Political actions like Trump's proposed "Landlord Lockout" target a symptom (Wall Street buying homes) but ignore the root cause of the housing crisis: a critical shortage of supply. The real solution requires a massive, coordinated national effort to build millions of new homes quickly.

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.

Politicians favor demand-side housing policies because it's easier to blame a villain (e.g., corporations) and offer a quick fix (e.g., lower rates). Addressing the root cause—a lack of supply—is a slow, multi-year process that doesn't fit into election cycles.

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.

Unlike the USSR's genuine lack of materials, America's problems like the housing crisis stem from political gridlock and local incentives, creating "self-induced shortages." Fixing them requires navigating a complex, multi-layered government system rather than simply producing more goods.

The state's most visible problems—homelessness, high costs, and corporate exodus—are framed not as complex policy failures but as the direct result of a singular, decades-long failure to build enough housing, office space, factories, energy, and transportation infrastructure.

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.

The core of the affordability crisis plaguing American families is a national shortage of 3-4 million housing units, particularly for middle-income workers and first-time buyers. This is not just a collection of local zoning issues but a macroeconomic problem that directly impacts consumer sentiment and economic well-being.