A Place to Live Shouldn't Break the Bank
We still call homeownership the heart of the American Dream. So how can we mean it, when the rules are stacked for investors instead of families?
Ask people what's actually squeezing them and you'll rarely hear a Washington talking point. You'll hear the rent. The mortgage they can't qualify for. The fact that a house their parents bought on one income is now out of reach on two. Housing is the biggest line in most family budgets, and when it climbs, it drags everything else—savings, having kids, retirement—down with it. This is the number-one kitchen-table issue in America, and both parties have spent years talking around it.
We think it deserves a plain diagnosis and a plain plan. The good news: the core of this problem isn't a mystery, and it isn't unfixable.
Start with buying. The median U.S. home now runs around $420,000—close to five times the median household income, up from a historical norm nearer three. By one estimate, about 65% of American households can't afford a median-priced new home at today's prices and rates. The bottom rungs of the ladder that let earlier generations build wealth have been sawed off.
Renting is no relief. Nearly half of all renter households—more than 22 million—are cost-burdened, spending over 30% of income on housing, and more than 12 million are severely burdened, handing over half their paycheck just to keep a roof overhead. When rent eats that much, there's nothing left to save for the down payment that would get them out of renting. It's a trap, and it's getting tighter.
For all the noise, the central cause is boring and undeniable: for fifteen years we have not built anywhere near enough homes. Estimates of the national shortage run to roughly four million housing units, with the crunch worst for lower-income renters. When you have far more families than homes, prices and rents go exactly one direction.
And a huge share of the blame sits at the local level, where restrictive zoning—single-family-only rules, minimum lot sizes, parking mandates, and endless permitting—makes it illegal or impossibly slow to build the modest, moderately-priced housing the market is starving for. You cannot regulate away the cost of something and then forbid people from making more of it. Supply is the whole ballgame, and we've been playing against ourselves.
Build, build, build—and clear the way for it. The single most important housing policy is more housing. Use federal leverage to reward communities that legalize and permit more homes—townhomes, duplexes, small apartment buildings, accessory units—and stop rewarding the ones that wall everyone out. Fast-track permitting, cut the regulatory fat that adds tens of thousands to the cost of every unit, and treat homebuilding like the national priority it is.
Stop investors from outbidding families. Roughly a third of single-family home purchases now go to investors, not people who'll live in the house—and they come armed with cash and tax advantages a young family simply can't match. The fix is to flip those incentives on single-family homes, with a smart escape hatch so the market stays healthy. We lay it out in full just below.
Help first-time buyers without just inflating prices. Targeted, means-tested help onto the first rung can work—but only alongside real supply. Pumping demand into a market with no new homes just hands the subsidy to sellers as a higher price. Supply first, then a hand up.
Stability over gimmicks. Predictable, evidence-based monetary policy keeps mortgage rates from whipsawing families, and we're honest that blunt tools like broad rent control tend to shrink the very supply we need. The answer to too little housing is never less housing.
Here's a dynamic that's quietly poisoning the entry-level market. In 2025, investors bought about 30% of the single-family homes sold—and in the third quarter the number hit 34%, the highest in five years. We'll be honest about the nuance: most of these are smaller investors, not just giant Wall Street funds. But in the starter-home range they compete as a group against first-time buyers, and they win more than their share—because the tax code is quietly refereeing the bidding war in their favor.
Think about what a family and an investor each bring to the same open house. The family is buying shelter with after-tax dollars and gets almost nothing back from the IRS. The investor is buying a business asset: they can write off the building through depreciation, deduct operating losses against other income, and defer their capital gains indefinitely by rolling proceeds into the next property through a like-kind exchange. Those breaks let an investor pencil out a higher bid on the very same house—and pay cash to close in days. A young couple with a mortgage pre-approval never had a fair shot.
The fix: cut the tax perks on investor-bought single-family homes. When the buyer of a single-family house isn't going to live in it, we'd sharply reduce or remove the federal tax incentives and loopholes—the depreciation write-offs, the loss deductions against unrelated income, the capital-gains deferral—that let investors treat family homes as a subsidized asset class. And we'd scale it, so the heaviest limits land on the largest-volume buyers rather than a retiree with a single rental. Take the government's thumb off the investor's side of the scale, and families can compete on a level field again.
The escape hatch that keeps the market healthy. We don't want to freeze the market or treat every landlord as a villain—rentals are a real and necessary part of housing. So the bill keeps a clean release valve: if a home has sat on the market for more than a year without an owner-occupant buyer, an investor can purchase it with the full incentives intact. At that point they aren't snatching a scarce starter home out from under a young family—they're absorbing genuinely surplus inventory, filling a vacancy, and preventing the blight that comes from a house nobody will buy. It channels investor money toward exactly the homes that actually need a buyer, and away from the ones a family is fighting for.
Pair that with real transparency on who owns what—so we can see the trend clearly and keep the rules aimed where the problem actually is. Houses should be homes first, and an asset class a distant second.
Fix housing and you loosen a knot tied to almost everything else. Affordable homes are what let young people start families—you can't raise kids in a place you can't afford. They're what let workers move to where the jobs are, what lets seniors age in place, what lets a paycheck turn into savings instead of vanishing into rent. A country where the next generation can't picture ever owning a home is a country that has stopped delivering the basic bargain. We intend to restore it.