by Steve Warren
The American dream of homeownership has slipped from the grasp of millions of working families, not because of some inevitable market force, but through decades of government overreach that strangled supply while inflating costs. A new White House report from the Council of Economic Advisers quantifies the crisis starkly: the United States faces a shortage of roughly 10 million homes, a deficit that traces directly to the collapse in construction following the 2008 financial crisis and the regulatory thicket that has since made building prohibitively expensive.
This shortfall did not emerge overnight. Homebuilding and the growth of single-family housing stock plunged after the housing market meltdown fueled by risky lending practices, and never fully recovered. Since 2000, home prices have surged 82 percent while median incomes rose just 12 percent.
Low mortgage rates once papered over the mismatch, but post-pandemic inflation and rising rates exposed the raw reality: for young families and first-time buyers, the door to stability through property ownership has slammed shut.