Conor Dougherty

So Bill Pulte, the Trump administration official, said this was just one of several ideas.

Another would be portable mortgages where you could take your mortgage rate with you to another house.

That would hopefully open up inventory because a lot of Americans right now have lower mortgage rates and want to move quickly.

but aren't going to because they don't want to have to buy a new house at a higher mortgage rate.

So that might encourage more people to move.

So it would unstick the housing market potentially.

Another one would be assumable mortgages.

So that's kind of the same idea from a different direction.

If you buy a home and the person who owns the home has a killer low interest rate,

you might be able to assume their mortgage and their mortgage rate when you buy the house.

So that would encourage someone to move, that would encourage someone to buy, etc.

Are any of these practical?

Are they achievable?

Probably not.

What you're seeing, though, is all the same type of idea, which is how do we fiddle with the debt?

How do we fiddle with mortgage rates in such a way that we can attack the payment, either by extending it with the 50-year

essentially winding back in time to give people access to mortgage rates that reflect mortgage rates of 10 years ago.

But there's one big thing we're missing here, which is that the reason housing is so expensive

is that we have a really bad housing shortage in the country.

We stopped building housing, essentially stopped building housing after the Great Recession and have never caught up.