THIS IS HOW WE MAKE HOUSING PERMANENTLY AFFORDABLE: FIAT HOUSING
Housing in America has become a financial product, creating a systemic incentive to increase the cost of housing while putting people into a lifetime worth of debt for the basic necessity of shelter. I don’t know about you, but I find that absolutely ridiculous and a threat to freedom.
There is no way you can convince me that a house can be worth over $400k with walls you can punch through because they are made of glorified cardboard and sheet rock. Talk about a house of cards.
Over decades, Wall Street and investment firms worked to turn the roof over your head into a speculative asset. Home prices no longer reflect what it costs to build a place to live. They reflect how much investors are willing to pay to store wealth. Millions of working Americans spend more than half their income just to keep a roof over their heads while banks and hedge funds collect the difference. We have the power to redesign this system through policy.
Here is what I believe we can do.
A mortgage is a financial instrument consisting of a deed and a lien, and those two things can be separated by law. We did something like this in 1971 when Nixon depegged the US dollar from gold. Nobody lost their dollars, and the financial system kept working because we declared a new framework, and the economy adapted. We can apply the same logic to housing.
Under this policy, any homeowner who chooses to enroll converts their mortgage into a time-accreting government instrument. The bank keeps its asset, the note keeps its value, the lien is severed, and ongoing housing costs reset to what the structure actually costs to build and maintain with no speculative premium layered on top.
This is a voluntary program. If you want to stay in the private market, nothing changes for you. If you are a working family crushed by a mortgage that reflects investor demand rather than construction reality, you now have an off-ramp. You enroll, you receive permanent occupancy rights to your home, and your housing cost reflects what your home is actually worth to produce. Imagine what American families could do with that extra income, and imagine what our local economies would look like if people were not spending the majority of their earnings on a speculative premium that only benefits investors. Housing should cost what it costs to build.
