Current real estate deliveries were financed in the 2020-22 low-rate era, causing a temporary supply glut in high-demand sectors like Sunbelt apartments. Since new construction halted in 2023, today's depressed prices offer a unique entry point before supply normalizes and rents can accelerate.

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.

The most effective way to lower housing prices is to increase supply. Instead of artificially freezing rents, which discourages investment, policymakers should remove regulations that make building new units difficult. More construction creates more competition, which naturally drives down prices for everyone.

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.

Counterintuitively, the best multifamily markets aren't high-population-growth cities like Austin. These attract too much new supply, capping rent growth. The optimal strategy is to find markets with barriers to entry and minimal new construction, as this creates a durable runway for rental increases.

Despite the current affordability crisis, underlying demographic trends from young millennials and Gen Z create a massive, long-term structural demand for housing. This will require approximately 18 million new units through 2030, irrespective of short-term market cycles.

New rent control laws don't just limit rent; they fundamentally cap the equity upside for real estate investors. By limiting potential cash flow growth from an asset, these policies make building or upgrading apartment buildings less attractive. This discourages the very capital investment needed to solve the housing supply crisis.

The American housing market is increasingly inaccessible to younger generations. The median age of a homebuyer has hit a record high of 59, the same age one can access retirement funds. Even the median first-time buyer is now 40, indicating a systemic affordability 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.