Transcription
Here's a headline you probably haven't seen, even though it will have more impact on your life and your children's lives than anything coming out of the Middle East. By the time millennials hit retirement age, the typical home in this country will cost $1 million. That will be the median price of a home, not just new homes, but any home by 2050.
Now, put another way, if you have a child today, then by the time your child is looking for a place to live, they'd better have like $200,000 saved up for a down payment. And for the rest of their lives, in all likelihood, they'll be paying off a debt that's completely insurmountable. And this is not a projection from some crackpot looking for attention. It's coming from one of the top housing economists in the nation.
"Essentially, in about 25 years, the national median home price will be a million dollars," Lawrence Young, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, said at a conference in Washington D.C. on Tuesday. "It may be hard to envision that, but back in 1990, the national median price was $90,000." Young noted that even San Francisco, considered an exorbitantly priced real estate market at the time, had a median price of only $250,000 in 1990.
Now, for comparison, as of right now, the national median sales price for existing homes is roughly $430,000. So, as high as housing prices are right now, you can expect them to be much higher, more than double in just a couple of decades. This economist quote used multiple scenarios to project home prices out into the future and says each scenario pointed to roughly the same timeline to hit $1 million, about 25 years.
Now, to be clear, although the economist determined that we'd hit $1 million as part of ordinary appreciation, home prices, inflation is not the only factor here. Inflation alone won't get us to this figure. And there's reason to believe that typical home prices will actually exceed a million dollars by 2050, and probably by a lot. And in a moment, we'll talk about some of those reasons and and what we can do about them.
But first, I want to talk about the story of 31-year-old Micah Longmire. This is a true story. I found the details in a small online-only paper called the Missoula Current. And according to the paper, Micah earns a salary of $200,000 a year. That's a high salary by any measure, more than double the median household income in this country. The average lawyer in this country doesn't make $200,000. So, you might think Micah is doing pretty well, all things considered.
But after looking all over the country for more than two years, Micah and his wife determined that they couldn't afford to buy a home on their own, at least not without taking on a mortgage that they weren't sure they could afford. Yes, even though he's making a salary that puts him in the top 10% of American incomes, he was not able to lock lock down a home despite looking for two years in a variety of markets. In the end, Micah's solution was to pull some money together along with his wife's parents and together they bought a 3,500 square foot, $600,000 home in Chattanooga, Tennessee for the entire family. Micah now lives with the in-laws. And as he put it, "I make $200,000 and I wouldn't have been able to buy a house by myself."
That's ridiculous. And it is ridiculous. Now, you can take issue with the idea that Micah truly couldn't afford a home. Uh, many of you listening to the show probably purchased a home with an income lower than $200,000. You might have even done that recently. And you might think that he could have picked a smaller house in a different area and everything would have been fine. But before I address that objection, I need to make the point that Micah's story is not unusual.
Just a couple of days ago, Fitch, one of the big three global credit rating agencies, downgraded the U.S. home building sector from neutral to deteriorating because people are not buying homes anymore. 30-year mortgage rates are over 6%. Consumer sentiment, meaning how pessimistic people are about their finances, is at a record low, going back to the '50s, even through the 2008 financial crisis, the surveys of consumer sentiment were not as dire as they are right now.
So, while it may be the case that people like Micah could theoretically purchase a home somewhere if they're willing to make more compromises, the fact remains that they are they aren't doing that. Lots of people aren't doing that, and we need to figure out why. And I'm not cherry-picking anecdotes or statistics here. Every possible indicator is sending the same signal.
Here's another one. Real estate agents are quitting in droves right now. It's another thing you might not have heard about. This is data from the National Association of Realtors. It shows the number of members in the Realtors Association, the light blue, and the number of existing homes for sale, which is the darker line. From 2012 to 2000, uh, to 2022, membership in the association grew every year, and now it's steadily declining. The Association of Realtors now has just 1.44 million members compared to 1.6 in October 2022.
And as the chart shows, for most of this century, there have been far more homes for sale than realtors. And that's the kind of ratio you want. That's a healthy ratio. That hasn't been the case for several years now. Realtors are competing over a very small number of homes. And on top of that, a recent legal settlement means that realtors have to disclose their fee upfront, which is leading many home buyers to handle the process themselves, which also isn't helping things for the industry.
So, to give you an idea of how quickly the housing market has become unaffordable, take a look at this chart from the Wall Street Journal, uh, just the other day. They're getting their data from the Intercontinental Exchange, um, uh, Angie, and the Labor Department. If you're buying a home now, as opposed to 2019, then on average, you're paying 22% more in principal. This is just from 2019, again. Uh, 35% more in interest, 31% more in property tax, 72% more in insurance, 85% more in home maintenance, and 175% more in emergency repairs. So your total annual bill is 40% higher than it would have been just 6 years ago. It's like catastrophic.
If you're the average American, your annual expenditure on housing went from $20,600 to $28,500. So almost $30,000. And it, it's worth taking a brief detour, though. We also mentioned property taxes. Uh, it's worth worth taking a brief detour to focus in on the property tax figure. Home prices are going up around the country, and so are property taxes. And the fun thing about a property tax, of course, is that you can never pay it off. It's an expense that the government taxes on. Money that you owe them simply because they say so. Uh, money you owe them as a penalty for, you know, committing the sin of buying property. And there's no end point. There's no such thing as a final payment.
CBS News reported recently, "Property taxes across the U.S. are rising faster than inflation, with the average homeowner last year paying $4,427, up 3.7% from 2024, according to a new analysis from real estate data firm ATOM. By comparison, the consumer price index, a basket of commonly purchased goods and services, rose 2.7% last year." Homeowners in some states have faced considerably larger property tax increases, including an 18% hike in Delaware and a nearly 12% jump in Maryland.
So, it seems like if it seems like there's some sort of conspiracy to deliberately make owning a home as expensive as possible, well, you're not crazy for noticing. Now, back to the Journal report. "Sales of previously owned homes have held around 4 million a year since 2023, the lowest level in decades, and down from a prepandemic norm of between 5 million and 5.5 million a year, according to the National Association of Realtors. That means fewer prospective buyers are accessing, uh, home ownership, and many of those who are buying homes are stretching their budgets to do so. Those new homeowners are vulnerable to falling behind on payments if their incomes drop or they face unexpected jumps in home ownership costs."
A buyer with a $2,500 monthly budget and a 20% down payment can afford to buy a $517,500 home at a 3% mortgage rate, according to real estate brokerage Red Fin. At today's rate, around 6.5%, that same buyer can only afford a $384,000 home. Even though rates have climbed, typical home values remain near record highs, according to Zillow, confusing many buyers who have been waiting for prices to fall.
And the last part is important. Normally, when interest rates go up, you expect home values to go down. You're paying more for interest over time, so you expect that your upfront costs will be lower. This is normally how things work. And, uh, you know, it makes sense that it would work that way. But in practice, that's not happening anymore. In most markets, there's nothing to offset the high interest rates at all. The homes have higher list prices and higher costs over time. It's a lose-lose.
One of the reasons that the conventional wisdom doesn't apply anymore is that nobody wants to sell their home. And why would they? In many cases, they locked in an extremely low interest rate during the pandemic. And as we've already discussed, they can expect a very large return on their investment in the coming decades. But even after several decades, they won't want to sell because their children will need to live somewhere, if they will even pass their house down to their children, which we'll get to in a second. Uh, if the median home is is going for a million dollars, then many more homes are theoretically going to remain in the family.
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What if I told you this is an incomplete picture of what's going on? And in fact, there was plenty of affordable housing in America, as it turns out. So, here's an experiment. Take a look at at this $700,000 home in San Francisco, California, one of the most desirable and expensive housing markets in the country. And it underscores just how bad things are, uh, out there. It's a 1,200 square foot dump. As you can see, the listing calls it a "diamond in the rough with immense potential," which is always a good sign, right? When you're spending $700,000 on a home, that's what you want, immense potential. And we've all come to accept this kind of price disparity because of the principle of supply and demand. So, we don't think about it.
But here's what you you can get for the same price in Detroit, Michigan, which is a far less desirable or expensive housing market than, uh, San Francisco. This is the exact same price. So $700,000 in the Midwest gets you basically a castle. It's 5,300 square feet, five bedrooms, a wood-paneled library. It's centrally located, 15 minutes to downtown, 20 minutes to the airport. Uh, a home that would be at least $2 million or more in Nashville or New York or Los Angeles or even in suburban Detroit.
Now, $700,000 certainly isn't cheap, but that's not the point. The reality is that real estate markets are hyper-local and there are pockets of affordability out there. So, you could still buy nice, livable $250,000 homes in many rural areas or small cities like, uh, Toledo. So, so what's really going on with housing? This is the, this is the first big issue: is that everybody wants to live in the same places, which is driving prices in those places up astronomically. San Francisco and New York and Boston and Nashville are boom towns. Detroit, Fort Wayne, and Gary aren't. Though, to be fair, this is starting to change, and the Midwest is posting its first net migration gains in decades, driven largely by relatively affordable, you know, uh, houses compared to the coast. One factor driving this is jobs. San Francisco is the tech capital of the world. They have a lot more jobs there, but that's still kicking the can down the road. I mean, you're not addressing the fundamental issue, which is that something, something caused something caused cities like Detroit to become so undesirable in the first place. Something caused cities like Detroit to become undesirable investment opportunities for job creators. Yes, the auto industry took a major hit. That's the default explanation for what's happened here. But plenty of industries in San Francisco have died since the 1960s as well. San Francisco used to be a manufacturing powerhouse. Uh, there was a major shipbuilding presence in the city. They also refined a lot of chemicals. None of that applies anymore. It's moved across the bay. So in many historical respects, San Francisco and Detroit are more similar than they appear. But over the past half century, one city managed to attract job seekers and investment while the other basically died out.
This brings us to the second reason housing is out of control, which is urban crime has made many cities unlivable, which has led millions of people to rule out what should be some of the prime real estate in the country. So, this is not as simple, by the way, as some people will say as saying, "Oh, well, you just have to move. You know, there, there are houses that are affordable. You just have to move there." Well, the problem is that in many cases, you don't want to move there because you don't want to get stabbed and you don't want your children to get stabbed while you walk down the street. I mean, that's the issue.
And if you look at the demographics, the distinction between the two cities is hard to miss. San Francisco is around 5% black. Detroit is closer to 80%. And as you'd expect based on the statistics, this is just the reality. Detroit has three times the violent crime rate of San Francisco. Could that be why no one wants to live there? In school, you're taught that the causation works the other way. That these cities are violent because they've been abandoned and forsaken by everybody else. But maybe it's the opposite. Maybe these cities have been abandoned and forsaken precisely because they're violent and dysfunctional. And maybe if we address the violence and dysfunction, then virtually overnight, we can have infinitely more housing stock than we do right now. We can have the houses that are already available, but you could have communities that people want to live in because they're not going to get stabbed while they walk down the street.
Now, you never hear about cleaning up the streets. Uh, maybe going full citizen vigilante on criminals, although ideally it would not be the citizens doing this. It would be, you know, the police. Um, but you rarely hear it expressed as a housing policy, but that's exactly what it is. It's the single most straightforward way to address a problem that we all know exists.
Now, Detroit is an interesting case study, actually, on this because since the city's bankruptcy in 2013, a consortium, a consortium of billionaires revitalized the downtown, which is now actually a thriving commercial district. And a lot of people don't realize that. Uh, they did this in conjunction with the city and state, which started aggressively policing the area and by encouraging downtown businesses to hire private security. And as the downtown and surrounding areas became safer, people started moving back into the city. And if those trends continue, hundreds of thousands of vacant homes in Detroit could come back online. But despite those successes, no one is supposed to even float the idea of actually fixing the cities, of making them places you want to live. Instead, the universal message is that we just have to accept the way they are.
Ed Sheeran just went on Theo Von's podcast to talk about how London is sketchy and, you know, dangerous. And instead of suggesting the government fix the problem, which they could pretty easily, he says the solution is to make sure you're not carrying anything around that criminals might want to steal. Watch.
>> What's the most dangerous place to be around here?
>> Here, uh, I'd say every, every area of London has a, literally everywhere area is sketchy. Like I think that you cannot be
>> anywhere.
>> Uh,
>> I love that. Yeah, it's not, it's not like a segregated city. There's like it's very
>> everybody's sketch, every
>> No, I mean the nice areas are sketchy, the bad areas are sketchy, but you just have to not do stupid, like if you
>> if you wander around, uh, with, I don't know, like a Louis Vuitton duffel bag and a 200 grand watch. Yeah.
>> You are going to get robbed. Like, like, but, but just don't do that.
>> Yeah, don't do it.
H. That's got to be one of the most relatable pieces of advice ever dispensed by a celebrity. When you're walking around London, whatever you do, don't take your $200,000 watch, you know, that we all have, and your $150,000 Louis Vuitton duffel bag. And just to be safe, leave your $2 million earrings at home as well. I mean, you got to have some street smarts if you're going to survive in London. Now, of course, when he's spending time in his $27 million mansion in London or driving through the city in an armored SUV or walking around with armed bodyguards, Ed Sheeran probably isn't taking his own advice because he doesn't have to. But for everybody else, for people who can't spend millions of dollars on a home, the message is that you're responsible if you get robbed, assaulted, and murdered. It's not the fault of the criminal. Because, by the way, most people getting robbed in London don't have a $200,000 watch. Okay? Okay, they have like a $50 watch and they're getting that stolen, possibly stabbed in the process. But you can't blame the criminals. No, they didn't do anything wrong. You're the one who should suffer because you made yourself a target by existing, by having the gall to walk down the street. You have two options: get robbed and shot, or I guess stabbed. This is London. Or do what everyone else is doing and move far away to a coastal enclave or a pocket of the south of the mountain west. And naturally, if you do what everyone else is doing, then you're going to pay a lot more. Also, and meanwhile, in Chicago, at least, uh, 36 people were shot, six fatally, in in shootings over the weekend. So that's how Chicago rang it, rang in Juneteenth and Father's Day. Here's a news report from one of the first shootings, and, uh, we'll, we'll play most of it. And tell me if you notice anything here. Watch.
>> We begin with breaking news of a mass shooting on Chicago's South Side. We just learned 12 people were hurt. Assal Razai is live at Chicago Medical Center as officers investigate. And Assal, what do we know about the victims?
>> Well, Megan, we just got an update from Chicago police, and they say an additional man has, uh, been hurt, refused medical treatment, uh, unknown injuries at this time, but that brings the total of victims to 13. We know at least 12 of those victims have gunshot wounds. Uh, take a look at the scene, Megan. We saw over a 100 evidence markers there. This is near Wentworth and 95th Street. Police say the shooting happened just after 11:00 last night. So far, they say a red SUV pulled up alongside a large crowd. Two people inside of that SUV started shooting at the crowd before driving off. We're told multiple victims between the age of 17 and 47 years old were shot at that scene. We know two of those victims, a woman and a man, were first discovered by Chicago police. They had multiple gunshot wounds. The 10 other victims, Megan, self-transported to the hospital. We did hear from street pastor Donovan Price at the scene. He said seeing a shooting like this on a holiday like Juneteenth is really a tragedy.
>> In my neighborhood where my church is, it's between seven and 11 people possibly shot. It's just, it's tragic. At least one of them is in critical condition. It's just, it should be celebrating. Fireworks should not turn into gunshots.
>> Does a disservice to, uh, the community and what Juneteenth, Juneteenth is supposed to stand for.
>> Well, actually, what happened this weekend is a very good illustration of what Juneteenth represents. Both parties, Democrats and Republicans, forced the fake holiday down our throats because George Floyd overdosed. That was the reason they signed the law in the first place. The whole point from the moment they made Juneteenth a holiday was to honor thugs and career felons like George Floyd and Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin and Jacob Blake and so on. We were supposed to pretend that all these degenerates are really victims of white supremacy and that as a result of all this suppression, black people need their own national anthem and their own Independence Day. They need their own country. Basically, we were told. Well, guess what? This is what it looks like. And you'll notice that at no point in that two-minute news clip did anyone provide a description of the suspects. You get no information whatsoever. And we all know why that is. There's no need for any kind of speculation. They're burying the suspect's description because the suspects, of course, are all black.
All over the country, Juneteenth celebrations descended into mayhem. And every single time, the suspects looked exactly as you would expect. This is from, uh, South Carolina's Juneteenth festivities. Watch.
Hey yo, there, bey. Oh. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Cory. Well, they're just, uh, getting into the Juneteenth spirit, I suppose. And here's how the authorities described what happened. It was a very sanitized press conference, but this was the takeaway. Listen.
night around 7:00 during the Juneteenth event, main concert was getting ready to start, and several fights broke out. Um, our officers immediately responded to a number of locations within the park. Um, but the disruption, uh, kind of took on a life of its own, and out of, out of an abundance of caution, we made the decision to evacuate the park.
>> Out of an abundance of caution, we made the decision to evacuate the park. Translation: it wasn't one or two people fighting each other. It was hundreds of black people, mostly teenagers, young black males, uh, engaging in an all-out riot for no discernible reason, which is something we're all now seeing happen all over the country multiple times a week. It's not isolated. It's not a one-off. It's the default state of affairs. At this point, if thousands of black teens aren't fighting in the street, that's an autom, that's an abnormal situation that merits investigation.
For good measure, this was the scene in Baltimore, uh, over the weekend. Uh, AFRAM, which is apparently one of the biggest African-American festivals on the East Coast, was marking its 50th anniversary as part of the Juneteenth celebrations. And, uh, here's what that family-friendly event looked like.
>> Pull up in a black Lotus. Your plaques are bogus, so I stripped them off the wall. Waiting for my cuticorn pocket a ball. You racking them up on big paper like pancakes, stacking them up. In fact, I'm slapping them up. Cadillac is a truck. I can't lose with 22. That's what's
Oh, I wonder why nobody wants to live in these, uh, in those these places. Why the houses remain vacant. Two days later, appropriately enough, it was Father's Day. And, um, we all know that none of the teens in these videos had a father in the household to celebrate with. Uh, I think we can guess that very few of them were, you know, sitting around the living room on Father's Day morning while their dad opened a gift bag with some socks, uh, inside. I think that scene probably did not play out very often in Baltimore. And, uh, a lot of them are probably already parents themselves, if we're being honest.
It's not simply a matter of law and order to bring an end to displays like this, although that's obviously a very important part of it. It's also about restoring sanity to the housing market. You know, nobody wants to live within 50 miles of this kind of chaos. So all, all of the homes are therefore useless. And as a result, the homes that are in safe areas become simply too expensive. Now, the moment we haul all these criminals to prison and never let them out, we'll see a drastic reduction in housing prices in the entire country.
Of course, that's not to say the problem is limited exclusively to black teens and their absent fathers. The second big issue with housing that some of the most desirable areas of the country have been made undesirable because of post-Civil Rights movement realities is compounding the first issue that millions of people want to live in the same small number of places. But there's a third factor in all this which is commonly overlooked, which is that illegal immigration is driving demand for new homes. So, if it, if it's true that 20 million illegal immigrants or more lived here during the Biden administration, then they had to live somewhere. And in fact, James Carter, a former deputy assistant Treasury Secretary, wrote an op-ed a couple of days ago where he spelled out the extent to which illegal aliens have caused housing prices to increase, uh, very considerably over the just the past few years.
Quote, "For much of the 2010s, pay in lower-skill occupations lagged behind while professional salaries pulled away. As immigration enforcement has increased, that gap has narrowed. Take construction, which relies heavily on immigrant labor. Wages in the sector grew at roughly 2.5% annually between 2010 and 2017. Now BLS data shows construction wages growing at 3.1% through the first quarter of 2026, above the sector's pre-enforcement baseline, even as broader private sector wage growth cooled to 3.4%. A recent Federal Reserve, uh, working paper finds that unauthorized immigration accounted for roughly 30% of house price growth and 20% of rent growth in the average metro area between 2021 and '24."
So I'll say that last part again because it bears repeating. Illegal aliens caused 30% of the increase in housing prices that we've seen in recent years. So, at the same time that illegal aliens were competing for American jobs, they were causing a massive spike in housing costs across the board. Now, I had to double-check the statistic because even with the knowledge that Joe Biden's administration imported tens of millions of illegal aliens and broke the country, uh, it still seems really shockingly high. And indeed, this is from a recent paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Quote, "We find that during the boom period, an increase in unauthorized immigrant worker flow equal to 1% of a local area's initial employment, uh, increased local housing prices by 2.2% and increased local rents by 1.4%. The impact on rents is slightly smaller for single-family units and slightly larger for multifamily units. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that unauthorized immigrant worker flows can explain about 30% of the total growth in house prices and 20% of total growth in rents over the boom period for the average local market."
This is one of the reasons why it's getting harder and harder to live in a country that resembles the one that Gen X or millennials grew up in. Um, the, never mind baby boomers, the degree to which foreigners have reshaped this country and all of the West is truly staggering to comprehend. Take a moment now to look at all three factors leading to the rise in in housing costs that we've addressed. First, that we, that people only want to live in a few places. Second, urban crime makes many prime locations unlivable. Third, immigration has the dual issue of causing more pressure on our strapped housing market while also reducing the number of desirable areas to live.
Now, what you have between these three factors is a perfect storm, basically, but they're not all. A fourth reason for skyrocketing housing costs is terrible public policy, which obviously dovetails with the other three we've talked about. Government regulations and codes are making it more expensive to build, uh, new housing supply, particularly in places like coastal California. Places that have developed huge amounts of housing in the past decade, like Austin, Texas, have seen rents stabilize or even decline. Anti-growth places like Boston and San Francisco, where it's basically impossible to build anything, have seen prices skyrocket.
The U.S. population in 1990 was about 250 million people. Today, it's about 350 million people. It's a 40% increase. In 1990, San Francisco had 328,000 housing units. Today, it has only 415,000, which is a 25% increase. The rise of NIMBYs in places like San Francisco and the counties around it are making it impossible to deal with the demand surge from a constantly growing population.
At this point, you're probably thinking, "What about places where you can build, places where there isn't urban crime and places without a lot of immigration?" You know, why are places like Northern Michigan or Stowe, Vermont, or coastal Maine also getting so expensive? Well, this is related to the previous points. People want to live in places that resemble 1950s America. You know, go to Vermont or coastal Maine or Northern Michigan, and you can find that. And there's a huge trend to people fleeing diversity, the wonders of diversity, to those areas. But there's also a fifth and very important overlooked reason, uh, for rising home ownership costs, and that is inflation. The government has doubled the amount of money that was in circulation during COVID, meaning the value of the dollar is declining, which in turn inflates the dollar cost of homes. This is one of the consequences of being $40 trillion in debt. Our leaders will seek to inflate away the currency as a roundabout way of reducing the country's financial obligations. Inflation is a hidden tax that's behind so many of the price increases we've detailed at the beginning of the episode. A dollar in decline means home prices rising, even if the inherent value isn't rising with it. It makes repair and replacement costs higher, which, you know, drives increases in insurance costs. It also makes it more expensive to provide city services, which makes your tax dollars go up. Uh, a lot of the rise in housing prices is really just a decline in the dollar, which is why it's a bigger and bigger issue that young people can't afford homes. One of the best defenses against inflation is long-term debt, backed up by an asset that rises with inflation. And these five explanations for for rising housing costs go a long way in explaining why we're in the situation that we're in. And unless they change, predictions that the average house will be a million dollars by 2050 are likely underestimating the situation, probably by a lot.
Now, the problem is that solving these problems is not politically practical. And for that, we can thank the most selfish generation in American history, which is the baby boomers. Now, boomers today control over 40% of the national real estate wealth, and about a quarter of them own a second home or a vacation property. One Northwestern Mutual survey found that less than a quarter plan to leave an inheritance to future generations. A Charles Schwab survey of high-net-worth Americans found that for nearly half of baby boomers, their priority, their top priority is to quote, "Enjoy my money for myself while I'm still alive."
Now, it's impossible to overstate just how historically bizarre, not to mention evil, um, that attitude is because for all of human history, the thing that animated older generations was a desire to pass down a legacy to their children and their grandchildren. And that's still the norm, by the way, outside of boomers. The same survey, interestingly enough, found that wealthy millennials were less likely to list enjoying my money for myself as their priority. They had a greater desire to see their own kids inherit their wealth. They wanted to see it. They wanted to be there to see their kids benefit from, um, the, the wealth and legacy. So the boomers are in this way kind of an aberration. You know, their general disinterest, which of course this does not apply to all of them, but the general statistical disinterest in passing wealth and legacy to their children is unique. And it's therefore helping to cause unique problems that their children and grandchildren have to deal with.
Now, it's not useful or helpful to like sit around stewing in resentment against other generations. That's there's no real benefit in that, you know, because even if it's true that you're getting kind of screwed by previous generations, Uh, okay. Well, once that's been established, you got to go live your life. But the fact is, economically, the boomers did have it considerably easier than their children have it. When they started entering the housing market in the late 1960s, the dollar was still pegged to the gold standard. The immigration laws that transformed the country had only just passed and so had not yet transformed the country. Uh, the cities were mostly still livable but in steep, swift decline because of laws supported by boomers. And it was easy to build new housing in suburbs, which were hardly, uh, regulated. Boomer NIMBYs hadn't made it impossible to build in coastal California yet. Uh, owning a home was the American dream, and it was an attainable one.
Now that they've secured their dominant position in the American real estate market, boomers generally have done everything possible to make sure housing stays unaffordable. Doing anything that might reduce the value of their housing is politically untenable. Something Donald Trump has said out loud. Watch.
>> Existing housing, people that own their homes, we're going to keep them wealthy. We're going to keep those prices up.
So, if you're a young person who wants a home, just know that there's a reason it's so bad out there. It's because the number of desirable places is rapidly declining. Lots of prime real estate is taken up by the worst and most violent people in the country. The government is deliberately destroying the value of the dollar while also importing millions of people and making it impossible to build anything new. So that's, that's what's going on. And now, as a result, the choice is binary and unavoidable. We can either doom future generations to a market that consists entirely of $1 million homes they can't afford, or we can make the decision, as unthinkable as it may be, to somebody like Ed Sheeran, to become a lot less tolerant. That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day. Godspeed.
Last month, we judged Martin Luther King Jr. not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. American school kids spend a lot of time hearing about MLK and Rosa Parks. Have you noticed no one ever asks what Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery are like today? The legacy of the civil rights movement wasn't a racially harmonious utopia. It's hollowed-out urban cores, hundreds of thousands of dead Americans, raped grandmothers, ethnic cleansing entire neighborhoods. This month, we surveyed firsthand accounts of the historic wave of nonviolent crime, riots unleashed on this country by the civil rights movement, which caused more enduring damage on America's greatest cities than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who were the winners and who were the losers? What's the truth about redlining, white flight, affirmative action? Don't want to miss the second part of our special on the civil rights movement, "The Looting of America," on Daily Wire Plus.