It's not a “housing” crisis. It’s an urbanism crisis.
Stop blaming Blackrock, start blaming criminals and McMansions.
There is no “housing” crisis. It’s an urbanism crisis. Specifically, it’s a “lower-middle income urbanism” crisis.
Young people haven’t had time to accumulate capital, so they are hurt the most. By locking young people out of cities:
they lose opportunities,
they gain less experience (leading to skill-scarcity),
the cost of labor skyrockets,
and everything ends up more expensive.
To increase productivity, efficiency, and innovation, we need to move young people into areas where they can acquire skills and experience.
On the supply side, we can remove regulations, lower tariffs, and increase the labor supply with “construction visas.” On the demand side, we could deport immigrants, but with the loss of cheap labor, the price of consumer goods will increase, leading to more outsourcing.
Rather than deporting immigrants, which is expensive and brutal, we could instead deport native-born criminals and remove welfare from equity-rich seniors. This would remove 40 million criminals (involuntarily) and 29 million seniors (voluntarily) from urban areas.
The population of America’s cities would be reduced by 25%, leading to a $150k discount on urban housing. That would give young people back their American dream, and give our companies the fuel they need for the innovation machine. I call that a total 360 win.
To understand why, let’s first cover the basics of supply and demand.1
SUPPLY
To increase supply, we can either:
(a.) Reduce regulations on building
(b.) Decrease the cost of inputs.
Reducing regulation is the Abundance program:
Remove height limits, density limits, and parking space mandates.
Make “single-family zoning” illegal.
And let people build wizard towers.
Reducing the cost of inputs is more controversial:2
Subsidize construction, like how we subsidize corn or soy.
Remove tariffs and taxes on lumber, concrete, and steel.
Introduce a “construction visa” to flood the market with cheap labor.
Outside of reducing regulations and input costs, is there a way we can reduce demand?
DEMAND
We could reintroduce the Black Plague. Between 1350 and 1450, land prices in Europe declined by 26%, and they did not recover until 1700.3
We could deport immigrants, but that would increase the cost of construction labor.4
Or, we could do a secret third thing…
Before I get into my weird but effective solutions, let’s get specific. We need to debunk the idea of a general “housing crisis,” and explain why it’s an urbanism crisis instead.
Crisis, or Fear-Mongering?
The “housing crisis” is a mixture of two things.
On the one hand, NIMBYism, regulation, 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, labor shortages, and academic over-production have artificially inflated housing costs.
On the other hand, the attention-economy incentives a hysterical panic. Medium-sized problems are blown up into apocalyptic, civilization-ending disasters.5
80% of Baby Boomers own homes, compared with only 26% of Gen Z.6 But if we compare Boomers at age 25 to Gen Z at age 25, there has been no decline in home ownership. Home ownership remained stable between 1990 and 2025, vacillating between 64% and 69%.7
Even if home ownership is stable, it’s possible that new homes are lower quality. If new homes are less sturdy, less attractive, or physically smaller, then that’s a problem.
But houses aren’t getting smaller: as household size decreased, new homes expanded.8 We can explain 100% of increased costs by home size. The ratio per square foot has remained the same since 1973.
WAIT! Don’t give up hope!
Debunking hysteria is no fun.9 Don’t worry — there is a problem.
Let’s put on our thinking caps. Ask a simple question:
Why are houses getting so big? Who is buying all these big houses? And where are they building them?
The increasing size of homes can be attributed to the fact that homes are not being built in cities,10 but in suburban and rural areas. The quality of housing has gone down, because the quality of housing isn’t just size, sturdiness, or physical appearance.
The quality of housing is determined by the desirability of the neighborhood.
For the very rich and the very poor, housing isn’t a problem. Rich people can afford to live in cities, and poor people receive government assistance. But for the lower-middle-class, good luck! They’re in the worst of both worlds: too rich to receive hand-outs, and too poor to afford housing.11
This is an urbanism crisis. It is an increase in the cost of city-living for lower-middle class people.
#1: DEPORT ALL CRIMINALS
Prisons are housing.12 Each prison drives up demand for land, and increases prices.13 Abolishing prison sounds insane, but it’s actually pragmatic and economical.
In America, the yearly cost per inmate is $45k.14 In El Salvador, land, food, and labor are cheap, so the cost per inmate is $20k. By deporting inmates, we not only save money on prison expenses, we also lower housing demand.
Let’s assume Trump deports four million immigrants by 2028. Those are rookie numbers: check out the number of criminals we got in here! (slaps the side of a prison)
79 million Americans have a criminal record. If we deported them all to El Salvador, that would reduce the population by 24%. By reducing demand and eliminating recidivism, the median home price would decrease by $98k.15
This is too radical, so let’s start with felons instead. Deporting all felons would remove 8% of the population.16 Not only would housing prices go down, but crime would decrease as well.17
But 19 million deportations is still too radical. We do have human rights, after all. If we just deported current inmates, this would grant each American a housing discount of $2,778.18 The benefit to the lower-middle class would be enormous.19
#2: THE NEVADA PLAN
Let’s say you oppose the deportation of criminals because you hate the idea of living in a boring, low-crime society. Don’t worry: I have a solution that will actually increase crime for some while decreasing it for others.
Land in Manhattan is more expensive than land in the Nevada Desert.20 With a people-sized vacuum, if you sucked people out of Manhattan and spit them out in Nevada, you would raise housing prices in Nevada, but lower them in Manhattan.
To achieve this, just pass this law:
Henceforth, all criminals shall live in the land of Nevada.
This “internal deportation” scheme would turn Nevada into a super-criminal state, thus keeping America exciting, vibrant, and diverse. At the same time, non-Nevadans would benefit from new opportunities from decreased demand in cheap and crime-free neighborhoods.
No one wants to buy cheap houses in St. Louis21 because they are “locked” by crime. If we deported criminals to Nevada, these houses would become available for gentrification by art hoes.
I can hear the sound of 3.3 million angry Nevadans shaking their fists. That’s a large amount of people who would be harmed by my scheme, but consider the following:
This is a map of the United States with one small difference: Clark County is now part of Arizona. That leaves 867,000 Nevadans to be mad at me for ruining their once-peaceful state.
Outside Nevada, non-criminal Americans22 who don’t own a home23 would have their housing costs reduced by $2,778 each,24 which would save $256 billion.25
With those savings, we could pay each Nevadan $295k, each, to get the hell out of this newly-created super-criminal hellhole formerly known as Nevada.26 Sounds like a good deal to me.
#3: DEPORT OLD PEOPLE FROM CITIES
Unfortunately, we can’t deport criminals or tell them where to live, because criminals have human rights. This due to our democracy and our values. This leaves me with one final option.
Instead of forcing criminals to live in Nevada, I propose we stop giving welfare checks to Boomers in McMansions.
I am not heartless: we can continue giving welfare checks to poor Boomers. But there just aren’t a lot of poor Boomers.27 The vast majority of seniors, 50 million of them, are not in poverty.28
I can hear bones clankeling and rankling as they snap-crackle-pop their arthritic knuckles and begin writing angry comments.29
Calm down, grandpa. I’m not proposing that we confiscate the wealth of senior citizens.30 I don’t even want to raise taxes on old people.31 All I want to do is to add an equity test to welfare.
The equity test is simple. If you own an expensive home, you do not receive Social Security or Medicare. If you own a home over $147k, and you don’t live in a city,32 your home is a luxury or a speculative investment. You are not in poverty; you do not deserve welfare; you do not collect $200.
Young people need to live in cities, because cities have jobs. Old people do not need to live in cities, because they are retired. Old people live in cities after retiring because:
city-living is a luxury to which they are accustomed,
or because they view their equity as an investment.
The elderly claim33 that they earned their welfare because they paid into the system.34 But the government is not an investment account35 or a publicly traded company.36
Boomers believe they are entitled to “return on investment” because of narcissism and selfishness.37 No one has ever gotten “a positive return on investment” from government spending.38
Government taxation is redistributive communism. I endorse some degree of communism, but I want that communism to be dedicated to helping poor renters, not equity-rich investors.39
If Boomers were making the libertarian argument that “the government does not have the right to tax us,” that would be consistent. But they aren’t claiming that: they are claiming that young people must be forced to pay pensions for McMansions. That is logically hypocritical, morally corrupt, and fiscally irresponsible.
If we banned seniors with over $150k in equity from receiving welfare, let’s assume that 50% of the 46 million Boomers who own homes would be forced to sell and downsize.40 They can live in a one bedroom apartment in a rural area. Not a McMansion. You are not entitled to a McMansion.41
I’m not forcing anyone out of their homes. I’m calling for an end to government subsidies for speculative luxury investments. I know these Boomers, and they do not rent out their 2nd or 3rd bedrooms.
I have no problem with people hoarding wealth, if they can afford to do so, but don’t expect a welfare check. If you want to live like Scrooge McDuck, you can pay your own medical bills.
If the government stops propping up the gerontocratic equity pyramid-scheme, most seniors will voluntarily move to rural areas where prices are cheaper.
The “deport criminals to El Salvador” option would harm human rights. The “deport criminals to the desert” option would anger Nevadan nationalists. But if we removed the welfare from equity-rich seniors, the exodus of the elderly from cities into rural areas wouldn’t hurt anyone.42
If 23 million seniors liquidate their assets and downsize,43 it would inflate the price of rural land, while deflating the price of urban housing. The net effect on the overall price of housing might be small.
But the “housing crisis” isn’t rural, it’s urban. For young people desperate for jobs, the effect would be massive.
In 2016, 10 million seniors lived in the highest density metro areas.44 By removing welfare for equity-rich seniors, this would cut the price of urban housing by 5%, or $30k.45
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People keep telling me “you don’t edit enough.” Instead of telling me to edit, tell me how to edit. Is the article too long? Too memey? Too stream-of-consciousness? Too all-over-the-place? Lmk.
Protectionists hate free trade; libertarians hate subsidies; and nativists hate “slave labor.”
According to nativists, deporting immigrants would reduce housing demand, crime, welfare spending, pollution, and political polarization. It would restore social trust, trust in institutions, and the fabric of our Judeo-Christian values. It would reverse “the Great Replacement,” and restore the white race to greatness.
If welfare dependence is the problem, why not reduce welfare? If crime is the problem, why focus on immigrants, when native-born blacks have 3x the crime rate of Mexicans? Are immigrants really to blame for polarization around LGBTQ, religion, COVID, social media, AI, outsourcing, automation, de-industrialization, and BLM riots, — none of which have anything to do with immigrants?
From a Christian perspective, America is morally worse than it was in 1965. But economically speaking, this moral decline does not translate. We have been duped into thinking we are worse off, when in fact, life is just as good as it has always been, or even better. This is because doom-and-gloom feeds the algo.
We want to be angry so that we can blame someone and hurt them, whether that is Jewish capitalists and Mexican immigrants.
(where people want to actually work and live — very few commute from the city to the suburb!)
Believe it or not, all housing is housing. For example: building luxury apartments reduces the price of low-quality housing.
An increase in the prison population increases the demand to build more prisons.
…which tracks with average income and cost of living. (2025 dollars)
Assuming the market responds proportionately to a drop in population, home prices to drop from 410k down to 312k. Regarding recidivism, the reduction in crime would open up homes in St. Louis which are currently “locked” — meaning, you can’t live there, because you would get shot.
…and 33% of the black male population. That sounds racist, but it would actually be the best possible thing we could do for law-abiding black Americans, who are tired of being shot, stolen from, and raped by this 33%.
I find the idea of deporting nose-punchers to be much more reasonable than deporting border-jumpers. I see jumping the border as a crime like speeding, underage drinking, or driving without a seatbelt — sure, it’s against the law, but it’s not hurting anyone, and many border-jumpers are hard-working people. Nose-punchers, on the other hand, seem less deserving of tolerance or sympathy, no matter how many sob stories they spin about “socio-economic conditions.”
Math: divide inmates by total population, multiply by cost of housing: (1.9/342)*410. This is a assuming a 1% reduction in population results in a 1% reduction in housing prices.
Of course current homeowners would lose equity, but we’re not concerned about them.
(263 million people)
(92 million). This is assuming home ownership rates for non-criminals are homogenous with the total population, but due to selection effects, this might not be true. In states like West Virginia (which are poor), home ownership is higher than in states like New York (which are rich) partially due to urbanization. I assume it here because I’m weighing for the positive externality of discounting housing prices for non-homeowners.
(1.9 million prisoners deported)
We could also assume that a reduction in the cost of housing would also reduce rents for non-homeowners, but I don’t factor that in here because I am lazy, and it never hurts to steelman my opposition by underrepresenting the benefits of my policies.
Migration of criminals into Nevada might even increase home prices (increased demand), so this $295k would be on top of increased equity, which they could sell for a tasty little profit. Delicious.
There are 58 million Americans over the age of 65; 14% live in poverty; Hence, 7.5 million seniors are dependent on the government.
Among seniors, the bottom quartile (working-poor) have a net worth of between $69k and $125k. That is dramatically higher than the net worth of 30-34 year olds in the same quartile, at $17k. Given that $17k is roughly the price of a car, it’s inconceivable that the bottom 25% of Americans could afford to pay a down payment, while the average senior in the bottom 25% can afford to buy a house in Kansas in pure cash.
I EARNED MY MONEY, he wrote, in all caps. IF YOU WANT MY MONEY YOU CAN PRY IT FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS, he screamed, oldishly.
Violating private property norms would cause massive capital flight. 64 year olds would take their money and move to the Bahamas, and we wouldn’t get any sales tax or property tax from them. It would be a massive loss of GDP to have all the old people flee to Jamaica to evade my Bolshevik wealth confiscation scheme. Overtaxing rich people just causes them to take their money elsewhere, and then you don’t get to tax any of it.
If you are retired and rich, and you want to live in a city, more power to you. But rich people do not deserve welfare. I am not calling for the confiscation of assets, but a removal of benefits.
Seniors do not need to be proximate to the job market (because they are retired).
(this is predictably uniform and scripted)
For the state to exist and to function, we have to pay taxes. Taxes are not voluntary; they are not the result of an “agreement” or a “social contract.” It is money that the government takes to fund its existence. Good governments take less; bad governments take more; but there’s no promise of “return.” The “return” is the fact that I am not organizing Zoomer death squads to forcibly remove Boomers from their McMansions — because that is illegal.
Taxpayers do not “input taxes and output benefits.” That’s not how this works.
This is: 1. a morally bankrupt political theology; and 2. never how any government in the history of the world has ever worked.
Governments exist because they outcompete anarchies. City-states outcompete tribal governments; nation-states outcompete city-states; empires outcompete nation-states. They don’t achieve this by becoming more “efficient” but by marshalling more resources into a collective pool. The bigger the pool, the bigger the army, and Darwinism acts upon the state. Complaining about this is like complaining about the lion eating the gazelle.
You might not like what I am saying because you wish to live in a hunter-gatherer tribe of African Bushmen, blissfully unaware of the world around you, unable to count past the number three. You long for the “state of nature” like an anarcho-primitivist. I am sympathetic to this romantic ideal, but if we lived in such a society, I would simply bash the tribal elders in the head and take their stuff, and there’s not much you could do about it. “The natural way of life” is the rule of the young and strong over the old and weak.
Since such brutal primitivism is uncouth, we have states, which enforce a monopoly on violence and allow the elderly to swim in pools of gold, while the young look upon them with jealousy.
It has no fiduciary responsibility to its citizens to make good its promise to make positive returns.
The fact that the government calls some taxes “payroll” and others “income” is meaningless. The government could break down taxes further, adding a payroll section for “Defense” and another for “Policing” and another for “Education” and so on. If we held all these taxes against the standard of “a promised return on investment,” they would all come up short.
Rich people are entitled to nothing — that’s just how taxes work, sorry.
The duty of the state is to endure. If we sacrifice our future on the altar of the elderly, we will be the last generation to do so.
Social Security is not a private retirement account. Bush tried to create a private retirement account system, and AARP destroyed his plan.
It would cause a boost in rural healthcare jobs, which would be a god-send for poor, uneducated nurses who would prefer to live in areas with a low cost of living.
It would not reduce the cost of housing as drastically as in the El Salvador or Nevada plan. In those plans, we were physically forcing people to go from one place to another. The results would be much more dispersed around the country.
The Harvard study here didn’t define precisely what they meant by “high density metro area,” but I assume they are talking about ~100 million people.
(that would open up 5 million new homes in areas with the highest job availability.)
given median values of $600k
I just want to say this is obviously correct and if all leftists thought like you, I’d be a leftist
San Francisco is proposing a new “parcel tax” (I guess calling it a parcel tax instead of just increasing property taxes gets around Prop 13 somehow?) to fund our transit system.
The tax as currently proposed charges a much higher tax per square foot on multi-family residential than on single-family, and has an exemption for home-owners over 65. It’s so insanely poorly designed.