The Housing Crisis Is a Lie—but the Prices Aren’t

The prices are real. The shortage is real. The explanation Americans keep hearing is the lie.

Government is simultaneously trying to protect the value of existing homes and make those same homes affordable. Those goals cannot both succeed—but admitting that would require politicians to choose between current homeowners and the people still trying to become homeowners.

So they perform a magic trick instead.

Chad examines nearly $460 billion in federal spending, California’s million-dollar affordable apartments, the proposed 50-year mortgage, tax policies that discourage older owners from selling, short-term rental crackdowns, HOA shadow governments, and the local building rules that helped erase the American starter home.

The central problem isn’t that builders suddenly forgot how to construct modest houses. It’s that America made small, inexpensive housing difficult—or outright illegal—to build.

Chad also introduces a four-second test for judging any housing proposal:

Does it make it legal and cheap to build a small house on a small lot?

If it doesn’t, it probably isn’t housing policy. It’s a payment plan.

Following the main episode, Chad takes listener questions about corporate investors, homeowner equity, generational blame, HOA enforcement, and what ordinary people can uncover in their own local building codes.

Call or text your question, disagreement, or episode idea to 252-CHAD-LAW.

Visit https://ChadParkerLaw.com for Chad’s books, editorials, the Gaily News, and the free Common Sense Conservative Manifesto.

Episode chapters

00:00 The Housing Crisis Lie—and Government’s Double Game
 02:55 What Did $460 Billion Actually Buy?
 07:33 California’s Housing Crisis: A Case Study
 11:28 When “Affordable” Housing Costs $1 Million
 18:25 The 50-Year Mortgage: Solution or Trap?
 18:52 America’s Most Efficient Housing Transaction Is a Funeral
 19:39 Congress and the Housing Bill Nobody Signed
 22:00 The Geometry of Housing Costs
 23:32 Local Regulations, Permits and Building Fees
 26:16 Short-Term Rentals and Manufactured Scarcity
 27:36 HOAs: America’s Franchise Governments
 30:21 How the Starter Home Disappeared
 32:28 The Generational Homeownership Divide
 35:34 The Radical Idea of Building Small Homes
 37:18 Two Housing Engines Fighting Each Other
 39:00 Reagan Diagnosed This Problem 44 Years Ago
 41:15 What You Can Find in Your Own Town
 42:00 Q&A After Hours

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

America, the housing crisis you're hearing about is a lie. Not the prices. The prices are real and they're brutal, and you do not need me for that part. I'm talking about the story about why. The one you get on every channel and every hearing, where everyone agrees there's a shortage, everyone agrees it's a tragedy. And then everyone goes back to arguing about who bought the houses. Here's what nobody says out loud. Government at every level in this country, federal, state, your own city council, is running two housing policies at the same time, and those two policies cannot both work. Thing one, your home is your retirement. Protect that value. Don't let it fall. For most of Americans, that house isn't an asset on a list somewhere. It is the nest egg. It's the whole plan, and the retirement math of an entire generation is built on that number going up forever. Thing two, housing has to get more affordable. Prices have to come down. Same house, same street, same number. And they will say both of these things in the same speech, sometimes in the same paragraph, and no one in 30 years has stopped and made a single one of them answer which of the two they're lying about. That's not gridlock, that's incompetence. That's a magic trick, and it's the biggest one running in American politics right now. Because a magic trick is always the same two things. The hand they want you to watch and the hand doing the work. The hand they want you to watch is Wall Street, the hedge fund buying up houses, the corporate landlord, the foreign buyer. Congress passed a federal law about it this summer with a section titled, I promise I did not make this up, Homes Are for People, Not Corporations. Big title, big applause. Those investors are about 3% of the market. And while you were watching that hand, the other one spent 30 years doing exactly what it is built to do, which is make sure that number never falls. Because the day it falls, a whole lot of people, you and I both know, find out their retirement was a story. So let me break down why this can't work, what they're really doing instead, and the results so far, so you can understand the true housing market. And I'll tell you where I come out. Because I'm supposed to be the free market guy, and this is the part where that gets me hate mail, okay? But yes, we are short on houses. The number people throw around is about four million. But that number hides the whole story because the whole isn't spread out evenly. It's at the bottom. The shortage that's breaking this country is a starter home shortage, and that one is not a market failure. The market has been standing there the entire time with a hammer asking for permission. This is a government crisis built on paperwork out of paperwork by people who will tell you tonight they're fighting for you. And America, don't forget, I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative, and this is common sense. If you've got a question, an argument, or think I've got this dead wrong, don't forget the phone number, 252 Chad Law. I answer you in the after hours. All right. Now let's take this thing apart. So I went looking for what all the helping actually bought us. $460 billion, 18 federal housing programs in 10 years. $460 billion. $282 million, $287,603.59 to be exact. They counted the change. Now I know what happens to your brain when I say $460 billion. Nothing happens. It's a noise. Nobody can picture it, which is exactly why they say it like that. So let me put it where you can feel it. That's $126 million a day every day for 10 years, including Christmas. And at what the average American house costs right now? That is more than 1 million homes. We could have skipped the entire apparatus. Walked into a million American living rooms and handed over the deed. Oprah style. You get a house, you get a house, you get a house. Everybody look under your seat. So what did the one million dollar what did the one million homes and spending buy us? Well, the researchers went looking for a relationship, any relationship. Take how much HUD spent in each state, put it against whether housing in that state got more affordable, then draw the line. There isn't one. Raw dollars, the model explains less than 1% per person adjusted for population, 2.75%, and the report says flatly it is not statistically significant. Their words are that it's about as meaningful as random noise in the data. Half a trillion dollars and it shows up in the numbers like a coin flip. Put it on a football field. If the distance between what a house costs and what you make is a hundred yards, we spent the most expensive drive in the history of the sport and the ball is still on the same blade of grass. I ran an ad agency for years. I've sat in the room and watched a client spend real money on a campaign that underperformed. If you spend half a trillion dollars and the analyst comes back indistinguishable from noise, you don't get a second meeting. You get walked to your car by security. Washington's got 18 programs. Now, somebody's going to hear that as nobody was helped. That's not the claim. People were helped. Individual families got into individual homes. That's real. The claim is that it never touched the gap, the distance between what a house costs and what a person earns. And that gap is the only thing decides whether the next family gets in. And the money's not small anywhere. In a single year, HUD's spending ran as high as $3,900 per person in Massachusetts. That's a car payment per human being. Then it went state by state. So you can't do the thing everyone does, where you decide housing is a California problem and go about your day. All 50 states, not 42, not just the coastlines, prices outran paychecks in every one. And in 48 of them, it wasn't even close. Idaho's the worst. Prices up 151% in a decade, incomes up 68, in a state whose entire pitch was come here, it's still affordable. Then Florida, Utah, Tennessee, Arizona, New Hampshire, and Nevada. Now the other end of the list, smallest gap in the country, the winners. Louisiana, West Virginia, North Dakota, Mississippi, Alaska, Illinois, and California. California made the good list. That took me a minute. California's gap is small because California was already unaffordable in 2015. You can't fall off the door. The typical home there was $522,000 at the start of the decade and $953,000 at the end. And the gap barely moved because the paycheck was already hopeless. That's not a policy win. That's a guy in a hole reporting he didn't get much deeper this year. All right. So we've established this isn't red or blue. It happened in Idaho and it happened in Illinois and under every kind of legislator and every kind of governor. When a thing happens everywhere, regardless of who's in charge, the thing in charge is not the governor. And here's the number that stopped me cold. In 49 out of 50 states, a 20% down payment on a normal house costs more than a household's entire pre-annual tax income. Everything you make in a year, before taxes, before rent, before groceries, all of it, and you still don't have a down payment. One state where that isn't true, Alaska. Congratulations, Alaska. I guess bring your coat and be prepared for sun 24-7 in the summer. So if you save 10% of your pre-tax income, which almost nobody manages, the median American is nine and a half years out just from the down payment. Best case. And that's the version where nothing goes wrong for a decade, which we know doesn't happen. In Maine, it's 25 years, which brings us to California. My favorite case study in this whole thing. California took $81.4 billion of that federal money. $81 billion, and it's still one of the least affordable places in America to live. $81 billion at the California median is about 100,000 California homes bought outright. A city the size of Boulder deeded over free and clear, and that's just the California slice of it. You can find the reason inside the same report, and it's a number I had to look at twice. Because in California, building one unit of affordable housing runs up to $570,000. That's the affordable one. And I want to hold that next to a real number because the median brand new house sold in America right now runs about $398,000. So the government's cheap apartment costs roughly $170,000 more than a brand new median house. A house with a yard and a driveway and a garage you can put a boat in. But $570 is the average. And averages are boring. Let me show you the good part. In Santa Monica last year, the city approved a building, $122 units, north of $123 million. Just over a million dollars a door. Housing for people who do not have housing at $1 million each. There was a second design they were looking at. That one was $200 million for $196 units. So somebody in that room said this was the cheaper one. At a million dollars a door, ladies and gentlemen, you're no longer building housing. You're building a monument with people in it. A million dollars a door in a state where the median house sells for around 800 grand. For the price of one unit and homeless housing in Santa Monica, you could buy a person an actual California house with a kitchen and a garage and hand them $200,000 cash on the way out. And here's the escalation. California put about $24 billion towards housing and homelessness across five fiscal years. Then the state auditor went and looked at five of those homelessness programs, thirteen point seven billion dollars worth ish, and could identify only two of the five as likely cost effective. Not two failures, two successes out of five. And the state agency, whose actual job is tracking where the money works, had not analyzed the spending since 2021. $24 billion and the scoreboard's been unplugged since 2021. California counted 187,000 homeless people in January of 2024, the most it has ever recorded, up from 118,000 in 2016. 24 billion across that population is roughly $128,000 a person. You could have walked up to every homeless human being in California and handed them a personal check for $128,000, and at least then somebody would know where the money went. And while all of that was going on, the governor of California ran on building three and a half million homes by 2025. Between 2019 and 2023, the state completed fewer than half a million. He missed his goal by 3 million houses. In the private sector, that's a lawsuit. In California, that's a re-election ad. And here's my favorite thing in the whole report, and it's the whole episode in one statistic. Right now, in California, there are about 39,800 affordable homes that are fully designed, fully approved, and fully permitted. And not built. They're sitting in a queue waiting on the last layer of funding because a typical project has to stack money from several different public programs, and every additional source you have to stack adds about four months and roughly $20,000 a unit. 40,000 homes approved, permitted, waiting in line at the government for the government's money to satisfy the government's rules. The mayor's explanation was that this fulfills their housing element requirements. Pile that phrase away, it comes back and explains more of this than any dollar figure I can give you. And before anyone writes in and says, fine, that's California. Los Angeles ran this experiment already, and we have the audit. Prop HHH, $1.2 billion in bonds approved by voters, 10,000 units promised. The original cost was supposed to be $350,000 a unit. By 2021, the average was $596,846. Some individual units hit $837,000. $10,000 promised, about $8,000 projected, and at the time the auditors looked, $1,042 of them actually existed. Now, in fairness, more were in the pipeline. That's true, and I'll say it. But look at what happened to the price while everyone waited. $350 a unit, then $596, then $837. The longer it takes to build the apartment, the more the apartment costs, which means the delay isn't a side effect of the program. Delay is the product. So that's the money. Half a trillion federal, $24 billion in California with a scorecard unplugged, a million dollars a door in Santa Monica, 40,000 homes approved and standing in line. Every dollar of it spent by people who were, by their own description, fighting the housing crisis. And none of what I just showed you is the magic trick. None of it. That's the receipts. That's the money on the table where everyone can see it and where everyone can argue about it. You can say it was wasted. Somebody else says it was underfunded. Someone says it's stolen. And we can do that all night and get nowhere because it's not the real crisis. The trick is the other hand, the one no one's filming over here. Look over here, look over here. Everything I just showed you was one hand. That's government trying to help you pay for a house. Here's the other hand. Everything from here does one job and it's the same job every time. Keep the house expensive. Some of it does that by protecting the price directly. Some of that does that by making sure nothing cheaper ever gets built to compete with it. Same engine, two settings, and it is not the opposing team. It's the same building and frequently the same committee. Start with the tax code, because that's where this is cleanest. If you sell your house, you pay capital gains on the profit above a certain line. $250,000 if you're single. $500,000 if you're married. Fine. Reasonable. That was written in 1997 and never touched again. Not adjusted, not indexed, not looked at. If they'd simply pegged it to inflation the way they do with about 40 other things in that same code, it would sit somewhere around 500 and 5,000 and a million ten today. So the number didn't stay the same. The number shrank every year quietly for 29 years while the houses it applies to got more expensive. Which was the entire point of the last 30 years of policy. Here's what that does to a real person. Say you and your wife bought in 1994, raised the kids there. You're 71 now, the house is too big, the stairs are a problem, you'd like something on one floor closer to the grandkids. You go to sell, and a big piece of what you made on that house isn't profit at all, it's inflation. It's the dollar losing value, it's the same government printing money and then taxing you on the evidence. So you look at the bill, you look at the one-story house you want, and you stay. And that's not a rare story. The estimate is roughly 1.9 million homes owned by Americans over 65, sitting on gains above the single limit and another 1.4 million above the married limit. So that's 3 million homes, give or take, carrying a tax bill that stands between the owner and the front door. Nobody can tell you every one of those people wants to move. What you can say is that we built a system where the ones who do get charged for it because moving is the taxable event. And 3 million is bigger than it sounds. This country builds somewhere around a million and a half housing units in a good year. So that's two solid years of everything America can build. Every crew, every nail gun, every framer in 50 states going flat out for 24 months, already standing, already finished, lights on, not for sale. Now hold that because here's the kicker. There's one way to get that house onto the market with no tax at all. You have to die in it. When you pass, the kids inherit it at today's value, and every dollar of that gain evaporates. So the cheapest housing transaction in America is a funeral. And to be fair, nobody designed it that way. Nobody sat in a room and said, let's make death the efficient option. That's just what you get when you write a number in 1997 and never look at it again. Our brilliant Congress. There are two bills right now to fix it. One doubles the limits and indexes them going forward. One eliminates the tax on your primary home entirely. Both have been sitting in committee. And while those sit, the states are running the same play with the property tax. New Jersey has a program for seniors worth up to $6,500 a year. It's called Stay NJ. That's the name. They named it Stay. New York raised its senior exemption to 65% of your assessed value. Texas freezes your school district taxes at whatever you paid the year you turned 65 so the house can double that bill doesn't move. Illinois freezes the assessed value outright. California, Vermont, and others will let you defer the taxes entirely until the house sells or you're gone. Vermont at 0% interest, which is a better rate than any American under 40 is getting on anything, by the way. And every one of those programs is defensible on its own. People on fixed incomes getting taxed out of paid-off houses is a real problem, and I'd vote for relief. That's exactly why nobody touches it. But add it up and look what we built. If you own, the government will shelter your gain, freeze your assessment, defer your bill, and wipe the whole thing clean at the funeral. If you don't own, the government will help you borrow. That's the entire policy. Two doors. One of them is protection and one of them is debt. And which one you get depends on when you were born. Which brings me to the 50-year mortgage. The plan for young buyers announced by the president on social media as a graphic titled Great American Presidents, with FDR over 30-year mortgage and himself over the 50-year mortgage, is he believes that you should be allowed to borrow for half a century. And I get it on its nameplate. I do. Sign at 28, own it free and clear at 78. And reporting says the whole thing got greenlit after about a 10-minute conversation at a golf club. 10 minutes. There are drive-thru orders that take longer and involve more people checking the math. And Marjorie Gangrene's objection, and I guess I'll give her this one, was that under a 50-year mortgage, a lot of people will simply die before the house is paid off. So we now have a housing policy where the boomer's exit is a funeral and the millennials payoff is also a funeral. And somebody needs to explain to me how those are two different parties fighting. And the 50-year loan, by the way, doesn't make one single house cheaper, never touches the price. It lowers the monthly payment, which sounds like the thing and is the exact opposite of the same thing because everybody in the bidding pool gets that same lower payment on the same day. So all of you can now bid more on the identical house. I mean, that's like fixing ticket prices by handing everybody in line an extra hundred dollars and acting shocked at what the tickets cost. The money doesn't get you in. It becomes the new price of getting in. Think about it. Every dollar aimed at the buyer arrives at the closing table. And at the closing table, a dollar of help and a dollar of price are the same dollar. Now Congress did just pass the biggest housing bill in about 30 years. And I want to tell you how it became law because it's the most on brand thing in this entire episode. eighty-nine to ten in the Senate, three hundred fifty eight to thirty-two in the House. Those numbers you basically never see anymore. Then the president refused to sign it because he wanted an unrelated voter ID passed first, but that's neither here nor there. And under the Constitution, if the president sits on a bill for ten days while Congress is in session, it becomes law anyways. So the most significant federal housing reform in three decades became the law of the land the way a package becomes yours. Nobody signed for it, ten days went by, and it's now sitting on the porch. Thirty years of waiting, 300 pages, two chambers, four hundred and forty-seven votes in favor, and the ceremony was a mailman shrugging. And I'll give the bill its due. There's like two real things in there. There's uh provisions aimed at cutting federal red tape, faster reviews, small dollar mortgages, manufactured housing. Those things help a little. But notice which half has teeth. The part with actual penalties points at institutional investors, the 3% of the market. The part that's supposed to produce the houses works by asking. Grants, pilots, incentive, and encouragement for local governments to change their zoning. Yeah, that's never gonna happen. And a city can take that money and change nothing. There's no penalty for a city that keeps its minimum lot size exactly where it is. Congress can cut every federal barrier it owns, and your county planning commission will still be sitting there on a Tuesday night deciding whether your neighbor gets a garage. That's how it is. Which brings me to the other hand. This is what I actually wanted to show you tonight. If you want to know why a house costs what it costs, don't read the bill, read the code. That's the most important. Here's my favorite. This one's just geometry. In most of America, it's illegal to build an apartment building over three stories with only one staircase. You need two connected by a hallway. New York City, Seattle, and Honolulu have allowed one staircase up to six stories for decades. So has most of the developed world. California's own state fire marshal studied three mid-rise projects and found the second staircase, the stairs, the hallway to reach them, the square footage they eat, accounted for between seven and a half and twelve percent of total construction cost. Twelve percent of the building is a staircase almost nobody will ever walk up. One out of every eight dollars spent on a hypothetical. The cost isn't the real damage. The shape ifs. Two staircases need a long hallway. A long hallway needs a long building. A long building needs a big lot. A big lot needs a big developer with a big loan. Which is exactly how you end up with a country where the only thing anyone can build is a giant complex, and the small six-unit building on the corner lot, the kind every old neighborhood you love is made of, is mathematically impossible now. Seven states fixed it just in 2025. California ordered a report on it due January 1st. The report showed up two months late and recommended that if they legalize single stair buildings at all, they can cap them at four stories. Culver City had already done it and called that ridiculous, which in fairness it is. Now let me bring this home literally because this one's in my state. Portland, Oregon. You want to put a small apartment in your backyard? An ADU, a granny flat, the thing every housing expert in America says we need more of? Before you pour a single yard of concrete, the city hits you with a system development charges that runs somewhere between $15,000 and $37,000 for one unit in a yard that already exists on a street that already exists. So hold that against a real number. The median down payment in this country is about $30,400. So Portland's fee to ask permission to build a cottage in your own backyard is bigger than the down payment most Americans put down on an entire house. And the city will waive it, a lot of it, if you sign a covenant promising that for 10 years you will not rent it short term. Read that again. The fee is not about infrastructure. If it were about infrastructure, they couldn't hand it back. The fee is a lever. It's $37,000 of leverage the city invented so it can get you to sign an agreement about how to use your own property. And the same city, this is classic, offers free pre-approved plans to help you move faster through the process it built. It's a guy who ties your shoelaces together and then offers you a ride. And once you're looking for the lever, it's everywhere. Let's do it rapid fire. Bellingham, Washington spent two years unwinding parking mandates that hadn't been seriously updated since the 1960s. Minneapolis put up 940,000 square feet of required parking in a single year, 16 football fields, 105 million dollars. The apartment couldn't get built, but thank God it had somewhere to park. Impact fees in California ran close to $20,000 a unit on subsidized housing, and over 130 projects paid north of 30. The government pays the developer to build it, then charges the developer for building it. Money leaves one office and enters another, and the only thing produced is the trip. Washington stupidly extended build American buy American rules to housing money. So now your affordable apartment has sourcing requirements on its materials, and it went so well that in June, two House members introduced a bill to pause the rule until HUD reports on what the rule did, then set a 90-day clock for reviewing the waivers from the rule. Four layers of paper, not one, two by four. And on August 7th, this month, the federal judge threw out HUD's entire homelessness funding competition for the year. Whole thing set aside, Seattle and King County were mid-application, they just stop. The money to house people is frozen inside a lawsuit about the form you use to ask for the money to house people. Rentals, same story. Open the books asked 20 odd cities what they've been collecting off short-term rentals, and it's approaching a billion dollars in fees and fines since 2019. Clark County, Nevada, Las Vegas is required by state law to license these things. It collected $1.3 million in registration fees and $4.6 million in fines, three and a half times more punishing people than permitting people. The county commissioner said out loud on the record that there's no rush on the licenses because he doesn't like them anyways. A federal judge looked at that arrangement in December and said it likely violates due process. New York went further and effectively banned them, 3,000 legal short-term rentals left in the whole city, down from around 60,000 listings. Rent went up anyways. And when people asked the mayor to loosen it for the World Cup, the answer was that he won't do it at the expense of working class families. The working class family in this story is the one that owns a house in Queens and isn't allowed to rent out the spare bedroom. You see, the people getting protected are the hotels. It's always, always the hotels. Which leads to the last piece, and this one isn't a government agency at all, which is the whole joke. There are more than 370,000 homeowners associations in this country right now. They cover over 40 million households, better than half of all owner-occupied homes, and roughly 60% of new single family homes get built inside of an HOA. 60%. That's not a trend, that's the default. If you buy new construction, you're probably buying into a private government you did not vote for. And a lot of people assume wrongly that that's a developer thing or a fancy neighborhood thing. Some of it is, but a lot of it is cities. See, when a city approves a subdivision, it can require that the roads, the drainage, the little park, the retention pond, all of it stays private and gets maintained by an HOA. Because then the city never has to plow it, patch it, or pay for it. In Florida, developers are typically obligated by the permitting authorities to form an HOA. In Minnesota, the housing people testified to their own legislator that local zoning mandates associations directly or indirectly down to rules about lot widths. So the city collects the property taxes and you pay a second set of dues for the road. They didn't shrink government. They franchised it. That's what an HIA is, is a franchise government. A board, a budget, dues, fines, an election nobody has ever won. And now the thing you escaped City Hall to get away from writes you a letter about the color of your door, your mailbox, the truck in your driveway, and in Missouri they had to pass an actual state law about whether you're allowed to keep chickens. The chickens aren't ruining the housing market, but we built a shadow layer of government to run the neighborhoods, made it the default on sixty percent of new homes, and its most visible achievement is an opinion about hens. And these HOAs block new construction and remodels constantly. Now, remember that phrase. Housing element. That's the plan every California city has to file, showing how it will meet its housing obligations, and here's how you satisfy it. You do not legalize 400 small cheap houses across town. That's 400 neighborhood meetings and 400 angry rooms. You approve one building, one big subsidized project, a million dollars a door with a ribbon cutting, photos and requirements met. See, this system doesn't reward housing. It rewards the appearance of housing delivered in a form that doesn't upset anyone who already owns a house on that street. That's the trick. Both hands at once. One points at Wall Street and 3%, the other freezes your assessment, shelters your gain, prices a staircase at 12% of the building, and charges $37,000 for a backyard cottage. It cannot work. It was never going to work, and it hasn't. Let me show you what this has cost. Not in dollars. We've done dollars. Go back to 1976. That year this country built more than 400,000 homes under 1,400 square feet. More than a third of everything that went up in America was a small house. These are the houses your parents bought. By 2020, we were building 65,000 of them. 7%. 65,000 spread across 50 states is about 25 starter homes per state per week. 25. One decent sized apartment building is more housing than an entire state was producing at entry level in a month. It's come back a little since, about 100,000 in 2024, roughly one in 10. So the trend is finally barely turning, which is nice. And if you're 29 right now, it means the starter home may return to this country in time for your retirement party. And it is an only new construction. In 1982, 40% of the houses on the market in America were under 1,400 square feet. By 2023, that was 9%. The median new house went from about 1,500 square feet in the 70s to roughly 2,300 today. Four bedroom houses were about a fifth of the market. Now they're half. So the American house got a thousand square feet bigger while the American paycheck did not. And I want to be clear about something because this is where people go sideways on me. Builders did not do this out of greed. A builder will build whatever you let him build and whatever he can sell, period. When it costs you $37,000 in fees before you break ground, when the lot has to be a certain size, when the setbacks and the parking and the review adds a year, every one of those costs is identical whether you're building a small house or a big one. So the fixed cost of permission is the same, but the profit sure isn't. You don't build the cheap one. Nobody would. That's not a conspiracy. That's just arithmetic. And every single input in that arithmetic was set at a public meeting. It's like a thousand little paper cuts. Here's the human version of that math. First-time homebuyers used to be about 40% of everyone buying a house in America. Last year, they were 21%. The median first-time buyer now is 40% at an all-time high. 40. That's not somebody starting out, that's somebody starting over. The median down payment is $30,400. And at what people are actually able to save, that's about seven years of your life. Seven years of doing everything right. No emergencies, no layoff, no medical anything, no car dying, just to reach the starting line. And in 2025, there were roughly 1.8 million millennial and Gen Z households that economists say are simply missing, not renting, not struggling, missing. They never formed. Those are adults who would in any other decade have their own address, and instead they're in a childhood bedroom looking at a ceiling fan they've known since middle school. 1.8 million households is roughly every household in the state of Oregon, by the way. Picture my entire state. Every kitchen light, every driveway, every mailbox. Now picture it never getting built, and the people who were supposed to live in it standing in their parents' garage at 34 holding a Tupperware of leftovers. That's the cost, not a spreadsheet. Family formation delayed and in a lot of cases canceled because the first rung of the ladder got sawed off by people who already had theirs. And here's the part that makes me want to put my head through a wall. Everybody in that transaction gets paid a percentage, the commission's a percentage, the title works a percentage, the origination is a percentage, the insurance is a percentage, the transfer tax is a percentage, the fees are pegged to the value. So when the house gets more expensive, every single person in that room gets a raise. Every person except the one trying to buy the house. Now, I want to talk to you about your parents for a second, because this is where the whole thing turns. A lot of the complaints I hear is that what worked for my parents doesn't work for me now. Well, their first house was not this house. Okay? Our parents, my parents, nobody's parents bought this house. Nobody in 1985 closed on a starter home with a wine fridge and a mud room. Let's be real. Our parents bought beaters. Bad roofs, orange carpet, a kitchen that was ugly when it went in. And they fixed one thing a year for like 11 years. The water heater, then the windows, then finally the kitchen when the youngest went off to school. And the whole time that house was quietly doing the actual work, which was building equity while they slept. Then they sold it, took the equity, and bought the house you grew up in. That's the whole American wealth machine, and it never required anyone to be clever. It required a cheap, ugly house to exist. There's a generation right now getting lectured about avocado toast by people who bought a two-bedroom with a coal chute on one income. They didn't rig anything. They took the deal in front of them, same as anyone else would. Somebody took that deal off the table, and it was not the market. So let me tell you the fix. Let people build small, plain, cheap homes on small lots and sell it to a person who's going to fix it themselves. That's it. Legalize the ugly little house. And that sentence, which describes how essentially every American neighborhood you find charming got built, now sounds more radical than a 50-year mortgage. We'll nod along at a half century of debt. We'll nod along at a million dollars a door. We'll nod at $460 billion. And then somebody says, What if a guy could put an 1,100 square foot house on a quarter acre and the room gets nervous? Somebody wants to know about the setbacks. Somebody's worried about the character of the neighborhood. That's how far this has gone. The crazy got normalized so completely that common sense reads as the radical position. So here's what I'll leave you with: one question. You can use it on any housing plan from any party forever, and it takes about four seconds. Does this make it legal and cheap to build a small house on a small lot? If the answer is yes, it's housing policy. If the answer is no, it's a credit, a subsidy, a longer loan, a grant, a pilot program, a tax break, a rebate, or a study, then it isn't housing policy, it's a payment plan. And you will be shocked how few of them survive that question. So it wasn't a bunch of crazy stories tonight. I know it sounded like it. A staircase, golf course, a fee you can get waived, a bill nobody signed, a programmed named Stay. It's one machine. It has two engines bolted to it pointed in opposite directions, running at full power, burning your money to hold each other exactly in place. One engine exists to keep the value of the house up because tens of millions of Americans have their entire retirement sitting in one. And there's not a politician in this country that's going to be the person who tells them that that number has to come down. The other exists to help everybody else afford the house that the first engine is keeping expensive. And they will never say that out loud because the day they say it out loud, somebody has to pick. And picking costs an election, and no house in America is worth an election. So instead you get the trick. The hand pointing at Wall Street and 3% of the market, and the hand that quietly makes sure it stays illegal to build anything a normal person could afford. We are short about four million homes, but the shortage that's breaking this country is at the bottom. And it's a small starter home shortage, and it got built the way government crises always get built. One reasonable sounding rule at a time, each one defensible on its own, all of them together, adding up to a country where a 40-year-old is a first-time home buyer. Fix that, and you don't need most of what we talked about tonight. four hundred and sixty billion dollars, and a result the researchers themselves compared to random noise. They put a question mark in the title. They knew. And before we get out of here, Reagan never gave a famous speech about housing. What he did was quieter and honestly it's better, and almost nobody has read it. First five months into his presidency, June of 1981, he set up a commission on housing and told them to figure out what the federal rule ought to be. They came back in April of 82. And what that commission found in 1982 was that unnecessary regulation of land and buildings had gotten so heavy over the previous 20 years that Americans were living with the consequences. Fewer choices, less production, higher costs. Sound familiar? That's forty-four years ago. They named it in a federal report with receipts. That fall, Reagan signed a proclamation on it, and the three words he used were that the country needed free, unhampered housing markets, and that the help ought to be aimed at people rather than at structures. Well, we did the opposite. For forty-four years we aimed it at structures and at programs and at paperwork about the programs. The diagnosis was correct. It was sitting in a drawer. It's been available to every administration since. And nobody wanted it because the fix had no ribbon on it, there's no groundbreaking, you don't get to stand in a hard hat in front of a building that didn't need a subsidy to exist. You just get houses people can afford. Which is apparently the one thing we don't trade a photo op for. One quick thing before we go. Folks, if common sense has become part of your week, ChadParkerLaw.com is home base. My books, editorials, the gaily news, the free common sense conservative manifesto, all of it. And if you've got a question, an episode idea, or think I got something dead wrong tonight, call or text me, 252 Chad Law. Some of the best conversations on this show start with your messages. And remember the whole ask of me as my audience. If you see us anywhere, Instagram, X, Substack, share us. Go look at your own town's rules this week. Not the federal stuff, not the cable news stuff, your town. Minimum lot size, parking requirements, permit fees. 15 minutes, and I promise you'll find the reason a young family can't move in down the street. Then ask the four-second question. Does what you're talking about make it legal and cheap to build a small house on a small lot? That's it. And America? That was common sense. Stick around for about 10 seconds while we reset the studio, and I'll take your questions live that came in during the show, and what I call the QA after hours. We'll be right back. All right, this is where I read your texts. Let's see what you got for me tonight. Dana 7714. She says, My HOA fined me $40 because my trash can was visible from the street for one day. One day. I want you to know I have never been angrier about $40 in my life. Look, it's never the $40. It's somebody had to notice. Somebody walked their dog past your house, saw a trash can, went home, took a photo, opened a laptop, logged into a portal, and filed a report about a bin. That's a person with time, Dana. That's a person whose life has room in it. Move out. Get out of the HOAs, get land, no neighbors, space. And I'm not gonna sit here and tell you HOAs are the reason young people can't buy a house because they're not. But there's something honest in your forty dollars. Cities required these HOAs so they didn't have to maintain them, and they're a shadow government. And we made it the default about 60% of new construction, and the thing it's most reliably good at is enforcing opinions about the appearance of stuff. It'll fine you over a bin in a week. It can't get anybody a new house. Pay the 40, photograph the guy's boat sometimes. I'm kidding, sort of. All right, Michael 2038, who spent an hour blaming an entire generation for buying houses when they were cheap. My parents worked their whole lives for that equity. What exactly were they supposed to do? Refuse it? Somebody misheard me. Uh I'm sorry if I made it sound like that. I did it wrong if I did, so I'll be straight with you. Your parents didn't do anything. That's the actual point I was trying to make, and I wanted to make it better here now. I'm so tired of the boomer blaming. They took the deal in front of them, which is what everybody does. I'd have taken it, you'd have taken it. There's no version of human being who says, no, thank you, I'd like my house to be worth less. What I'm going after isn't the generation, it's the promise. The thing every politician has made for 30 years on both sides, which is that your home is your retirement account. That's the sentence that did the damage. Because once we all agreed on that, we agreed on something else without noticing that housing has to get more expensive forever. Or a lot of Americans are in serious trouble. That's not a boomer choice. That's a policy choice a bunch of people made for your parents, and it happens to also mean their grandkids can't buy a house. So no, they shouldn't refuse it. But somebody should have told them 30 years ago that they were building a retirement system on the price of a thing their kids would also have to buy. That was going to end somewhere, so here we are. Something's got to come down. That's it. All right. Rachel, 5591. One, you brushed off the corporate investors as 3%. In my neighborhood outside Atlanta, it feels like every third house on the street is owned by some LLC. That's not 3% to me. Kind of a fair hit, so I'll split it with you. Nationally, that number's right. Institutional investors are a small slice of the single family market. But national average is doing a lot of work in that sentence because those buyers didn't spread themselves evenly across America like a nice even coat of paint. They concentrated. Certain sunbelt metros, certain zip codes, certain price bands, specifically the entry level stuff. So there are absolutely streets where it is not 3%, and if you live on one of them, you're not imagining it, and I'm not going to tell you you are. Here's where I still land, though. Ask yourself why those firms went where they went. They went where the houses were cheap relative to rent and where the local rules made it slow and expensive to buy new ones. They didn't create that scarcity, they found it. They read the same zoning code I've been complaining about all night and correctly concluded that nobody was going to be allowed to compete with them. So ban them. Fine. Honestly, I don't care. Ban them. But if you ban them and change nothing else, next year the entry-level house is on your street, just go to whoever else has cash. Because there still aren't any new ones being built. You understand? I'd rather make the competition legal than pick which buyer we're mad at this year, but that's just me. Great question. Alright, next one. Tom, 4402. Easy for you to say. My house is most of what I've got. If the city lets someone build cheap little houses on my street, my equity takes a hit. Why would I ever vote for that? Yeah, Tom, this is probably the best question I got tonight, and it's the one nobody on television will answer, so I'll try. You're not wrong. You're describing your actual interest correctly. If small, cheap houses go up on your block, the number on your house probably doesn't rise as fast. You didn't sign up to eat a haircut so somebody else's kids can move in. Nobody would sign up for that, and every politician in America knows it. Which is exactly why nothing changes and why they'd rather hand out a 50-year mortgage than say this part out loud. So here's what I'd say to you, and it's not a guilt trip. One, what you own is a house. It's still going to be a house. The thing that takes the hit isn't your home. It's the fantasy that appreciates faster than everything else forever. And that fantasy is the part nobody can actually deliver. It requires each generation to pay more than the one before it, and eventually you get where we are at now. A 40-year-old is the first-time buyer, a down payment that costs a full year of pre-tax income in 49 states. That's not a market about to keep rising. That's a market running out of people. Two, you're not just a portfolio. You've got a kid or a niece or a young guy at your church who's 34 and still has a roommate. He's the buyer. Somebody has to be the buyer. If nobody under 40 can be one, then the number on your house isn't a number, it's a listing that sits. And three, honestly, nobody's asking you to torture equity. We're talking about letting a smaller house exist somewhere in your town, not on your lot, not necessarily your street, somewhere legal. It's a much smaller ask than what gets pitched to you every other election, which is we can protect your number and fix affordability. That's the lie that started this whole episode. It's impossible. If it hurts a little, yeah, it might. I'd rather tell you that than lie to you and take another 30 years. All right. Oh, Priya. Always got great questions, Priya. Fine. What do I actually do Monday? She always does these. I'm not going to a city council. I have two kids. I love that you have two kids, and I love that you cut me off before I could suggest a city council meeting. Fine. Uh 15 minutes from your own couch. I'm spitballing here. Search your town's name plus uh minimum lot size, then plus parking requirement, then maybe permit fees or system development charges. Those three numbers are public, they're online, and they'll tell you more about why housing costs what it does where you live than anything you'll hear on a national broadcast for the rest of the year. Then just carry the question. Anytime anyone proposes anything about housing, the mayor, senator, president, whoever, four seconds. Does this make it legal and cheap to build a small house on a small lot? If they can't answer, they've told you what it is. Text me when you look up yours. I want to know what y'all find because I guarantee you it's dumber than mine. All right. That's the show. Great place to end. Go online and find your number. Figure out why you're locked out of the housing market. Call or text me at 252 Chad Law. I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative America's binary brother, saying, God bless you, President Reagan. And as always, may God save America.

SPEAKER_01 48:56

It's marvelous that you should care for me. Yes, you've made my life so glamorous. You can't blame me for feelings amorous. It's wonderful. It's so marvelous that you should care for me. It's wonderful, it's marvelous, glorious, it's glamorous.