The most powerful voting bloc—homeowners—is financially incentivized to oppose new housing development that would lower prices. This political reality means politicians cannot address housing affordability without alienating their core voters, leading to policy stagnation and an intractable crisis.
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Both Democrats and Republicans avoid the boring, complex solutions to inflation—like housing density, healthcare reform, and aggressive antitrust. Instead, they opt for politically palatable but ineffective measures like tariffs (Republicans) or short-term subsidies (Democrats), ensuring the core problems remain unsolved.
Meaningful affordability cannot be achieved with superficial fixes. It requires long-term, structural solutions: building 5-10 million more homes to address housing costs (40% of CPI), implementing universal healthcare to lower medical expenses, expanding public higher education, and aggressive antitrust enforcement to foster competition.
Recent elections show a clear pattern: politicians win by focusing on groceries, rent, and healthcare. These three categories, dubbed the "unholy trinity," represent the biggest inflation pain points and make up 55% of the average American's cost of living, making them the decisive political issue.
The difference in home price trends between US regions is not about weather or jobs, but housing supply. States in the South and West that permit widespread new construction are seeing prices fall, while "Not In My Backyard" (NIMBY) states in the Northeast and Midwest face shortages and rising prices.
High home prices should not be interpreted as a sign of a healthy market. Instead, they indicate a system that is malfunctioning as designed, where artificial scarcity created by policy and corporate buying drives prices up. This reflects a structural failure, not robust economic demand.
Housing scarcity is a bottom-up cycle where homeowners' financial incentive is to protect their property value (NIMBYism). They then vote for politicians who enact restrictive building policies, turning personal financial interests into systemic regulatory bottlenecks.
A serious approach to the affordability crisis requires a multi-year strategy targeting the biggest cost drivers: housing (massive supply increase), healthcare (nationalization), and education (income-based tuition), combined with aggressive antitrust enforcement. Piecemeal solutions from either party fail to address the systemic nature of the problem.
A major driver of today's housing scarcity is that homeowners, particularly Boomers, who refinanced into sub-3% mortgages have no financial incentive to ever sell. This seemingly positive economic condition has had the negative side effect of locking vast amounts of housing inventory in place, worsening the supply crisis.
The current housing market is not a cyclical bubble that will pop, but a structural crisis. It's a permanent collapse of opportunity driven by policy failures, corporate consolidation, and demographic incentives that have created deep, lasting scarcity, fundamentally changing the nature of homeownership in America.
Politicians at all levels actively restrict housing supply through zoning and other policies. This is not incompetence, but a deliberate strategy to protect and inflate property values, which satisfies the large and reliable homeowner voting bloc, ensuring re-election at the expense of renters and future buyers.