"Your attitude has been noted, Comrade."
Posted on 11/16/2025 2:01:14 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
We need a Marshall Plan for housing, a collection of broad initiatives to make homes more affordable and put the American dream back on track
Homeownership has long been part of the American dream, but that dream has been deferred.
Households in their 30s have an ownership rate of just 42% — more than 20 points lower than the national average.
The median age of all home buyers is a record-breaking 59, and the age of a first-time buyer is 40 — up from 29 in 1981.
As a solution, the Trump administration is floating a 50-year mortgage.
Though I disagree with that specific idea, I am heartened that they are brainstorming ways to tackle the problem.
We need a Marshall Plan for housing, a collection of broad initiatives to make homes more affordable and put the dream back on track.
The federal government can use its bully pulpit to get changes to red tape and regulations that are holding back building, and encourage policies that would increase housing and decrease costs.
To start, the White House and Fannie Mae should instead promote shorter, 20-year mortgages.
As Ed Pinto of the American Enterprise Institute has argued, a 20-year loan can be paid off "when the 30-year-term loan leaves most homeowners saddled with another decade or more of mortgage payments, the cash flow freed up from a paid-off shorter-term loan is available to fund a child’s post-secondary-education needs and later turbocharge one’s own retirement."
The 20-year loan could be incentivized with a first-time buyer tax credit.
The decline in homeownership is a problem that must be addressed federally and locally.
This would be especially important today when the vast majority of taxpayers no longer itemize their tax returns — which means they cannot avail themselves of the deduction for mortgage interest.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
What could possibly go wrong?
No, we need to put US citizens first for jobs.
"Your attitude has been noted, Comrade."
Keep removing illegals.
Why are houses not affordable? Because house flippers are getting to them first and making them more expensive to buy.
O believe in capitalism and free enterprise, but it’s true.
We could start by educating college students that you CAN’T afford a home with a Genders Study degree.
I don’t think the authors know what the Marshall plan was.
It would take years to get a program like that moving. And by then, all of us boomers are going to be dying and getting rid of our homes.
This housing crisis is going to take care of itself. Let’s get the illegals out of our low income housing. Then tell the hedge fund guys to stop buying up all of the homes.
Prosecute and incarcerate those who employ illegals. Once it becomes prohibitively costly to hire illegals, the money will stop flowing to them and they will self-deport.
Sever the tie between home ownership and taxation. No more property taxes on primary home ownership. No capital gains taxes from the sale of your primary home. That will enable people and their children from being taxed out of their homes, and make home ownership easier. (And deport all illegal aliens.)
Crisis??
Simplify the rules to encourage new housing developments.
And, the presence of 30 or 40 million people who don’t belong here must surely affect the price of housing. Not to mention wages. So that seems to be another good place to start.
Don’t we have enough socialism?
I think we have too much.
The Feds ruined the housing market by allowing public service unions that the diminishing tax paying public could not afford. Also they allowed welfare rents to skyrocket higher and higher and the Feds just paid it.
In Colorado, it costs $300,000 to build a shack in the backyard (accessory dwelling unit)
It’s not a crisis. Many 20 something’s live in mommy’s basement instead of getting married and starting families. Many in their 30s are single and live in cities and prefer to rent because they switch jobs every few years.
The interest rates are actually lower than what I paid when I bought my first home in 1992 and much lower than the Jimmy Carter inflation days.
We do need to take a page from Margaret thatchers playbook and sell off public housing to the residents. Create an ownership society instead of a permanent renter class.
Man how wrong is this. We need government to GET OUT OF THE WAY, and let private developers do their thing. You’ll have more housing than you’ll know what to do with.
The biggest problems to home ownership are state regulatory burdens to building more housing stock, local property taxes, bad state home insurance regulations that hike up home insurance, bad state home building permitting regulations that in California alone can add 30% to the cost of a new home, and myriad other issues not solvable by the federal government.
And none of it will work without an admission that federal reserve easy money policies have created inflated housing prices in too many local markets, making housing “recovery” impossible without DEFLATION of housing prices in some markets.
Home mortgage interest rates today ARE NOT out of historic norms, and should not be considered part of the problem. From the years 1971 through 2024 the average 30 year home mortgage interest rate was 7.4%. That’s less than the average today.
That helps. Reducing any federal burdens that increase the cost of building materials would also help.
Protectionism? Never worked anywhere tried.
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