HOME reauthorization expand the affordable housing finance pipeline.

These provisions matter. But none of them address the structural condition. None of them touch zoning, expand rental vouchers or resolve the asset inflation chasm. None of them can.

If we want affordable housing without a massive, centralized, government-funded construction program—and no such program is on the table from either party—then the only market correction is a depression. Prior experience with public housing has soured today’s elected officials on the government’s role in this vital sector. And it’s not unfounded on the surface.

Many of the most high profile, large-scale public housing projects look like failures in hindsight. But most of these projects failed because of chronic, deliberate underfunding and political neglect. Whether you own or rent a home you know what it takes to keep it up. It’s not easy. Now do this at scale, divorced from market incentives, and you can see where the problem lies.

Apart from a mental exercise and history lesson about how fucked up housing is, we’re still left with a problem in need of a solution. As counterintuitive as this might sound, one of the reasons efforts have failed in the past is because we’re tackling housing problems with housing responses only.

It’s like so many things we tackle within capitalism. Always striving to hit the nail directly on the head instead of seeing whether the board is loose because of structural issues. To address the housing crisis in America we have to come to terms with the same reality that we face with public health and education. To address any of these vital concerns we have to first admit that the so-called market cannot fix them in isolation. Markets are designed to choose winners and losers. We have to agree that access to food, healthcare, public education and shelter are rights, not privileges. Then we have to examine the system holistically.

To be clear, Proudhon wouldn’t have advocated for government housing. He was an anarchist, not a socialist. That distinction matters. He wasn’t asking the state to fix the problem—he was naming the structure that created it. But Proudhon was writing before capitalism became a fixture of the world, when the population of France was around 32 million. Before the second industrial revolution and the mass urbanization within nationstates.

Democratic socialists of today point to the city of Vienna, which owns or subsidizes roughly 60% of all housing within its borders. Half the city’s population lives in it—not just the poor, not just the desperate. It’s middle class families. Young professionals. Retirees. Everyone. The buildings are architecturally competitive. The rents are low. And because the supply is so dominant, even the private market can’t outrun it. Landlords can’t charge what the market won’t bear when the market has a permanent floor.

Vienna has been doing this since the 1920s—through two world wars, recession and austerity, and every political headwind you can name. It works because they never stopped funding it. That’s the whole secret. We built similar concepts and then we starved them of resources, neglected them into dysfunction, and pointed at the rubble as proof that government housing doesn’t work. Or we privatized them over time and left future generations out of the beneficiary pool.

If you want to gradually bend the affordability curve in the United States, you have to have an enterprise-level plan that steadily brings workforce housing online with heavy subsidies in perpetuity. Zoning, public schools, access to healthcare, and food scarcity should be addressed in parallel and, yes, this would be a New Deal level intervention into the market. You can’t just drop a Vienna housing project into an urban American center without considering the other social democratic protections that bind society together. What I’m suggesting is a large scale, gradual unwinding of our capitalist system with housing as a core component in a suite of programs that definitely serve the working class. It includes Medicare for All and municipal grocery stores in food deserts, similar to what Mamdani is proposing in New York.

It’s a collective decision to check the “all of the above” box. So I applaud Congress for this. Genuinely. Because it’s proof that they can still legislate. It won’t solve the structural problem. That problem is decades deep and wired into the retirement security of the most reliable voting bloc in America. It will take more than a bill to unwind that.

So here’s where I land: if housing in America controls your health, your children’s education, your access to credit, your generational wealth—if it is the means of production of modern American life—then the sentiment holds.

Property is theft. Also, our world isn’t the same as Proudhon’s. Anarchy is no longer on the menu, but a little Robin Hood action wouldn’t hurt.