Jenny Schutz

Housing affordability is really the intersection of two things.

It's people's income, how much they can afford to spend on housing, and then the cost of housing.

The problem that homeowners have at the moment is that housing prices are very high, interest rates are high, and we also have rising costs of insurance and property taxes.

I mean, the mortgage markets are very large, and intervention by the GSEs can help at the edges, but that's not fundamentally going to change the price that most people are paying on their mortgage.

We have a lot of homeowners who are at lower than 3% mortgage interest rate, which makes them very reluctant to sell their house and move someplace else.

That limits the availability of homes that are open for first-time homebuyers to get into the market.

Yeah, the other way to think about this is that when private equity buys particularly single-family homes in the suburbs, they're not taking housing off of the market altogether.

They're just making housing available for renter households who on average have lower incomes than homebuyers.

Yeah, the only long-term way to improve affordability is to build enough homes so that the price of houses goes up roughly equivalent to the rate of inflation overall.

Right.

I mean, we import a lot of our construction materials, so tariffs are going to make that more expensive.

The construction workforce depends really heavily on immigrant labor.

All of this makes it more expensive on the bricks and mortar side to build homes.

There aren't enough homes to go around.

The problem that the federal government has, both the administration and Congress, is that they don't have a lot of levers over supply.

We did a survey recently that showed that

The vast majority of people agree that housing affordability is a big issue.

But when you ask them, is a good solution to allow your local community to build more housing in your community?