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 ...
It has been a Christian sin forever and it was illegal in the United States for most of our history.
It is moneylending at interest, and with very few exceptions, it is destructive of social bonds, morals, and families.
So charging interest on a loan is immoral and should be outlawed?
As family size got smaller, average new home size went way up. We have invested in an asset we can’t afford only because government subsidies incentivised it.
Either a crash or a massive deportation program can begin to correct the misallocation of resources.
When I get time, I’ll hunt up an online square foot estimator to price a new house the size and features of the one I grew up in. I think I have an idea of the answer, but will see what the numbers say.
You used to be able to buy a home without any degree at all.
And don't knock gender studies degrees when we have countless Americans with computer science degrees who can't get jobs because we're giving them all to "talented" H-1Bs from India.
Thanks to current home prices and interest rates, a 50 year mortgage is the only way for renters to be able to afford a mortgage payment for the same amount as they're paying in rent.
It basically means you're paying rent to a bank instead of a landlord and when the A/C unit goes out, that's on you.
It didn't used to be this way. Not that long ago, it was actually far cheaper to make a mortgage payment (30 yr) than a rent payment. A lot of people chose to rent simply because they didn't want to get tied down to a specific location.
Stop shouting, if you don’t know what you’re saying!
We’re in California. If we die, our kids inherit huge capital gains taxes. Because of Prop 19, the property is reassessed to current market value and the kids are on the hook to pay the capital gains taxes for previous years. No breaks, unless the kid is currently living there for the last couple years. If an empty nester, your kids lose out if they can’t come up with the increased taxes. We don’t live like Rockefellers! We bought 4 decades ago, within our means. Property taxes are insane now, and local governments are thieves.
House Insurance certainly seems to be out of control.
Of the others, for me lining out in deepest flyover country, only the optical fiber internet seems to be highly out of line.
Due to Property Taxes, the local gov’t always owns the property.
Exactly !
“...we have countless Americans with computer science degrees who can’t get jobs because we’re giving them all to “talented” H-1Bs from India. “
Also, suppose Gender Studies does something that can make good money.
Now they are also bidding for the same number of houses and the price goes even higher.
Demand needs to be reduced. And the best way is to expel non-citizens.
Sir, or Ma’am, you are an enigma, wrapped in mystery, and smothered in secret-sauce. ;)
And not just the demand on housing but we'd see gas and energy prices plummet from less demand. Health care costs would go down as well. We'd see food prices drop.
We could solve so many problems by kicking out the 100 million people who don't belong here. (And I know the "official" number is 30 million but I don't buy that for a second. I was in Walmart today. It was packed. NOBODY was speaking English. Look around and start noticing this. Everybody around you is speaking a foreign language.)
We need to reduce the excessive demand by getting rid of every goddamn illegal alien within our borders
Kick their asses out all of them
We need to get about 50 million people who are in the country illegally, out of the country.
Think that might help.
When I got out of college in 1982, the unemployment rate was 11%, & interesr rates were over 20%. No sibling, cousin or friend from college or childhood had a house in his or her 20 s. My father got a house at age 28 in 1969, but after serving on the 38 th parallel in Korea, & with a down payment he got as a gift from his unmarried, childless uncle, who adored him.
I worked in Midtown Manhattan in the mid 1980s, when people would pay $2,000 / month for a closet space in Manhattan. People from NJ, PA, Connecticut, RI, Long Island & upstate New York work in the city, & there is no way everybody who works in all those tall buildings & skyscrapers is ever going to find an inexpensive apartment in Manhattan.
I remember when Trump came into New York City & saved it.....the media hated him. Trump would show how millionaire widows were living in cheap, rent controlled apartments on Park avenue, & how their rent had not risen in 20 yrs or so. Not easy to increase supply in NYC, & demand was off the charts, so of course, the wealthy people could outbid the rest. Nobody is owed a cheap place to live in New York City.
Most people commuted by train to the city from Long Island and New Jersey....or lived in Brooklyn or Queens & took the subway. And outside the city, where people drive cars and trucks, very few people live in the same town where they work. The idea that the poor & middle class & slackers & welfare clean are owed a cheap place to live in the most demanded geography in the world is absurd. There are areas where the rich live because they can afford to live. New York City is one such place. Hollywood Hills is another.
Here in Phoenix area, the new homes are much bigger than the older homes. People who live in homes built in the 50s & 1960 s, are dying and selling to builders who demolish them to replace them with huge new homes to fill demand from California and Chicago area, and these people have big money to spend. The home across the street from us went to a builder in 2011 for $235,000, but he built the carport area into a big garage, opened up the kitchen....and sold it last December for $1.6 million to a young couple who seem to be loaded. The house next door that was a rental for many years, finally was sold.....demolished, and a huge new house was built on the property, bought first by a Carvana executive, now was bought by a young golf loving dentist and his wife who moved to Phoenix from San Francisco. The new economy seems to have winners & losers, and I am hoping that as Trump drives out the illegals, many neighborhoods that once were nice middle class neighborhoods in Phoenix that got poorer in the 1990s, when urban “ sprawl” was being condemned by liberals, now can go back to being middle class neighborhoods, again. ..as illegals and crime subside. Obama era brought in lots of Africans, so our Costco....which once was frequented by congressman Sam Coppersmith, newsoaper columnist Robert Robb, and mayor Terry Goddard....has become a depressing place of non English speaking people...many Muslims & Mexicans....not far fron where all these over million dollar homes are being built and bought, as 1990s sprawl has been somewhat replaced by richer peoole wanting to be near the airport in the center of town. So I am hoping that middle class neighborhoods spring up out of the areas blighted by immigration from the 1990s, when Greensoan’s mild deflation led to bigger cars and bigger homes, and more borrowing, that kept going all tge way to 2008, and even illegal immigrants were buying homes before 2008.
So home prices going from $200,000 to over $1.5 million in 25 years is mostly about huge demand for bigger homes in the center of town, according to Demographics. Property still is affordable in Maricopa county, but not in the areas in highest demand, just like New York City never has been affordable since the 1970s.
But there are parts of New Jersey where home prices are not skyrocketing at all. Property taxes and jobs are part of the picture. Arizona has no state property tax, nor do some cities in Maricopa county that have no schools, such as Sun City and Paradise Valley. And where there are local property taxes, they are not very high compared to places such as NJ. There are no areas in NJ where home prices in a neighborhoid rose fron $235,000 to $1.6 million since 2011, like in certain high demand areas of Phoenix, where Californians are buying, because they are used to paying $1 million for a small home on a small lot. I
Government should get out of the business of promising people homes or rents controlled in highly desirable areas.
People are nuts these days. Democrats are to blame for the Federal Reserve 1977 dual mandate law, for 1965 open immigration, for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Obamacare, Green New Deal, open borders under Biden, Stalinist Covid shutdowns.....so now we have runaway spending, broken supply chains, higher inflation. The Democrats ran up massive debt during Covid that was monetized by the Fed, so....along with Biden’s open border, war on fossil fuel energy, green wasteful slending binge....plus runaway social program spending, we got a surge of inflation, made worse by the Fed over tightening before supply chains could recover, plus Biden put a destructive minimum tax on corporations, including oil. ...so prices stubbornly have remained high, but we have runaway spending but an economy still strong enough not to have runaway inflation. Greenspan legged the dollar to gold and oil.....and what we need is tax reform that supports high entitlement spending without taxing business or soaking the rich, fixing programs and runaway spending, and getting rid of the Federal Reserve dual mandate and ability to try to control the economy by manipulating interest rates to control demand and keep wages from rjsing, and replace it by a single mandate to keep the value of the dollar strong and stable.....and let markets work for progress, to fill human wants and needs and reduce inflation by competition and innovation. Markets and freedom will work....maybe homes will be smaller. But each city and aress surrounding cities have so much blight and fallow land BECAUSE of government, it is nauseating ti think that a spoiled generation of coddled young people who have not seen a recession since 2009, have never seen an unemployment rate above 6%, are going to create a new entitlement for homes, for apartments by going to socialism and cursing free markets. Trump is very undisciplined, because it looks lime he get rich by getting government to do favors for him, too. Trump panders too much.
P
We can also remind those students that our parents our parents were able to buy their houses because they weren’t buying expensive fingernails, hair frostings, $7 coffee and expensive destination weddings, wedding outfits and bachelor weekends in Las Vegas.
There’s two huge issues in the housing market..interest rates which should under 4% but that won’t happen anytime soon and real estate taxes which are skyrocketing everywhere because of runaway government freebies.
Most forms of lending are predatory, given the nature of man, and rather than punishng individual borrowers, which is time consuming and punishes understandable human weaknesses, we have in the past punished lenders.
Because more government is always the solution to all problems.
Hail Victory!!!!
After you pay off the bank and get the mortgage released, the city, county, state still really owns it. Miss paying property taxes and they will take it, just as the bank can foreclose if you don’t pay the mortgage.
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