A genuine split — 7 shows land on three different arguments, with no consensus in the arena.
Environmental laws and you just add up you know decades of croft of you know it's all but it's all well intended. And each one on its own is very justifiable. But this the sum the cumulative effect is that to build housing, you want to build a kind of classic apartment building, condo building that you might be able to put up in Austin or Miami and you can do it there for literally half the cost and half the time. And at some point, California can't compete with and can't demonstrate that we have better ideas or a better quality of life than a than a red state because we literally just can't build housing anymore. And so this is a real public policy failure and we've got to be willing to change our approach. But but if each turn of that regulatory ratchet was justified and presumably is justified if you just focus on it >> once again, you know, as though for the first time, >> how do you change that system? >> There's this growing movement driven by young people who are rightly frustrated that the rent's too damn high and they have very little prospect of home ownership. It's called the Yimi movement. Yes. In my backyard. and they are very effectively uh driving a uh reform agenda that has many components. It's you know the biggest has been initially zoning reform. I think they've largely won that battle not entirely but expanding zoning for housing and height limits and that
Still looks like the Valley of the Hearts Delight with orchards. Like, how you can't have that. You can't have the most economic activity in the world and the housing growth be be restricted. And so, it's not a surprise that you have all these multi-millionaires now bidding up the housing prices so that a working class can barely can't live there. And I do think that the debt and inflation is one of those causes, but restrictive zoning has been another reason. And the fundamental income inequality, I think, is also a reason. If you're if you're living as a plumber or as a teacher and everyone around you is working at Google as and had stock and it just so happened we had this tech boom. Well, you know, that that makes it hard to have housing be affordable. I totally agree. And so, the good news is you're being very specific and once something is specific, then we can look at the cause and effect and we can say, "What exactly do we need to do for people that that don't know YIMBY?" It would be yes in my backyard. So, NIMBYism, which is the thing that you'll hear most commonly is not in my backyard. Meaning, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can go do it somewhere else, but don't build those apartments in my neighborhood." So, I think that there's a lot of things that we could do with that to make sure that we're getting more housing. Houston is a great example. Houston just says, "Yeah, it's easy to get a building permit. No problem. Go do your thing." And because of that, housing prices in uh, Houston have been ridiculously stable. And so, people that want that
Funds or other large forprofit entities would be able to own no more than 350 homes. Oh wow. Yay. That's sounds great. 350 homes. Okay. I think that's weak sauce in my opinion. No one should own 350 homes. Um, it's going to remove some regulatory barriers uh and streamlining environmental reviews to increase development of affordable housing. I think that's good. It depends on how it's carried out, but I do think that's good. I do think in some states especially, there are regulatory concerns that are making it difficult to buy to build new housing, which we need. Updating requirements to uh expand manufactured housing production. There was a big boom in that regard back in the 50s and 60s. Uh those are many of the houses we live in today. And uh we should maybe reconsider going back to that. Creating an innovation fund for communities to build more housing supply, establishing better community banking and loan options, supporting housing opportunities for veterans, permanently authorizing a major disaster recovery program. Okay, look, what I like about the provisions here is that many of them are focused on increasing housing supply, which is the biggest issue we have right now. We don't have enough housing. So, here it is. They're doing something. I can't believe it passed both chambers. Makes its way to Trump and Trump's like eh no I want the Save America Save Act to pass. So what happens next? Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, under the Constitution, a bill passed by Congress
Things takes years, literally years, for it to to hit the markets. And the goal of the bill is to address the the national h housing shortage to increase housing supply, lower housing costs over time, and most importantly reduce the barriers that builders can build, right? Modernizing that federal housing policy. Um there's a lot of restrictions that are in this for Wall Street, but just the spirit of this bill, yes, they want to help more people buy. They want it to be more affordable. They want to have more supply out there. But how do you do that? Right? You got to change zoning. You got to change the laws. You got to change the politics that it takes for someone to go out here and build the house. Right? Just going through your local governments and you know you guys building homes. So you already know the pain and the asset is to even try to get things done with the city with permits and this that and the third and the cost that comes with that, right? So imagine if you're doing this at scale and and building homes, right? Like the cost is just ridiculous in the material cost, >> right? like this bill doesn't really from what I've read so far is not really addressing the material cost, right? The material cost is just absolutely insane. So, do I think it's going to help folks today, next year, the year after? No. But probably 5 years down the road as we see um this law go into effect and there's more um housing supply that's available, yes, this could make things a little bit more affordable in the long run in my opinion. Could I just ask a follow-up really quick? >> Go ahead. >> Yeah. Yeah
Rate housing in Texas. Now that affordable housing is being built partly on the public dime, why is it so much more expensive here to do affordable housing than market rate? What do you do about it? This is not a surprise because look, affordable housing projects face more delays. They face more obstacles. They face more community resistance. They face more restrictions on zoning. People don't necessarily want them in a lot of our communities. And so the other piece of this is that land becomes more expensive every time you have uncertainty about whether something is going to happen. The costs go up. The other issue is that affordable housing developers are piecing together financing from seven different pools of money that are all designed to make a contribution and you just assume get the seventh thing and you're ready to go and then the seventh one expires or you lose that funding or someone changes the term of a program. So one consolidated bigger pot of money which is more similar to what market rates using, right? They're going to Wall Street, they're getting the the money and they're using it. One consolidated pot of pot of money would help. The other thing is the state should be putting land up for affordable housing. That is the ma that is one of the major factors. It's one of the hardest ones to solve. You can actually solve labor by not going backwards on housing in labor policy, which the other candidates both have. I think we ought to be trying to drive down the cost of construction, but the land is the a tricky piece. The state should contribute land for affordable housing. >> When you say the other candidates are going backwards on labor, what do you mean? So, I have not I have said that I do not think today or now is the time to
Buying 10,000 houses at a time >> um in single transactions because they were the only people in the marketplace. Money flowed to Wall Street rather than Main Street. And because it didn't flow to Main Street, Main Street was essentially increasingly priced out of the market to the point we got to the 2020s where a flood of money went on Wall Street. Wall Street went crazy buying up properties in 21 and 22 and to a certain extent 23 which of course uh housing prices absolutely soared ahead pricing people regular folks out of the market even further. So in one sense it's recognizing that there's an imbalance here. Wall Street has money has the ability to buy and therefore to some people make them rent slave for the rest of their lives and they have no hope of actually getting into a home. Tom, so the part of part of this bill that I I wasn't sure about was the limit on corporate purchase because whenever you give the government a knob, they kind of turn it and they'll always turn it the wrong way. So I think that's a well-intended thing to say, hey, the supply of housing is being constrained because they can buy so many houses at once. And then when they price the rent on those houses, they're able to price the rent higher because they themselves through the purchase of those houses have now constricted who controls the supply. So I agree that that hurts the little guy. But why were they able to do it? Where's the rest of it? The rest of the bill has got some things I think are going in the right direction, but we really need the states to do it. Such as manufactured homes relief. There are some standards for manufactured homes that they've changed to match the market. and then financing on their they want the FHA to increase limits on multif family. Well, that to match the
Unaffordable to a typical household. On Monday's Prof Markets, Edson and finance professor Patrick Bole argued that this isn't simply the market malfunctioning. Expensive housing may be the result of a political choice. you know, in the very long run, if you look at a very long history of housing prices, there's no reason to think they should go up, but it's it's become sort of an investment class. You know, years ago, if you speak to your grandparents, they'll never talk about the concept of real estate investing. They they bought a home that they needed to live in. Once it became an investment and we'll say in places like the UK where it is by far the biggest investment like it's what people do with their savings is sort of either buy their own home or buy a buy to let a property you end up with this situation where the government have uh you know incentivized people to buy homes. They want prices to go up or at least stay steady. And so, you know, in an election year or whatever, you know, are are you going to sort of uh permit a load of new building that'll hit house prices? Are you going to allow uh you know, changes that would make it affordable to young people? And for the last 20, 25 years, the answer has been no. You said in your video, I think this quote really sums it up. He said, quote, "Once a country decides its houses are supposed to make everyone rich, it has to keep prices rising forever, which means restricting
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