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The thing is though, if you are for building new construction, possibly in connection to wanting to reduce the price of housing, the predictable surety is the value of houses currently owned by people will go down.
I should have spent more time trying to find the rest of the context of that clip. I debated it, but was lazy. There is a clue in that he briefly says, "We're going to make it easier to buy." A longer clip is here. He talks about this repeatedly. Making it "easier" for people who don't own houses to buy houses. The repeated message of the Secretary of HUD is about how they're making it so that millions more people "can afford" to buy houses. How is it "easier"? How is that they "can afford"? The major talking point is interest rates. ...as if lowering interest rates has no effect on the sale prices of houses. Lowering monthly mortgage amounts, offering lower down payment options like FHA loans or whatever, sure, these things get people into home borrowership, but they have other effects, too. Do people already forget the impacts of the drive to push more and more people into home borrowership twenty years ago, even resulting in significant impacts to government coffers as they were left picking up the pieces.1 These things are the sorts of ridiculous tinkers one comes up with to try to look like one is solving the problem when one hasn't grasped the reality of the core tension.
Trump is honest in that he's saying that he's siding with landowners, and he wants you to believe it. He's honest in that he's saying he's siding with people who want to buy houses, and he wants you to believe it. So we'll keep pushing the same flawed fake solutions, try to play whack-a-mole in the process, and never accept the limit of technocratic solutions.
1 - I've been lucky in that I decided a few years ago to start listening to the entire back catalog of EconTalk. It started in 2006, and I'm around 2011 now. There are plenty of episodes that aren't housing-related, but there is an incredible breadth and regular stream of folks grappling with and trying to understand the housing crisis, the crash, and the process of recovery. I guess I've been stewing in it enough that it's clear what people thought they were trying to do, how it sounded nice, how it all went wrong, and now we're basically repeating the same tune, just a different key.
This sounds fascinating. Any way you could distill what you observed from those 5 years of podcasts?
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You don't even have to go back that far. The most recent appreciation in housing prices from the COVID era and renewed discussions on affordability directly stem from the wave of home purchases from the era of rock-bottom interest rates. It's basic supply in demand. Sale prices of homes are more reflective of mortgage payments than they are of the sticker price; it makes more sense to talk about a $1500/month house than a $250,000 house. This difference is especially clear in the Pittsburgh area, where houses just outside of Allegheny County command a price premium due to lower property taxes. If there's a class of people who couldn't afford a particular house at 7% but now can at 3.5%, the house is going to cost more.
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