In our online culture, we’ve got lots of fights. Men vs. women, race debates, and some of our favorite fights are generational. Boomer versus Millennial. Boomer versus Zoomer. Sometimes there’s real discourse buried in there.

The reality is every generation feels angst about the folks coming up behind them, and most generations feel judged and their concerns dismissed by their parents. Going all the way back to World War I, generations judged the fitness of the young men who would go off to fight World War II.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Yes, the demographics on many issues, especially housing reform — check out the quotes there — are polarized by generation.

Young people feel trapped in a system they were born into, one that looks nothing like the American Dream they were promised. That’s real. And it’s nearly invisible in a politics run by people in their sixties and seventies—even eighties.

But the way we build housing and grow our communities doesn’t actually serve anyone well. It’s static. It answers to political pull and graft — who you know, who lobbied, who got the variance — not to what families need or what a builder can dream up.

And some of the most invisible victims of our building and tax codes are older people. Especially single boomers. They got in when the getting was good, sure, but the same system that let them in has locked them in.

Here’s the part the fight keeps you from seeing: the big house grandma can’t get out of is the exact house your family can’t get into. She’s not hoarding it. She’s trapped in it. And the day she’s free to move is the day it comes up for sale — for you. Her exit is your entrance.

This was never young against old. It’s all of us against a system that bolted the doors shut.

Let me explain.

You know her

Maybe she’s your grandmother. Maybe she’s your mom. She’s in her seventies, in the house where she raised you — or raised your dad. Three bedrooms. Four, if you count the one that’s been a sewing room since 2013. The kids are grown and gone. The stairs are getting harder every year. The yard is more than she can mow, and most summers a neighbor’s kid does it for her.

Ask her, and she’ll tell you she’d love something smaller. A one-story place. A little cottage. A townhouse near the grandkids. Three out of four Americans over fifty say they want to stay in the home they built their life in as they age—and most who expect to move say cost is what keeps them from changing homes.

She is not the villain of this story. She is not hoarding anything. She is stuck. And the same walls that trap her are the barriers between you and your first house.

The mismatch

This might not apply to you specifically, dear reader, but it is a social problem when we zoom out to the big picture. Redfin ran the Census numbers this spring, and the result is stark: empty-nest baby boomers — households of one or two adults, no kids at home — own 28% of every three-bedroom-plus home in America. Young families with kids own 16%. Barely more than half as much. And it’s way worse in our largest metro areas where the jobs are.

Those same empty-nesters owned 27.7% of the big homes a decade ago. Today they own 27.8%. Their share didn’t move; why?

A Redfin agent in Philadelphia put it plainly: the empty nesters want to downsize but can’t find a small, move-in-ready place in their price range, so they stay — which means younger families can’t find the bigger house they need. Old and young, frozen in the same jam, wanting to trade places but neither can.

So how did we build a country where seniors can’t move out of a house that’s too big for them, and a whole generation behind them can’t move in?

The mortgage

When a homeowner locks in a low rate, the odds they’ll ever sell drop 18% for every point the market rate rises above it. That’s the FHFA’s own finding — the federal government’s housing agency, measuring the thing the federal government’s own policy created. They call it lock-in, and it froze the resale market solid. The agency estimates between 1.3 and 1.7 million home sales simply never happened as rates climbed.

More than half of all mortgages in America are still under 4%. Today, the going rate is about 6.7%. So even the owner who’d love to move does the math, sees a monthly payment that doubles for a smaller house, and stays put.

Grandma might not even carry a mortgage — nearly six in ten boomers own their homes free and clear. She’s not stuck for money. She’s stuck for options. The freeze is why nothing small is available for her to move into. The market has no open doors, because policy taught a whole country not to open one.

I’m not necessarily arguing for lower interest rates right now; that might have worse inflation tradeoffs for everyone, but I am observing that the government sets these rates through the Federal Reserve; this is the result of public policy.

The tax

In about a dozen states, the day you buy a house, the government caps how fast your property tax can climb — as long as you don’t move. Stay forty years, and you’re taxed on a fraction of what the house is worth. Move, and the number resets to today’s value.

Good for people who don’t move, terrible for folks who need to.

In Miami, a family that bought a median home in 2023 owes nearly three times the property tax of the neighbor in the identical house who’s owned for it twelve years. So the tax code hands your grandmother a bill for the privilege of downsizing — the smaller place can carry the bigger tax. Economists have measured the effect: assessment caps add years to how long people stay put. We built a tax that punishes her for moving, and then we wonder why she doesn’t.

The capital gains

When you sell your home for more than you paid, the first slice of profit comes out tax-free — $250,000 if you’re single, $500,000 if you’re married. Sounds generous. Except those two numbers were written into law in 1997 and never touched since, while home values have climbed more than 260%.

A widow — single filer, so half the exclusion — who’s owned a house in a neighborhood that appreciated for thirty years can blow right past her cap without owning anything anyone would call fancy. And the government takes its cut of everything above the line. Unless she does the one thing the code rewards: never sell. Die in the house, and her heirs inherit it with the entire lifetime of gain erased — no tax at all.

Milton Friedman once said something very true: we are a family society as much as we are an individualist society. Of course. But our tax laws and proposals often miss that fact: leaving your children with $440,000 in assets vs $110,000 is a tremendous incentive not to move.

The illegal cottage

Say she beats all three hurdles to moving. Say the rate doesn’t scare her, the tax reset doesn’t sting, and the profit clears the cap. She still slams into the last wall — the one this whole movement is about: There just isn’t enough small houses.

The small home she wants to move into is illegal; the law won’t allow her to build in the neighborhood she wants to stay in. The little cottage in her daughter’s backyard. The granny flat over the garage. The townhouse down the block. In most of America, zoning codes forbid all of it — single-family-only lots, minimum lot sizes, parking mandates piled on top. Only 18 states broadly allow the backyard cottage — the ADU by right. Everywhere else, the permission bureaucracy stands in the way.

Think about what that means.

1. She wants less house.

2. The market wants to give her less house.

3. A builder would happily build her less house.

4. And the government stands in the doorway and says no.

Her exit is your entrance

You know these people too. They’re in their thirties or early forties. They have one kid and they want the space for a second. A third bedroom. A yard. A place where the grandparents can visit without sleeping on an air mattress. They are not “delayed adults.” They are the adults trying to do exactly what previous generations did: form a family and put down roots.

The houses that would let them do it are already occupied.

Empty-nest baby boomers own 28% of every three-bedroom-or-larger home in America. Millennials with children own only 16%. That gap exists in every major metro in the country. The people who need the space don’t have it. The people who no longer need it can’t leave it.

This was never a competition between generations. It is a traffic jam.

When the rules, the tax code, and the lack of smaller homes keep the grandmother frozen in the house that is now too big for her, that house never comes on the market. The young family that would move into it stays stuck in a place that is already too small. The next family that would have taken their smaller place never gets a turn either. One locked door holds an entire chain of households in place.

Her exit is their entrance.

Government: the hidden villain

Your grandmother didn’t do this to you. She bought a house under a set of rules and lived a whole life inside them — same as you’re trying to do right now. She didn’t write the lock-in effect. She didn’t pass the assessment cap. She didn’t set the 1997 exclusion or draw the zoning map back in 1957. She’s obeying the same map you are. She’s just trapped on a different square of it.

The boomer isn’t the villain. The government is.

Which is the good news hiding inside the grim one. Someone wrote every one of those policies. Which means someone can repeal every one of them. This is man-made scarcity. Men can unmake it.

And in places, they already are. California — of all places — passed portability in 2020, so a senior can carry her low tax base to the new home, and the reset penalty disappears. Arkansas made the backyard cottage legal by right. A bill is sitting in Congress right now, with cosponsors from both parties, to double that 1997 exclusion and finally tie it to inflation. None of this is exotic new ideas.

Free the grandmother, and you free the grandson. Legalize the small home, and she has somewhere to go — and the big one opens up for your growing family at a price you can afford. Fix the tax so moving doesn’t cost her, and the frozen market starts to thaw for everyone standing outside it. There is no version of this where she wins, and you lose, or you win, and she loses. You were always on the same side. The system just needed you fighting each other, so you’d never look up and notice the government who created the conflict.

Come home

So the next time the generational food fight kicks off online — boomer versus zoomer, who had it easy, whose fault it all is — remember the grandmother in the house that’s too big. She didn’t trap you. She’s trapped too. And the day we tear down the permission structure that is preventing her from realizing a new dream for her life is the day a whole generation finally gets to come home.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.

Let’s rebuild the American Dream together.

Firefighters pulled dozens down the ladders and dragged people through the stairwells. They saved almost everyone. Five people didn’t make it out.

The fire chief said the whole thing in one sentence. If that building had sprinklers, they’d have put the entire fire out with fifteen gallons of water.

Fifteen gallons.

So you’d think the people who run your town would be racing to tear down the old firetraps and put up new ones. That would be the logical thing. It would also be the humane thing.

Instead, in your town tonight, safety is the exact word being used to make sure the new building never goes up, and to protect the old one that’s still standing.

The number that ends the argument

The con depends on one assumption: that new buildings aren’t really that different from old ones.

The Pew Charitable Trusts looked at every reported residential fire death in the country. Not a sample. Every one.

America still loses close to 3,000 people a year to residential fires. They die overwhelmingly in old buildings.

Homes built before 1970 have a fire death rate of about 8.5 per million for multifamily, closer to 9 for single-family. Apartments built since 2010 have a fire death rate of 0.5 per million.

That’s seventeen to eighteen times safer.

Imagine if regulators didn’t know there was a difference in crash test results between a Model T and a 2026 F-150. That’s roughly where we are on housing. A complete transformation in technology and design that the people writing the rules haven’t acknowledged.

What actually changed

It wasn’t one gadget. It was everything at once.

Better wiring instead of wiring from the Nixon administration. Better HVAC. Smoke detectors built into the walls from day one. Materials that fight a fire instead of feeding it. Sprinklers, in the buildings that have them.

And most new single-family homes don’t have sprinklers at all, yet fire deaths in homes built after 1970 are close to zero. So the sprinkler was never doing all the work by itself.

Apartments do better still, because codes already treat them differently. Concrete stairs instead of wood. Fire-rated walls that hold a fire for at least an hour. Self-closing doors, so when someone flees a burning unit and forgets to shut the door behind them, the door shuts itself.

Newer is just safer. That’s the whole maxim.

There is no such thing as perfect safety

Every single time somebody proposes letting people build more, the people who run the city stand up and say no. And the reason they give, more often than not, is safety.

They’re counting on you not to look too closely at that word.

There is no such thing as perfect safety. There never has been, for anything. Everything you own is a trade-off between how safe it is and what it costs. Your car could be built like a tank. You’d never afford to drive it off the lot. Your house could be a windowless concrete bunker. Most people wouldn’t want to live in one.

You make these trade-offs every day, quietly and sensibly, and you’re right to.

So when a zoning board looks you in the eye and says it can’t allow a different way to build a home because of safety, understand what just happened. They didn’t protect you from anything. They pretended there was an option on the menu that read perfectly safe and costs you nothing.

There is no such option. There never was.

The housing they’re keeping off the menu

Pew has been researching single stair construction with the Center for Building in North America. One stairway instead of two, in small apartment buildings up to about six stories, four units per floor. Little buildings. Sixteen to twenty-four units.

These were common once, especially on main streets and near businesses. They made up a serious share of the rental housing stock. Production has fallen off a cliff.

And they are, by the data, about the safest housing you can build. Sprinklers. Self-closing doors. Fire-rated walls. Connected smoke detectors. A non-combustible concrete stairway. Only six stories, so there’s no massive occupant load moving down the stairs. Only four units per floor, typically all within twenty feet of that stairway, so evacuation is fast. Built in metros with water and sewer, which means fast fire response too.

That is the kind of housing getting blocked on fire safety grounds.

The part that should bother you

By not building, we are making things less safe.

The median age of American housing used to be around 30 to 35 years. It’s now about 45. We’re adding less than one percent to the housing stock annually. We should be adding two to three million homes a year given the size of the deficit. We’re on track for roughly 1.2 million in 2026.

Older buildings burn more. So every year we block new construction, the housing stock gets older and more dangerous. Safetyism is producing the exact outcome it claims to prevent.

The same room, the same night

Picture this, because it’s real and it’s happening in a municipal building near you, probably this month.

There’s a hundred-year-old structure. Wiring from another century. An old staircase that turns into a chimney the second it catches. The city will fight you in court to keep that building standing.

And that same night, in that same room, possibly at that same meeting, they’ll deny the permit for the newer, safer building that would have gone up next door. Because it has one staircase instead of two.

They are using safety to kill the safe thing, and using history to protect the thing that kills people. Same room, same night, same mouths.

If you described this system to an alien, they’d conclude the government was trying to kill us.

What we should actually do

The answer isn’t forcing a sprinkler into every old house in America.

The answer is to stop blocking the new ones.

Let people build. Let them build smart, with every bit of innovation and hard data available, safety included. Let them build the missing middle, the townhouse, the duplex, the little apartment building with one staircase, because that’s what actually fits the lot.

Every one of those is a home a family can afford. And every one is far less likely to kill them.

More homes and safer homes were a trade-off we never had to make. They’re the same thing.

They told you that you had to choose. That is the con.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked. The people blocking it got smart, and they learned to dress the whole thing up and sell it back to you as protection.

It isn’t protection.

I’m David Rand from the Land Liberty Movement. This is Build the Dream. Let’s rebuild the American Dream together.

Tonight I’ll do an exclusive livestream to share my thoughts on how we can solve the housing crisis using values from the ancient world. I’m a little late in analyzing The Odyssey, but I think it’s key to understanding the West, where our values come from, and how they can map a better future.

Please block out some time to make it; it’s only available live, and I don’t repost them. When I’m done, I do an Ask Me Anything too, so drop in, and we can talk about your housing story as well.

See you then!

We talk a lot here about breaking down the permission structure, restoring property rights, and unblocking the American Dream. But at the end of the day, ideas don’t build a movement—the people in it do.

You guys are an incredible, dedicated bunch, and because you’re the core of what we’re doing here at Build the Dream, I want to pull everyone together for an exclusive live session.

Save the Date: Substack-Only Live Stream

• When: Tuesday, September 1st at 6:00 PM MT / 8:00 PM ET

• Where: Right on Substack

• What: An exclusive live conversation with David Rand. We’ll talk about where property rights come from and how understanding their deep origins in the Odyssey will help us bring them back.

Let’s keep building,

David Rand

You know the apartment. Long dark hallway. Unit on one side only. Windows on a single wall. No cross-breeze. The kitchen and the bedroom share the same thin strip of light.

That shape is not an accident of the market. It is not what builders prefer when they have a choice. It is what the code requires.

In most American cities, any apartment building over three stories is legally required to have two separate staircases connected by a long central corridor. That single rule quietly decides the shape of the housing most people rent.

The rule almost nobody has heard of

Building codes call it a second means of egress. In plain language: two ways out.

The requirement forces what architects call a double-loaded corridor. Units line both sides of a long hallway. Each unit gets windows on only one face of the building. Light and air come from a single direction. The hallway itself and the second stair consume floor area that could have been living space.

Stairs and corridors routinely eat about seven percent of every floor. A second staircase alone can add one hundred ninety thousand to three hundred eighty thousand dollars in construction cost—sometimes more, depending on the site.

Those numbers do not stay abstract. They show up in the rent. They show up in the decision not to build on a narrow city lot that already has water and sewer. They show up in a national apartment stock that skews heavily toward studios and one-bedrooms because family-sized units become harder to pencil under the same constraints.

What the rule quietly outlawed

Paris still builds the other way. So does Vienna. So does Tokyo. A single stair, apartments clustered around a compact core, windows on more than one side, natural cross-ventilation. The buildings are efficient. They fit on the small, already-serviced lots that make up so much of an American city.

In most of the United States those buildings are illegal above three stories.

The result is visible if you know where to look. Narrow urban lots sit empty for decades because the only legal building form is too large and too expensive for the parcel. Mid-rise housing that could fill the gap between single-family houses and high-rises never gets built. The housing that does get built is the long-hallway version you already know.

This is man-made scarcity written into the code. Not a conspiracy. Just a rule that outlived the conditions that produced it.

The safety case, examined honestly

The rule exists because of fires. Early twentieth-century American cities saw catastrophic losses in wood-frame tenements with limited exits. The second stair was a rational response to that technology and those materials.

Modern construction is different. Sprinklers. Fire-rated assemblies. Smoke detectors. Limited floor plates. The conditions that made the two-stair mandate necessary a century ago are not the conditions of a new mid-rise apartment building today.

New York City has allowed single-stair buildings up to six stories for decades, under strict limits on floor area and units per floor. Seattle has allowed them since 1977. Honolulu followed.

A 2025 analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Center for Building in North America examined the record. New York has roughly 4,440 modern four-to-six-story single-stair buildings. Over twelve years the fire death rate in those buildings matched the rate in other residential buildings in the city. Three deaths occurred. None were attributable to the absence of a second stair. Seattle’s smaller stock showed the same pattern—one death in the same span, again unrelated to egress design.

Countries that allow single-stair mid-rises as a matter of course—Canada, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands—maintain lower overall residential fire death rates than the United States.

The historical fires were real. The modern safety case for keeping the blanket two-stair rule on every small mid-rise is not.

States are starting to notice

In the last two years a wave of states has begun to change the code. Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, Texas, Oregon, Tennessee, Washington, Michigan, and others have either legalized single-stair buildings up to five or six stories or directed their code bodies to do so.

My home state of Montana is among them. The reform is modest and conditional—height limits, unit limits, modern fire-safety systems. It is also concrete. It restores a building type that was never inherently unsafe and that fits the narrow lots and mid-rise scale American cities actually need.

This is what progress looks like when it is not dressed up as a new program. Delete a constraint that no longer matches the evidence. Let builders respond to what people need.

The permission system, one rule at a time

The second-stair requirement is not the only rule that shapes your housing. It is one of the quieter ones. Most people never hear its name. They just live inside the floor plan it produces.

That is how the permission system works. It rarely announces itself as a ban on the American Dream. It arrives as a technical requirement, a safety standard, a design standard, a lot-size minimum, a parking mandate. Each one is defensible in isolation. Together they decide that the apartment you can actually rent will be darker, narrower, more expensive, and farther from the life you were trying to build.

You do not need a conspiracy theory to explain the outcome. You only need to notice the rules.

What changes when the rule changes

When states restore the single-stair option for small mid-rises, three things become possible again.

• Narrow lots that already have infrastructure can finally be used.

• Units can have light and air on more than one side.

• The cost of the second stair and the wasted corridor space stops being baked into every rent check.

None of that requires a new subsidy. It requires the code to stop prohibiting a building type that already works in New York, Seattle, Paris, and Tokyo.

The apartment you already know did not have to be designed this way. The code made it so. Codes can be rewritten.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.

I’m David Rand from the Land Liberty Movement. This is Build the Dream. Let’s rebuild the American Dream together.

Since that law took effect, Dallas has new projects. Fort Worth has new projects. Arlington, Plano, and McKinney are moving. Grand Prairie has built zero units. Not one.

That is not an accident. It is the point.

What this actually costs

You are not asking for a subsidy. You are not asking the government to hand you a house. You want a stable place to live—something you can plan a life around without spending every dollar just to keep the rain off.

When cities invent new barriers after the state removes the old ones, the cost does not land on the planning department. It lands on renters, on young families, on the forty-year-old making the most money he has ever made who still cannot buy the house his parents bought on one income.

One-third of Gen Z still lives with their parents into their late twenties. First-time buyers keep getting older. Rents keep rising faster than paychecks. That is the downstream cost of treating housing as a privilege the city gets to ration.

What Texas actually fixed

Last year Texas took a real piece of zoning power away from city hall and handed it back to the people who own the land.

Senate Bill 15 stopped big cities from forcing every new home onto an enormous lot. Five, six, seven thousand square feet of dirt under every single house—whether anyone wanted it or not—was just another way of saying starter homes are illegal.

Senate Bill 840 went further. Own a dying strip mall, an empty office park, or a warehouse nobody has touched? You can redevelop it for housing under clear limits. No rezoning. No hearing. No eighteen months of begging a planning commission while the loan clock runs.

Most housing reforms make permission easier to get. This one deleted the permission step. A key distinction to remember.

The numbers so far

Since September, SB 840 has put more than 8,400 apartments in motion—roughly one out of every five multifamily units permitted statewide.

Apartment permits fell across Texas in the areas the law does not cover. They rose in the nineteen cities it does.

Another 2,800 homes are moving forward under the lot-size reform in places like Dallas, Plano, and El Paso.

That is what happens when property owners are allowed to respond to demand without asking first.

How cities answered

The cities lost some power. They did not surrender. They got creative.

A few examples:

• Irving decided any apartment built under the new law must be eight stories. Most buildings that actually pencil in that market are three or four. Then came the amenity menu: gym, dog park, remote-work space, and a mandatory choice between a yoga room, a bike station, or a place to wash your dog.

• Arlington raised height minimums on major corridors, expanded amenity requirements, and required EV chargers on fifteen percent of parking spots.

• Frisco used the cleanest workaround. The law does not reach districts that allow heavy industry. So Frisco wrote heavy industry into every commercial district—copying the definition straight from the bill. Now those corridors are “industrial” on paper, and the housing law does not apply.

Will Frisco ever approve a smelter next to the Whole Foods? Never. Council votes on every project. The answer is always no. The industrial designation exists for one reason: to make apartments illegal again.

• Grand Prairie required the Olympic-sized pool. When pressed at the Capitol as to whether someone could build a smaller one they said or no pool at all, the mayor pro tem called it a “reasonable variance”—an easy one the council would probably grant. The state had just removed the need for special permission. The city built a new permission process on top of the old one so they had a reason to say no to new development.

This is what protecting power looks like. The permission system does not disappear when a state law deletes one step. It invents the next step.

“Not just the number of rooftops”

At the hearing, Grand Prairie’s mayor pro tem put the philosophy in plain language: growth should be measured by the quality of life it creates, “not just the number of rooftops.”

Rooftops. He means houses. Homes people can actually live in. He says the word the way you’d say throughput—like a roof is a unit of production instead of the place a family sleeps.

In this usage, quality of life means whatever the city decides you need. A pool. A dog wash. A yoga room. The city pays for none of it. All of it lands on your rent.

You want to know why people are getting more populist and more resentful of the institutions that claim to serve them? Moments like this. Abstracting people’s core need for shelter into a question of rooftops and “quality of life” as if someone who only has $250 after rent has a quality of life he need not be concerned about.

The man who would not name the city

At the same hearing, a homebuilder told the committee that cities are defying the new state law. Then he refused to say which ones. On the record. For his own protection.

He has to go back Monday and pull permits from those same people.

That is what “local control” often means in practice— the power to hold hostage a man who just wants to build homes while the city flouts the law the state just passed.

Local control is not the same as property rights

I believe in local control. I’m from Montana. Give me a county commissioner over a federal agency every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

But we are not talking about the balance of powers between levels of government. We are talking about property rights.

But if you want to talk about local control, let’s: the smallest unit of government in America is a man and a woman deciding what to do with the ground they own and the family they are raising on it. Everything above that is borrowed. A city gets its authority from the state. The state gets its powers from the people.

Authority flows up out of the household. It does not rain down from a mayor pro tem.

When a council overrides the property owner, the larger unit of government is overruling the smallest one and calling it “local.”

A better answer than endless lawsuits

Texas anticipated some of this. Both laws let a property owner sue a city that will not comply—and when the owner wins, the city pays the lawyers. That is a real legal weapon. Almost no one has used it yet.

But the current approach is a trap. You pass a bill. A city guts it. You sue. You win. You pass another bill. They invent the next obstacle. Forever. One ordinance at a time. A thousand cuts, and you have to bandage every single one. The creativity of localities that want to keep their power is limited only by their imagination.

There is a better answer. It is called the Private Property Restoration Act.

It does one thing. It says your property rights should be treated the way your free speech rights are.

Right now, if a city wants to restrict what you say, the government walks into court carrying the burden. It has to prove the restriction is necessary and narrowly tailored. If it cannot, it loses.

If a city wants to restrict what you build, you carry the burden. The city wins if a judge can imagine any halfway rational reason for the rule. Traffic. Neighborhood character. Quality of life. Not enough pool. Whatever.

The Private Property Restoration Act flips that. Same standard as the First Amendment. The city justifies itself, or the rule dies.

Run the Olympic-sized pool through that test and it does not survive the afternoon. Neither does the eight-story minimum, the mandatory dog-washing station, or the fake heavy-industrial zone written solely to block apartments.

A thousand cuts, answered with a thousand lawsuits—and the city paying for the privilege of losing them. That is a fight you can actually win.

The model bill is sitting on a shelf right now, waiting for states to pick it up. The more people who know it exists, the harder it gets to ignore.

Send this to someone

Send it to someone in Texas. Send it to someone in your own state who is about to watch the same pattern play out.

The people blocking your house are already in the rooms where the rules get written. They never miss a meeting.

Somebody has to show up on the other side.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.

We can unblock it

Even back then, she knew it didn’t have to be that way.

After college, she moved to Florence, Italy as an au pair. She lived with a family in a building that had stood since the 1500s. They lived in a ground-floor unit with twelve other households above them, but it wasn’t as compact as it seemed. Out the front door: a bustling street full of restaurants and life. Out the back door: a quiet, private courtyard garden.

The setup was dense but beautiful. Nothing like what Americans experience.

Alicia loved the design but didn’t see the true value in it until later in life, when she herself had children who wanted to run and play outside. Her friends were leaving the Chicago neighborhood she loved in search of yards and safe spaces for their children to play. There were no alternatives that didn’t involve leaving the city entirely.

So Alicia started asking a question nobody else seemed to be asking, only to find that the courtyard setup she loved so much about European cities is almost entirely illegal to build in America today.

One thing that stuck with me: we spent a lot of time talking to people about their housing stories. Older folks kept telling us the same thing — their kids and grandkids are still living at home well into their late twenties. When we talked to Gen Z directly, the ones who weren’t still in college were often living with their parents too. A lot of them wouldn’t say it on camera. They were embarrassed. And that’s a shame, because it’s not their fault.

I get the embarrassment. We still act like a young adult should be out on their own by now. That expectation was built on a reality that no longer exists. And they feel like they’re the only ones. They’re not. Twenty-five million American adults under thirty-five are living with their parents right now. That’s a record. That means one in three.

Realtor.com just ran the numbers. You can already hear the takes forming online. They’re lazy. They’re entitled. They spent it all on DoorDash — looking at you, Kevin O’Leary.

Here’s the problem with that story. Seventy percent of 25- to 34-year-olds living at home have jobs. That number hasn’t moved in twenty-five years. These people are working. Plenty of them are helping cover their parents’ groceries. These aren’t ex-cons or party kids. These are regular young people who did what they were told — go to school, get the job, save your money. Then they went looking for a place to rent, saw the prices, and made the only rational call left: staying home made more sense.

This didn’t happen by accident or by weather. Politicians wrote its death note into law, one ordinance at a time. Not greedy developers. Not bad landlords. Not corporations buying up all the homes. Yes, those are all real issues, but it was our government that killed the on-ramp to independence.

Let me explain how.

Young people who finally move out of their parents’ house or a college dorm usually start by renting. In big cities that often means big apartment complexes. But in mid-sized and smaller cities, a different kind of housing used to matter more. It’s called middle housing — duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, small townhome courts. These buildings look like regular houses from the street but hold two, three, or four separate homes inside. They’re the scale that works in real towns. Big enough to add supply, small enough that local builders can still finance them — and actually find people who can afford to live there.

For a young person with a steady job, this is often the first realistic step out of their parents’ basement. Housing you can actually afford without needing five roommates or moving to a bigger city.

At least that’s the role it used to play in our society. Because they are largely gone today, the first person to really notice and coin the term “the missing middle” was a guy named Daniel Parolek, an architect and urban designer.

One of his stories really helps demonstrate the challenge of developing middle housing.

About twenty years ago, Dan Parolek was working on a master plan for Isla Vista, just outside Santa Barbara, California.

The local advisory group told him they didn’t want any new housing with more than 18 units per acre. Strange right? Why 18? Not 19? Not 20? Where does this number even come from?

So to persuade them he took them on a walking tour of nearby neighborhoods. At one point, they stopped in front of a beautiful two-story courtyard building. Everyone loved it. They said, “This is the kind of housing we’d actually support.”

Later, Parolek went back and did the math. That building they all loved? It was 52 units per acre — nearly three times what they had said was their limit.

This story shows how the permission system actually works. People say they want housing — the right kind, the kind that fits the neighborhood. But their mental picture of what “too much” looks like, has nothing to do with reality on the ground. A building they instinctively liked turned out to be three times what they claimed was too dense. A small group with veto power gets to decide what “neighborhood character” means — and they often get it wrong.

Really, opposition to more density is the lipstick on the pig that is other biases, some of them just aesthetic. What the local advisory group likely had in mind when they thought of destiny was a government project, or a giant steel building. Middle housing just makes sense for many communities that could benefit from other kinds of housing development that’s neither those things nor single-family. But crucially, it could help younger generations get out of their parents’ basement, shed their embarrassment, and gain the confidence that independence brings.

So if middle housing provides housing more efficiently than other kinds, and it’s more affordable, then why did it go missing?

You guessed it. The honest reality is that zoning codes prohibit it in most places. We’ve made anything but single-family houses on large lots illegal in huge swaths of the country.

These are really small multifamily buildings that look and feel closer to single-family homes than apartments. What Parolek and others call “gentle density” as opposed to skyscrapers full of apartments.

The opponents, like the folks on that walking tour, banned middle housing in the name of “neighborhood character.”

But what it actually did was erase the stepping stones between your parents’ house and full adulthood. Today, in most suburbs and many cities, if you’re not ready to buy a whole detached house, there’s almost nowhere legal to go that doesn’t cost a fortune.

Twenty-five million young adults did their part. They worked. They saved. They believed the deal America offered them: effort in, a life of your own out, with all of the freedom that implies. Then a permission system quietly repealed the deal, one zoning ordinance at a time.

But every one of those rules was written by somebody. Which means every one of them can be repealed by somebody. That’s the good news hiding in the grim headline. This is man-made scarcity. Men can unmake it.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.

I’m David Rand from the Land Liberty Movement. This is Build the Dream. Let’s rebuild the American Dream together.

I appeared on Rebecca Davis’ podcast, Not Your Enemy, where she challenged me to explain the American Dream given that she does not desire to own a home or have children. We talked about fatherhood, our values and birthright as Americans, the millennial experience, and so many other topics. She was charming and had really smart, interesting questions. This was my first time rolling out our approach to a more centrist-to-center-left audience, and it was interesting; I think I convinced her?

You tell me.

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As a bonus, you get to see my Donald Trump impression. Please give it a watch. They were great hosts.

He grew up on Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck in the car, Ben Shapiro destroying college kids on YouTube, and Louder with Crowder skits. For decades, the conservative movement told him that America had drifted from the principles that once made the good life possible. He believed them. He still does.

But something doesn’t add up.

When Joe tries to do the most ordinary thing a man can do — find a modest place to live near work, near family, for something less than half his paycheck — there’s no slot in his political worldview for why it’s impossible. Nobody told him that housing is the cleanest example of the big government that his movement hates.

The voices he grew up on talked about taxes. They talked about federal overreach. When they talked about housing at all, they talked about it like weather — something that just happens. Or rather as something that would sort itself out once the broader economy got healthy. They almost never told Joe that a board of appointed strangers in his own town decides what can be built on a given acre of land, and therefore what he is allowed to afford.

My point is that I listened to him for years before the podcast got big, and I don’t think Glenn Beck ever said “land use regulations” when talking about the Marxisifcation of America.

That silence was convenient for conservative inc. It just wasn’t convenient for Joe.

The reason I suspect this is that single-family zoning has long been seen as a political third rail of the people who traditionally listen to those voices on cable news, and somehow, despite having a younger audience, it has never made it into the mainstream of online conservative inc.

For cable news and radio, telling middle-class homeowners that the rules protecting their property values were quietly pricing out their own kids — that’s a hard thing to read into a microphone. So the movement reached for fights that felt cleaner. It explained the radicalization of the young as Marxist indoctrination in the universities, in Hollywood, and in the press. All real. All worth fighting for sure. But it almost never connected radicalization to the plain fact that those same young people can’t afford rent even if they are hard working.

Call it audience capture. The Fox News audience liked this form of progressivism. So this form got a pass.

I know this because I was Joe. I suspect a lot of you were, too.

For good reasons, we spent thirty years terrified of a bureaucrat standing between you and your doctor. We fought Hillarycare in the nineties and Obamacare in 2010. We warned about death panels, about faceless boards rationing care, about experts in an office deciding what you were allowed to have. We were right to fight it. A committee should never stand between a man and the care he needs.

A committee has been standing between Joe and a home his entire life. Making it artificially scarce by law — and now the bill is due. And hardly anybody on our side said a word.

That is the asymmetry. We taught a generation to oppose government-run healthcare and government-owned housing. We taught them to hate rent control, correctly. But minimum lot sizes? Setback rules? The discretionary veto of a local planning board? We acted like those weren’t even part of the same family of ideas. They are. They are the purest version of it — a panel of experts substituting its judgment for yours, on land you own, in the most personal decision you will ever make.

That has been the battle since the progressives won in the counter-revolution of the managers between the 1910s-30’s. Over that era of ideological groupthink, everything became a “freedom” such as in FDRs 4 freedoms, or they became “human right”. An abuse of both terms, but you know what I’m talking about. They went after every critical domain of human survival to better plan it with experts and we’ve been fighting them off from every angle.

In Food. Progressives tried their regime and had early political success, but it failed so spectacularly it was abolished. In the New Deal’s farm program paid farmers to grow less, and where they wouldn’t, it plowed crops under and slaughtered millions of hogs to drive prices up. County committees decided how much you were allowed to plant. They called it, “adjustment”. It was artificial scarcity, engineered on purpose, while people stood in bread lines, which is one of the many reasons FDR made the depression worse, despite what many history books say. And in 1936 the Supreme Court struck the whole scheme down. The planning board over agriculture lasted three years. What came back afterward was a subsidy check, but not a committee with a veto over which crops and how many.

Interestingly, a decade before the Court found the Constitutional backbone to strike the takeover of agriculture by the FDR administration, it had already endorsed one for all land use with buildings— and walked away whistling. In 1926, Euclid versus Ambler. A village zoned a company’s property into near-worthlessness. The company sued. And the same Court would codify the right to overrule the landowner nearly everywhere if it didn’t meet the experts plans.

In Water it’s a more positive story, the states largely held the line. They fought federal control over who owns water and who gets it, and they mostly kept it — right up through the fight over Obama’s Waters of the United States rule, when Washington tried to stretch its reach into the puddles on a man’s own property and got beaten back. The core argument against it was that it violated our ancient customs regarding property and water rights and would likely have terrible effects.

With healthcare, they got furthest, maybe short of housing. We let in third-party payment and a wall of regulation that drove costs up and competition down. Certificate-of-need laws in many states still empower a state board to tell a doctor he may not open a clinic, add a hospital bed or buy a machine because a competitor might be inconvenienced. That is a board between you and your care, and it is real. But even there — even there — we’ve been at least fighting it.

In the end, land use has been the most complete takeover by the progressives of any institution in America but monetary policy. Mostly because Conservatives largely let them off the hook and never took up the fight.

So we got exactly what you would expect when you give technocratic experts that kind of power over land. Across most of this country, it is now flatly illegal to build starter homes and small apartment buildings that once let a young person get a foot on the ladder.

Here is the hard truth for our side. We have been telling ourselves we are the keepers of limited government and property rights while operating inside institutions built on the opposite premise — that experts and boards should overrule owners and builders and the people who actually live somewhere. We got good at slowing the next expansion, pushing on the brake while the left has the pedal to the metal.

But the longstanding trope remains true because of this defensive posture, conservatives don’t really advance much in terms of their own ideas and when they do, their politicians are rarely radical enough to get much at the bargaining table – see the failure to get the REINS or SAVE Act. I suspect that is mostly due to the avoidance of the hard reality: we don’t live under Madison’s Constitution, we live under FDRs. And rather than confront that, conservatives are just saying, “slow down”, rather than “turn right”.

We have been playing on their board. Their rules. Their squares. And then we wonder why we keep losing ground.

You can win elections on their board. You can stall the next bad bill. But the default stays the one the planners drew. You are losing slowly and calling it conservation.

I don’t intend to lose slowly.

So picture the other version. The one where Joe can buy that starter home where he lives where he works, or 10 minutes from his parents, so the kiddos can see Papa and Mumu more often.

That doesn’t happen just because Joe gets a raise or pays less taxes, though that’d be sweet. It happens because inflation isn’t out of control, because the builder in his city put up those six modest homes with plans that flew through the process. His town isn’t flooded with illegal immigrants, and the labor costs are reasonable because tradesmen are not given the government protections from competition that prohibits price competition.

That is not a fantasy. I know that it is possible because it is America, prior to the progressive era, not perfect, but American and defined by freedom.

That is what Build the Dream is about. A center-right that stops pretending we are one tax cut away from prosperity and starts naming the machine that is actually in the way of our prosperity.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.

By a story we accepted instead of correcting, and a permission system we never had the nerve to name. We can tell a different story — one that treats the freedom to build as part of the inheritance worth fighting to restore.

Housing is where that story starts. And Joe is still young enough to live in the better ending and pass something better on to his kids.

The city made the builders pour acres of parking anyway.

Half of it sits empty. Permanently. Nine million dollars of asphalt that nobody asked for and nobody uses. That money could have built an entire 40-unit affordable property. Instead, it stores air and collects heat.

And here’s the part that should make you angry: nobody made a mistake. The builders followed the law. The law required the wasted space.

It’s called a minimum parking requirement, and there’s one buried in the zoning code of almost every city and town in America. It says that before you can build a home, you must also build a government-specified number of parking spaces — whether the people living there want them or not, whether they own cars or not, whether the land could hold another family or not.

You’ve been paying for this your whole adult life. You just never saw the bill, it’s another hidden tax.

The Invisible Line Item

A single parking space costs between $10,000 and $50,000 to build. Go below grade and the median hits $70,000 per space — some run as high as $100,000. More than a brand-new pickup truck, for a rectangle of asphalt.

Builders don’t eat that cost. They can’t. It gets folded into the price of every unit — your rent, your mortgage, your kid’s first apartment. Researchers who studied bundled parking nationwide found a garage space adds about 17 percent to a unit’s rent — roughly $1,700 a year. One required space per unit raises total development costs by roughly an eighth. Two spaces, a quarter.

There’s no line item on your lease that says “mandatory parking surcharge.” But it’s there. If you’re a renter without a car — and millions of Americans are — you are subsidizing free parking for your neighbors, by law, every single month.

The federal government can’t force you to buy broccoli. The Supreme Court spent a year arguing about whether it could force you to buy health insurance. But your city council can force you to buy a parking space, and it’s been doing it for seventy years, and nobody ever asked your permission.

Where the Rule Came From

Here’s the history they don’t teach you.

After World War II, cars flooded American streets faster than cities could handle. Planners panicked about curbside congestion. Their fix: make every new building stash its cars off the street. Reasonable enough — until you ask where the actual numbers came from.

They came from a manual. The Institute of Transportation Engineers published tables of “parking generation rates” — how many spaces a building supposedly needs. Those rates were built on tiny samples of suburban sites where parking was free and there was nothing to do but drive. How tiny? Half the manual’s rates rested on four or fewer observations. An engineer counted cars at a handful of strip malls, wrote down a number, and that number became law in ten thousand cities.

Nobody studied your town. Nobody studied your block. City after city simply copied the code from the city next door, the way a kid copies homework. Donald Shoup, the UCLA professor who spent his career dismantling this system, called the whole thing pseudoscience.

He was being polite. It’s a guess, laundered through a manual, enforced with the power of the state — and it reshaped the physical form of America. Drive through any downtown that died in the last fifty years and look at what replaced the buildings. Asphalt. In plenty of American downtowns, more land is devoted to storing empty cars than to housing people.

This is what the permission system does. It takes one planner’s assumption from 1965, freezes it into law, and makes your grandchildren pay for it.

The Poison Pill

The damage isn’t spread evenly. Parking mandates fall hardest on exactly the housing we’ve lost.

Starter homes. Backyard cottages. The small apartment building over the corner store. Housing experts call parking requirements one of the three regulatory poison pills that kill accessory dwelling units — and the math explains why. On a standard single-family lot, the yard has room for a small cottage or the parking pad the code demands. One or the other.

So picture it. Your mother is getting older. You’ve got the space, the savings, and a builder ready to put a little place for her out back — close enough to help, separate enough for dignity. The kind of arrangement American families relied on for two hundred years.

The code says no. The cottage doesn’t come with its government-mandated parking spot. So Mom goes to the facility, the backyard stays grass, and a bureaucrat somewhere files a report about the housing crisis.

A $30,000 parking requirement is a rounding error on a luxury tower. On a granny flat or a starter home, it’s a death sentence. That’s why the mandate functions as a filter: big expensive projects survive it, small affordable ones don’t. The rule written to manage cars ended up banning modest homes.

When you combine it with the other regulations we’ve covered and some we haven’t gotten to yet, it becomes increasingly clear why, as Zillow reports, the average starter home in US cities is now $1 million.

What Happens When You Repeal It

Now the part the planners never predicted. Cities started scrapping these mandates — and parking didn’t disappear.

Minneapolis eliminated its parking minimums citywide in 2021. The city’s own Planning Commission tracked what happened next. Builders kept building parking — about three spaces for every four new homes instead of one apiece. Near transit and in walkable neighborhoods, they built little or none. In driving neighborhoods, they built plenty. Supply matched what residents actually wanted, the way it does for everything else you buy.

And the homes came. Minneapolis built so much housing that rents fell roughly 4 percent from 2019 to 2024 — while rents nationally rose 22 percent. Read that again. One of the only major American cities where rent went down, and it got there by repealing rules.

Seattle’s reforms cut nearly 18,000 unneeded spaces from planned projects — about $537 million in savings that went into homes instead of asphalt. Buffalo scrapped its minimums in 2017; researchers found that more than half of the new homes permitted afterward would have been illegal under the old code. San Francisco, Austin, Portland, San Jose — same story everywhere. Builders still build parking where people want it. They just stopped being forced to build it where people don’t.

And if you think this is some blue-city fad: Montana killed parking mandates for small homes statewide in 2025, as part of the same Montana Miracle reforms that made it the national model for housing freedom. Red-state Montana said its biggest cities may not require a single parking space for any home under 1,200 square feet — and capped mandates at one space for everything else. Texas moved. Dallas ended mandates for small residential projects. So did New York City in its core, which tells you the idea has crossed every line that matters.

When Montana ranchers and Minneapolis renters land on the same answer, it’s worth asking what they both saw. They saw a mandate that made everything cost more and delivered nothing.

Nobody Is Coming for Your Truck

Let’s kill the objection before someone in the comments raises it.

Ending parking mandates bans nothing. You can build all the parking you want — a two-car garage, a three-car garage, a parking moat around your house if that’s your dream. The reform is one sentence long: the government no longer forces you to.

That’s it. That’s the whole radical idea. The people who want parking pay for parking. The people who don’t, don’t. A young couple saving for their first place stops subsidizing storage for cars they don’t own. A builder putting up starter homes spends the money on bedrooms instead of asphalt. Your town’s main street gets a building instead of a lot.

Conservatives spent decades arguing the government shouldn’t force you to buy products you don’t want. Here’s a mandate sitting in every zoning code in America, adding 17 percent to the typical rent with a garage space, killing the granny flat and the starter home, paving over the small towns we say we love. Repealing it costs taxpayers nothing. It’s the cheapest housing reform in existence — you don’t spend money, you stop wasting it.

The American Dream doesn’t need a subsidy. It needs the government to stop charging admission.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.

You’re part of this movement too.

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A young couple in your town did what they were supposed to do.

They finished school and took skilled jobs. They skipped the summer trips, kept the old car running, and moved back in with her parents for a year to stack every possible dollar. By 2021, they had a real down payment for a modest starter home — the kind their grandparents bought on one income without calling it a miracle.

It took them months to pull the offer together. When they finally did, the house was out of reach again. It’s now up to fifty, sixty, eighty thousand dollars in a single year. The new house wasn’t revamped or anything. It’s got the same vinyl siding. Same cracked driveway. Their hard-saved down payment now bought less house than the day they started saving.

That is the quiet cruelty built into our status quo. You can follow every wise piece of advice and demonstrate every virtue of frugality and temperance and still lose ground, because the ground itself keeps shifting.

How and why is this happening?

The people who manage our economy through dollar creation —the Federal Reserve System— have overshot their mandate for about 60 months straight to keep inflation reasonable. This was particularly exacerbated in housing for many reasons we’ll get into later. If your wages don’t grow faster than the Fed’s monetary policy, you fall behind. That is, unless you leverage up dramatically and finance the inflated valuations of homes as they are, which defeats much of the purpose of owning a home.

Now, if that doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, this article is for you.

An Invisible Thief to the American Dream

The Federal Reserve sets interest rates — functionally, the price of borrowing money. When it holds the price below what the market would set, it creates new dollars and pushes them into the economy. Normally, the money you borrow comes from someone else’s savings. Here, nobody saved first. It’s brand-new money chasing the same supply of homes and land.

That is inflation: the expansion of the money supply that drives prices higher.

It’s important to note that the new dollars entering the economy don’t fall from the sky. They flow first to the banks, the government, and the largest borrowers closest to the source – the Fed. They get to spend the fresh money before prices fully adjust. Everyone else — the nurse, the tradesperson, the young couple saving for that starter home — receives the higher prices without the head start. This is the Cantillon effect.

For a hundred years, when the dollar has lost value, land and houses have been among the best places to shelter money. So home prices rise fast, and wages move more slowly. The house runs away from the down payment.

The young couple wasn’t just competing against other buyers. They were competing against a system that was creating new dollars and sending a large share of them into the housing market, while local zoning laws made it extremely hard to build enough new homes. Their savings were running on a treadmill that was being sped up by the monetary system.

Worse, this is a short-run political and economic game with a terrible track record of disaster.

There’s every political and professional incentive for the Fed to keep interest rates low. But when the Federal Reserve keeps rates too low, it sends a distorted signal to the economy. More money flows into housing and other assets. Prices rise. Then the distortions become obvious, and the correction comes. This is the boom-bust cycle. The 2008 crisis followed this pattern, low interest rates set after 9/11 continued throughout the era, distorting the economy, until eventually the music stopped in the game of musical chairs, and people were left without a house.

And worse still.

Ordinary families lost their homes while the institutions closest to the government were protected by the “Troubled Asset Relief Program.” As President George Bush said at the time, “I’ve abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.” What’s important to understand now is that the machine was never fixed. People blamed the banks that were bailed out, not the Congress that bailed them out; they blamed the homeowners who took on variable-rate mortgages, not the Federal Reserve that set interest rates too low. In fact, Dodd-Frank made it easier for Congress to bail out banks going forward by codifying too big to fail into law. Creating more moral hazards.

A Machine for Rulers, not the Ruled

A new Federal Reserve chairman was just sworn in after one of the most contentious confirmation fights in the Fed’s history. He may prove capable. He may not. It barely matters. They changed the person at the wheel. They did not change how the machine is wired or who it ultimately serves.

The national debt has surpassed $39 trillion. Interest payments now exceed the entire defense budget. A government that large cannot be funded by taxes without a revolt. So our federal government borrows, and the Fed creates the dollars to cover the shortfall. You pay the difference in the shrinking value of everything you earn and own.

Now the Fed has an even greater incentive than in 2008 to push for lower interest rates, because without them, we can’t fund our government. This federal debt financing means higher inflation.

And that is really a hidden tax. It does not appear on your return. It is one of the most regressive forces operating in American life, and it lands hardest on the people without assets to ride the inflation.

When in doubt, lie with statistics

What is concerning about the new Fed chair is that his comments might pave the way for much higher inflation ahead.

When the official numbers become inconvenient, the response is often to change the scorecard rather than the underlying reality. The new chairman argued during his confirmation hearings that inflation should be judged by a “trimmed“ measure — discarding the fastest-rising prices and reporting what remains. Run the numbers that way, and the rate drops from 3.8 percent to something that looks almost under control.

From your kitchen table, though, that is not looking through the noise. It is moving the goalposts.

The machine has a primary customer: the federal government. Our kitchen table reality doesn’t factor into their equations.

Americans are furious about prices and pessimistic about what rising prices mean. This spring, the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment hit 44.8 — the lowest reading since they began tracking it in 1952. 57% percent of Americans said high prices were wrecking their personal finances. Gas prices from the latest energy shock struck the match. But the tinder was already there: years of a dollar that’s been quietly losing its value.

The reflexive answer in Washington — from both parties — has been to reach for the same lever: cheaper money. Lower rates while inflation is still running near four percent. More easy credit chasing the same artificially constrained supply of homes.

Cheaper money is not the cure. It is the disease. It does not create more houses. It creates more dollars, bidding up the houses that already exist, while local and state governments prohibit building any more houses. It re-inflates the very bubble that wiped out a generation of homeowners in 2008.

It is the next drink offered to cure the hangover.

It’s policy, not natural order

Prosperity has never come from a printing press. It comes from making more of what people actually need — more homes, more energy, more of everything — while preserving a dollar that holds its value long enough for working families to save and plan. It comes from a stable currency, either through stable rules or market-based money. I’m pretty agnostic on the cure right now.

What’s clear is that the young couple at the edge of town does not need another lecture about patience. They need two things at once.

They need the right to build — the removal of the zoning maps, lot minimums, parking mandates, and review boards that make housing artificially scarce and expensive. That fight happens at city hall and in state legislatures. It is the core work of the Land Liberty Movement.

They also need a dollar that does not betray them while they save. They need the federal government to deliver fiscal (budgetary) and monetary (The Fed) reform.

Until enough of us understand how the machine actually works and demand something better, the house will keep running away — and they will keep telling you it is your fault for not running faster.

It is not. It never was.

The American Dream isn’t Dead; it’s being blocked by a monetary system designed to help the government, not you. We can unblock it by helping more people understand that the reason prices go up isn’t an act of nature, it’s an act done by a shadowy group of people who run our money systems.

I’m David Rand from the Land Liberty Movement. This is Build the Dream. Let’s rebuild the American Dream together — by restoring both the right to build and honest money that make saving worthwhile.

In a state most Americans picture as cowboys and Yellowstone reruns, a group of legislators, think tank researchers, and ordinary people who were tired of watching their hometowns become unaffordable passed the most aggressive housing reform package in modern American history. National media called it the Montana Miracle. The Beltway types couldn’t believe it.

Kendall Cotton is the man who built the policy machine that made it happen. He runs the Frontier Institute in Helena and chairman of the Land Liberty Movement.

He started with a map.

Not a manifesto. Not a lobbying campaign. A map that showed exactly which neighborhoods were off-limits to starter homes, duplexes, and ADUs. The kind of data that makes it very hard for a city councilor to look you in the eye and say the regulations aren’t the problem.

That map led to legislation passing with near-unanimous support from both parties.

This week, Kendall joins us to explain how it happened and the advice he would give someone who’s tired of being locked out so they can start the fight in their own state tomorrow.

He spent fifteen years on Wall Street before walking away to earn a PhD in economics to study exactly why cities like his keep making the same mistakes.

He’s watched New York make the same housing mistakes for a long time. And this week, we asked him to tell us what’s coming next. Because New York’s already been through this once, and it didn’t end well last time.

The City of New York Rent Guidelines Board is about to vote on whether to freeze rents for a million apartments. Mamdani has appointed six of its nine members. The freeze is likely. And Niles knows what the last chapter of this story looks like.

The Bronx didn’t burn by accident.

This conversation is about what rent control actually does to the real people living inside it. And about whether a locked-out generation that is increasingly drawn to the language of “housing as a human right” can be brought back to a framework that actually delivers the thing they’re looking for.

The people who passed rent control in New York before weren’t evil. They were trying to help.

That’s what makes the story so hard. And so important to understand.

I hope you enjoy it.

**This conversation was recorded before the vote on the rent freeze.

The plan was for one- or two-bedroom units in a high-demand area of town. Good for high earners who want that community, a brand-new spot, and enough units to make a dent. A developer named Jason Grant bought the first parcel in 2023, back when Los Angeles rents were climbing through the roof, and the city was starved for housing.

He never got to build those 100 apartments. He walked away last year.

What sits there today is eight derelict apartments, a couple of small businesses, and a vacant palm-reading shop. That’s what the community got. Not 100 new homes. A boarded-up storefront where a fortune teller used to work.

This is the story of how Los Angeles convinced its own voters to destroy the housing they desperately needed — and called it social justice.

The Pitch

In 2022, a coalition of construction unions and anti-homelessness nonprofits sold Los Angeles voters a socialist fairy tale. They called it the “mansion tax.” A small levy on the city’s most expensive properties. Bel-Air estates. Hollywood compounds. Billionaires’ beach houses.

The campaign called itself United to House LA. The promise to everyone else was simple. You’ll never pay this. Only the rich will.

Voters bought it. The measure passed with 58% of the vote. A 4% tax on property sales over $5.3 million. A 5.5% tax on sales over $10.6 million. Revenue earmarked for affordable housing, eviction defense, rental assistance — the whole compassionate package.

Three years in, the receipts are in. And it looks like it was all a lie.

The Receipts

Most of the money — about 56% — never came from mansions at all. It came from commercial real estate. Office buildings. Retail. Industrial. Apartment buildings. Mixed-use developments. The buildings that house and employ actual people. Single-family homes — the “mansions” the whole thing was sold on — brought in 41%.

And building just stopped. Researchers at UCLA and the RAND Corporation found the tax is now killing roughly 1,900 apartments a year that would otherwise get built in Los Angeles — including the low-income units it was supposed to fund.

Sales of multifamily-zoned parcels over the $5.3 million threshold — the deals that come right before new apartment construction — have collapsed by nearly two-thirds.

LaTerra Development used to build 500 to 1,000 apartments a year in Los Angeles. Since the tax passed, they haven’t started a single multifamily project in the city. They’re building in Burbank now. Sacramento. Texas. New Mexico. Anywhere but their hometown.

And then there’s the revenue itself. A study out of Harvard Business School, with economists from UC Irvine and UC San Diego, found the city is barely making money on this. Despite the predictions of the social justice crowd, it turns out people respond to their incentives. The new tax prompted both residential and business property owners to hold onto their real estate. Causing sales of properties worth more than $5 million to fall by about 38%.

And so, every property that doesn’t sell is a property that never gets reassessed, and the lost property taxes wipe out most of what the “mansion” tax collects — about 80% of it. By the researchers’ own math, every dollar the tax raises could cost the region up to $1.38 in future property taxes. There’s a real chance the city is running this whole thing at a loss.

And then there’s the punchline.

The “affordable” apartments the tax is actually funding cost an average of $779,955 each.

No joke. The tax sold as a way to house working renters and drive down housing prices is producing expensive units.

So the tax shuts down market construction. Remember the 100 apartments near Venice Beach, part of the approximately 5,700 apartments that never materialized in the private market? And the program doesn’t even manage to build housing any cheaper than the market would. What it’s managed to do, in a city potentially short hundreds of thousands of units, is get 1,800 units in permitting, not even constructed, after three years.

The oldest trick in social justice politics

In 1913, the federal income tax was sold to the country as a tax on the rich. Top rate of 7%. It applied to fewer than 1 in 100 Americans. Tycoons. The so-called “robber barons,” but not you or I, the unwashed masses of regular folks.

But five years later, the top rate was 77%.

Today, about four in ten households pay no federal income tax at all. The rest watch payroll taxes vanish from every paycheck before they ever see the money.

The Alternative Minimum Tax, passed in 1969, was the same pitch. 155 wealthy Americans had used legal deductions to pay nothing. Congress was embarrassed. So it built the AMT to make sure the rich couldn’t escape.

By 2015, the AMT was hitting 4.5 million taxpayers. Engineers. Two-income families in high-tax states. The upper-middle household with a couple of kids and a mortgage. The 155 were long gone. Your dentist in Akron was paying it now.

Property taxes started as taxes on plantation owners. Now they fall on retirees on fixed incomes who can’t afford to live in the houses where they built their lives and driving up rents for young people trying to get a start.

Every one of them was sold the same way. You won’t pay. They will pay. We promise.

They lied. They always lie. And the people who design these taxes know they’re lying — because the entire architecture of a “tax the rich” measure depends on the assumption that wealth will sit still and let itself be taxed. It never does. Capital moves. Developers walk away. The rich hire accountants and lobbyists to make carveouts. And the bill, every single time, lands on the people who were promised they’d be the beneficiaries.

The Next Lie

The latest version of this fraud has a new name. They call it the “unrealized gains tax.”

The pitch sounds familiar. A few thousand billionaires — Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg — have built enormous wealth in business assets that don’t get taxed until they’re sold. So the proposal is to tax those gains every year, whether the assets are sold or not. Taxing the appreciation of paper wealth.

And again, the promise is “just the billionaires. You won’t pay”.

Think about what that means for a second. If you own a small business, the IRS would assess what your business is “worth” every year and tax you on the increase. If you own a farm and the land appreciates, you pay. If you own a house and the market rises, you pay — on money you don’t have, on a gain you haven’t realized, on wealth that exists only on paper.

It is a forced sale dressed up as a tax. The government decides what your property is worth, and takes a piece of it every year — forever — on phantom value it gets to define.

And by the time it lands on you — because it always lands on you — the people who sold it will be long gone, just like the United to House LA coalition will be when the working renters of Los Angeles look around in five years and realize their city has fewer apartments and higher rents than it did before the “mansion tax.”

The Real Problem is Confidence in Freedom Itself.

Every one of these “tax the rich, help the rest” schemes fails for the same reason California’s mansion tax failed. They all rest on the same quiet assumption: experts can rig the system, override human behavior, and deliver the outcome they want.

That assumption is the real problem

Ask why we can’t just let people build, and you get the same answer every time: builders will only put up expensive housing. And sure — replacing eight dumpy apartments with a hundred new ones means those hundred units rent high at first. Nobody’s pretending otherwise.

But that’s just not how housing actually works.

Housing is like a Jacob’s ladder with the bottom rungs falling off into disrepair and needing to be replaced at the top again. A family moves into a new, expensive apartment and leaves an older, cheaper unit behind. Someone moves up into that one and leaves their place behind. And on down the line. Building at the top loosens up housing all the way down.

Economist Evan Mast proved exactly how this works. In his 2023 study published in the Journal of Urban Economics, he tracked the moving chains started by 52,000 residents of new market-rate apartment buildings across twelve major American cities. Using detailed address history data, he followed who moved where—step by step, round after round.

The numbers are concrete. For every one hundred new market-rate units built, the resulting migration chains create vacancies for 45 to 70 households in below-median-income neighborhoods. Between 17 and 39 of those vacancies open up in the bottom income quintile. Most of the effect shows up within three to five years.

This isn’t theory or wishful thinking. It is what actually happens when people are allowed to build and move freely.

But when you lose confidence in freedom, you block the top rung. You freeze the entire ladder. The working families the planners claim to protect—the nurses, the cooks, the tradesmen—never get the units that would have opened up for them. The chain never starts.

That is what the permission system does. It replaces the natural process that has delivered more housing to more people for generations with central planning and veto power. It assumes experts know better than builders responding to actual demand and families making their own choices on their own land.

The American Dream Isn’t Dead

They told you housing was unaffordable, and it was the rich man’s fault. Then they passed a tax to “fix” it. Then the apartments stopped getting built. And then, somehow, the same coalition came back with a new tax, a new promise, a new lie.

The way out was never another tax; you can’t tax yourself into prosperity, abundance, or affordability. The way out is property rights and leveraging the productive capacity of the American, set free to pursue his happiness.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.

And in this case the people blocking it are the same ones who promised they were here to help.

He and his wife had spent decades on their land in the North Helena Valley. They planted an orchard. They raised a family. They built a life with roots deep enough to matter.

Then, as they got older, the house stopped fitting their lives. Too many stairs. Too much risk. So they came up with a simple plan: build a small, one-story home in the orchard, sell the main house to their grandson, and keep the land in the family.

They had the land.
They had the need.
They had the family ready to make it work.

But the government needed to be consulted. And when they did ask permission, the county said no.

This episode is about one man’s fight to pass down something real in rural America — land, memory, family, and a future his grandchildren could actually afford.

That is what property rights mean in real life.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.

Watch or listen to the full episode below.

A clip of Kevin O’Leary from an old interview made its way around the internet — him saying, more or less, that he hates to see a young person making $70,000 a year, spending $28 on lunch using DoorDash. The advice wasn’t new. The interview wasn’t new. But the clip was suddenly everywhere, and within about an hour, the whole familiar argument had reassembled itself in the comments.

One side: finally, someone said it, Gen Z and Millennials are cry-babies. The other side: here’s his net worth, sit down, there are real problems we face you never had to contend with. Both sides feel righteous in their indignation. You got the ungrateful young people vs entitled boomer luxury-communists. Both sides are convinced that the other is the reason the country feels broken.

You’ve seen this argument before. We will see it again soon, with a different clip and a different name. It is one of the small, predictable battles of our cultural life — the kind of fight that gets fought over and over, on the same patch of ground, by the same two sides, for the same outcome, which is really no outcome at all.

And while it gets fought, the machinery that priced a generation out of its own country goes on humming in the background, completely untouched, exactly as it has for the last hundred years.

I want to write about that machinery. But first, I have to write about the fight, because it’s doing something important — it’s covering for the machinery. And we should know if O’Leary’s comments are more than just his personal experience with the next generation.

Is Lunch The Problem?

A twenty-eight-dollar lunch in 2026 sounds like a lot to me. I don’t use the apps much myself. In 1978 dollars, that’s about five and a half bucks. Inflation is real. Restaurant lunches have always been expensive relative to a sandwich from home — that part isn’t new. Interestingly, however, what gets lost in the discourse is that Americans, on the whole, are spending less of their income on food today than their parents and grandparents did. Younger Americans included.

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What we’re spending more on — a lot more — is housing.

In the 1970s, a typical young family spent roughly a quarter of their income putting a roof over its head. Today, in most American cities, a young worker is doing well to keep it under forty percent. In some metros, it’s half or more of their income.

This trend is not an accident; it was done by design.

So when a 28-year-old worker hears a famous man worth hundreds of millions of dollars say the reason he can’t buy a house is the chicken sandwich he ordered on a Tuesday, he is right to be angry. Now — that’s not exactly what O’Leary said. That’s what the discourse turned it into when it spilled out into the broader culture. But the spillage can become the story.

Here is the thing, both sides of that argument keep refusing to say out loud, because saying it out loud means giving up the fun of the fight:

It is simultaneously true that budgetary discipline is critical for financial success, and that there are systematic problems in our society — created by government policy — that have opened a huge gap between what our parents and grandparents were able to achieve at our age and what we can achieve at ours.

O’Leary is not wrong that no generation has ever built a life without discipline. The young people aren’t wrong that they’re playing on a board their grandfathers never had to play on.

And here’s where it gets interesting. The 28-year-old is right to be angry — and he is also being played. Not by O’Leary, who is mostly just saying what people of his generation actually believe. The shape of the fight itself is playing him. Because the lunch argument is a cover story, it’s what gets argued about while the thing that actually broke the country goes on running, day after day, untouched, in plain sight.

The Uber Eats lunch is not the problem, and the longer we argue about it, the longer we don’t argue about what is. The problem is in the story that keeps you from looking at the real drivers of this huge gap we’re talking about.

Every Generation Inherits a Story

Every generation inherits a country that someone else built, and a story about that country that someone else wrote.

You did not choose the tax code. You did not choose the zoning maps. You did not choose the immigration framework, the trade policy, the banking system, or the unspoken rules about who counts as a serious person and who doesn’t. You walked into a room already furnished. You inherited it.

The story is more than just the shape of our government and institutions; it’s also about our role in the story.

For the Silent Generation and the Boomers, the story was simple and, in its own way, beautiful. They inherited a global empire from their fathers — fathers who had fought a world war, built the highway system, electrified the countryside, and won it all. The story they were told about themselves in the wake of their parents’ achievements was that they were stewards. Managers, that would perfect the American experiment into the end of history. Their job was to keep the machine running, expand its reach, and trust the experts.

And they did. By their own values, they did it very well.

They built a country run by professionals. Lawyers in the legislatures. Planners in the city halls. Economists in the Fed. Credentialed experts at every level, applying credentialed solutions to credentialed problems. The presumption was always the same: somebody smarter than you, in a building you’ve never been inside of, can manage the situation better than you can.

This is not a conspiracy. This is a worldview. The progressives at the turn of the twentieth century gave it a name — scientific management — and they meant it as a compliment. The faith was that with the right experts and the right data, you could engineer a better society than the messy, bottom-up one our forefathers had built. You could plan prosperity. You could plan fairness. You could plan the right number of houses in the right places at the right prices.

That faith built the world you woke up in this morning. The credentials. The permits. The studies. The committees. The 48 months between when someone wants to build a duplex and when they are actually allowed to do so. The administrative state. The zoning maps drawn in 1957 that still dictate what’s built in 2026.

It is the water boomers swam in. And like fish, most of us never notice the water.

What the Story Costs

Here is the bill that came due for the boomers’ story.

The next generations cannot start. Family formation has collapsed. Birth rates are at all-time lows. The median age of a first-time homebuyer in this country is now 40. Forty. Your grandfather bought his house at twenty-four and raised three kids in it. You’re going to be eligible for AARP before you sign your first mortgage.

This isn’t because you’re lazy or because you like Uber Eats. It isn’t because of avocado toast or lattes or whatever the talking point was the year you turned twenty.

It is because the country you inherited was managed, with great care and with the best of intentions, into a configuration where ordinary working people can no longer afford the basic conditions that previously defined the American experience.

And it was done in the name of helping you.

The planning class did not set out to lock you out of your own country. They set out to manage the country, on the assumption that they knew better than you did how it should be arranged. They believed — sincerely, in many cases — that property rights were a primitive institution. That left to themselves, ordinary people would build the wrong kinds of homes in the wrong places. That, with the right credentialed plan, applied with the right administrative care, you could optimize a community into something better than what people would have built on their own.

This is the story they inherited, and the one they are caught up inside with little ability to see outside of it, remember fish seeing the water.

A New Story & A Heroic Tradition

Mr. O’Leary’s comments, almost despite themselves, point toward.

Buried under the patronizing tone is a kernel of truth in what he said that is worth keeping: no generation builds a future by waiting for someone else to hand it to them, and doing so will require discipline.

That part is correct. The mistake is in thinking the missing ingredient is the discipline to bring a brown paper bag to work.

The missing ingredient is a story — and a philosophy of life. A different story than the one the managers have been telling for a hundred years.

The story the managers told was that you are a unit to be optimized inside a system run by experts. The story we need to tell — the story I think the next twenty years of American life will be decided by — is older and yet new, and more dangerous to the people currently in charge.

It goes like this.

You are not an economic unit. You are a man of the West—a builder. You inherited a country your forefathers built with their hands, and you have the right — the birthright — to use your land, your labor, and your wits to build a life here. A home of your own. A family, if you want one. A business, if you can dream one up. A place to plant roots, to raise children, to age, to die, and to leave something behind that wasn’t there before you came. You are a hero of your own life because you own you; you are free.

This used to be the American story. But it wasn’t invented in 1776, 1689, or at Runnymede. The idea that a person has the right to what is his, and that violating that right is a direct assault on his value as a human being, goes back as far as we have written records of human beings trying to live together.

Homer wrote about it three thousand years ago. The Odyssey — and no, not the new movie from Christopher Nolan — is, at its core, a story about what happens to men who take what isn’t theirs. Odysseus’s crew slaughters cattle that don’t belong to them, and they die for it. The suitors waste his wealth and woo his wife while he’s away, and they die for it too. Even the hero himself spends ten years detoured at sea as punishment for the property (war) crimes he committed, sacking Troy. As classicist Isabella Reinhardt put it in a recent conversation with Michael Shellenberger, the poem’s deepest lesson is that property rights are the basis of peaceful coexistence — and that the great work of civilization is the slow, generational training of warriors to respect what belongs to other men.

That is the tradition we inherited. It came down to us through the common law of England, the Levelers, and the Magna Carta, and it’s a civilizational story we must return to if we are to heroically revive our values and culture.

A man is the king in his own castle. No man is born with a saddle on his back, nor any other man booted and spurred to ride him. These weren’t slogans. They were the operating system of Western civilization and then refined into the American experiment. And they got slowly, quietly, expertly replaced over the course of the twentieth century by an operating system that says: actually, you need a permit for that.

The choice before our generation is which operating system we want to run to revive our culture and our people.

You can run the one you inherited. You will get more of what you’ve already got. More man-made scarcity.

Or we can reclaim American identity and run the Western civilizational one. The one that says people who are free to build can build. That land in the hands of its owner is more productive than land in the hands of a planner. That a starter home is a moral good — a duty each generation owes the next — not a regulatory category. That the proper job of government is to protect the right to build, not to ration it. That housing freedom is the foundation of every other freedom worth having.

I’m not trying to invoke nostalgia for its own sake. I am not asking you to go back to 1955. I am telling you the conditions that made 1955 possible can be rebuilt, by us in the next twenty years, and that rebuilding is already underway in many states.

But it requires the right story. And the story is, underneath everything else, a story about what we value.

The values the last hundred years have prized — the values the managerial class has been quietly refining since the Progressive Era — are not the values of a people who build. They are the values of a people who manage. Risk management. Equality of outcome. Optimization. Credentialing. Process. Consensus. The smoothing of every rough edge. The reduction of every messy human decision to a regulated transaction overseen by someone with a degree in overseeing it.

These are not bad values, exactly. They have their place. But they are the values of stewardship of a finished thing — what you hold when the country has already been built, and your job is to keep it from breaking.

But the country was not finished. The country is never finished. The country is a thing you build every day, in every generation, by the millions of small decisions of millions of ordinary people about what to make of the land and the lives they have.

The values that build a country are not the values that manage one.

The values that build a country are heroic values. They are life-giving. They are the willingness of ordinary people to risk something in order to make something, to solve each other’s problems, to dream up the mutually beneficial arrangements that let one person’s ambition become another person’s opportunity. They prize the family that works hard and disciplines its budget to make that down payment. The woman who lives within her means, builds a career, and settles into motherhood if she chooses. The man who takes the chance on a new business in a new town because it might make a difference. These are small virtues and small heroisms. They are the sustained insistence — across a generation — that we are more than what we have become.

Our culture can value again the dignity of having something that is yours because you made it. The long, difficult, ennobling work of turning a piece of dirt into a home. Of turning two broken people into a meaningful marriage. Of forging virtuous children out of the clay of our imperfect unions.

The political right did not invent these values. They are not partisan. They were the baseline of American life until very recently. They were dismantled by an ideology — one that genuinely believed it was helping, and that, in the end, produced a country where building anything is an act of cultural rebellion.

This is why the housing fight is not just a housing fight. It is a fight about what we value. You cannot fix housing without rebuilding the cultural permission to build. You cannot rebuild the cultural permission to build without reviving the values that say a builder is worth more than a planner, and a human right — property rights — is worth more than a process.

I’ve said it before: housing freedom is life freedom. The phrase is not a slogan. It is a literal description of what has been taken.

The Handoff

The Silent Generation and the Boomers are not the villains of this essay. They are not the villains of American life. They are stewards of a story that was given to them by their fathers, and they have been passing it down in good faith for a long time. Most of them, like most people in every generation, did the best they could with the worldview they inherited.

But the progressive approach is exhausted. Its errors and costs are manifest. It has produced what it can produce. It produced a global hegemony, a freeway system, and a man on the moon, but it also produced a country where your grandfather’s life is functionally illegal to recreate. Both things are true. The cup is full. It cannot pour anything new.

The values that will determine the next fifty years are ours to decide.

This is what nobody quite says when they tell you to put down the phone and skip lunch. They are not actually telling you to be more disciplined. They are telling you — without knowing they are telling you — that you are about to be responsible for a country that does not yet match your values. And that the period of complaining about what was handed to you is shorter than you think.

Your grandparents complained about the Depression for a while. Then they won a war and built American manufacturing. Your parents complained about Vietnam for a while, and built the information age. The complaint is a phase. The complaint is what every generation does before it picks up the tools and gets to the job of civilization.

You will pick up the tools. The only question is what you build.

If what you build is a politics of revenge — if our governing instinct, when we finally take the reins, is to punish the people you blame for the country we inherited — then we will replicate exactly what the managers built. A different team in the same franchise. A different set of victims, a different set of beneficiaries, but the same machine. The permission system doesn’t care which party runs it. It just keeps running.

Resentment cannot build a future. It can only re-litigate the past.

If what you build, instead, is a politics of heroism— a politics whose first instinct is to ask, what is preventing a normal person from living a normal life in this country, and how do we get it out of the way so they might solve the problem themselves — then something else becomes possible. Something American. Something worth having.

That’s what I mean when I say, “The American Dream is not Dead, it’s blocked.” We are focusing on the right people, the institutions, and ideas fueling America’s decline. And we are focused on unblocking and rebuilding the American identity and institutions that will make a better future for our children.

Let’s rebuild the American Dream together.

There’s a shortage of housing. In the public imagination, there’s no shortage of people and institutions to blame for it. To be fair, there’s some truth in each of them, with varying degrees of validity. The question is: what is the root cause of the housing crisis, and what is the best approach to actually driving housing towards affordability?

I went on the Libertarian Christian Podcast to make Build the Dream’s case. These other variables are worth discussing, but ultimately fall downstream of a bigger story and act as a distraction.

I make the whole case here:

Getting on shows like this was the plan from day one — new rooms, new people who’ve never heard the case. We’re gaining momentum, and Build the Dream is on its way because of you. Thank you. Stick with me, and we’ll end this housing crisis for good.

I’m David Rand from the Land Liberty Movement. This is Build the Dream. Let’s rebuild the American Dream together.

P.S. — If you’ve got a second, drop a like on the Libertarian Christian Institute‘s video and send it to a friend. It really does help get these ideas in front of more people

You’d expect urgency. The owners want their lives back. The city wants its tax base back. The country wants its people housed after a tragedy. We are the richest country in the world. We can do this, and do it quickly.

Instead, the waiting begins.

And it drags on. And on. And on.

What Burned

The Palisades Fire started on January 7, 2025. Santa Ana winds drove it across 23,448 acres. It destroyed 6,837 structures. Twelve people died.

The fire was arson. Set by a 29-year-old man who, in July of the prior year, sat at his computer and prompted ChatGPT to generate, in his own words, a painting of “a burning forest” and a crowd of people “trying to get past a gigantic gate with a big dollar sign on it” — on the other side, “a conglomerate of the richest people, chilling, watching the world burn down, watching the people struggle, laughing, enjoying themselves, dancing.”

That is from the federal court documents of the prosecution.

It is a picture of the resentment-based politics we are drifting into as a culture. It cannot build anything. It can only burn.

Hold onto that. We’re coming back to it.

What They Got Right

The government did some things right after the fire. The Army Corps of Engineers cleared the lots ahead of schedule. Real credit where it’s due.

But the homes?

And Then, Nothing

The first family didn’t get a Certificate of Occupancy until November 21, 2025 — more than ten months after the fire. As of this spring, only a handful of homes have been finished and reoccupied across the entire burn zone.

A handful.

Out of nearly 7,000.

That is way worse than a slow start. Compare it to 1904.

Baltimore Did It Faster — In 1904

The Great Baltimore Fire destroyed 1,500 buildings across 140 acres of downtown. They did it without power tools, without cranes, without computers, with less wealth and fewer people than we have today.

The entire Burnt District was rebuilt and occupied in roughly two years.

We have more technology, more wealth, more people, more everything. And yet we cannot do in fifteen months what people in 1904 did with horses and hand saws. At the current rate, it will take roughly 500 years for the Palisades to become a lived-in community again.

This is the same permission bureaucracy that makes housing scarce in normal times. Now it’s preventing recovery from a disaster.

There are so many reasons it is taking forever throughout the process. Owners file permits. They hit design review. They face new studies on the exact same footprint that already had a house — though a little quicker. All the old rules still apply too; they weren’t all suspended. Things like minimum lot sizes and setback requirements still apply. You still gotta do extra reviews for that ADU. In fact, if you want to add that ADU, you are punished for not just rebuilding.

Yes, supply chains are tight. Yes, insurance is a fight — although that too is at least partly the government’s fault. But California’s rules are what turn a hard situation into a 500-year purgatory.

Temporary Mercy Is Not a Policy

Now — California did some things in response, yes. Newsom suspended parts of CEQA (their environmental review) and the Coastal Act for fire rebuilds. LA created a supposed “one-stop shop” for quicker reviews. The County tried an AI-assisted plan review pilot program.

Helpful. And not nearly enough.

Every one of those reforms is temporary. Every one of them treats permission as the default and freedom as the emergency exception. The fundamental problem is untouched.

And here is the deeper point. If property rights had been honored before the fire — if Californians had been free to build by right on their own land all along — the system would already be tuned for fast, owner-driven construction. The rebuild would not be a fifteen-month bureaucratic crawl followed by endless waiting for inspectors. It would be a sprint, run by the people who actually live there.

That’s how Baltimore, Chicago, and Boston rebuilt so much quicker.

The Last Locked Door

Remember — even after your plans are approved, even after construction is finished, even after the contractor walks off the job, the government still has one more checkbox. A separate sign-off by a separate government inspector. The house is built. The family is ready. And the door stays locked until a city employee finds time to come visit.

They call it a Certificate of Occupancy inspection. It seems to be one of the biggest bottlenecks in this process.

But there’s a solution for it. Florida has run a private provider program since 2002. A licensed architect or engineer, hired directly by the owner, signs off on plans and inspections. The system works just as well. But buildings get built faster. California could do the same tomorrow. This would dramatically expand the pool of people qualified to approve a house for occupancy while maintaining standards. Making it quicker and less painful for the family moving back.

That’s the lesson. Property rights and more open market-based systems don’t just help after a disaster. They prevent disaster from becoming a permanent condition by arranging the larger social structure to respond dynamically.

So if California is serious — really serious — about helping these families, the temporary suspensions aren’t enough. Make them permanent and respond with real policy change to empower Californians with property rights again. Cut the discretionary reviews. Restore the owner’s right to rebuild on her own land without asking permission from half the city.

Back to the Painting

Now — back to the accused arsonist.

He didn’t burn the Palisades because he was poor. He burned it because he had been taught, somewhere along the way, that the system was rigged, that the gate was locked, that the rich were on the other side laughing while everyone else struggled.

He was wrong about who to blame, and he did an evil thing by killing all those people and destroying so many lives. But he wasn’t entirely wrong that something was locked and deeply broken. How can you look at America today and conclude something isn’t deeply broken and disenfranchising?

The American Dream really is being locked away from millions of people in this country. Not by a cabal of billionaires in an Illuminati meeting. But by a permission system that says: you cannot build a starter home, you cannot put up an extra unit, you cannot rebuild your own house, or build those apartments unless some bureaucrat says so.

When you tell an entire generation that the dream is out of reach, and you build a system that makes it true, you give voice to the demons in the human soul that will justify any atrocity. We have been feeding that system — feeding those voices — with our politics and policy for decades.

We can do better. We must do better. Not just because the Palisades families deserve their homes back. Because a country that locks out its own people feeds resentment politics.

The answer is not to redistribute what already exists. The answer is to unlock the gate. Let people build. Let people own. Let people come home.

The arsonist gave in to despair. He believed the American Dream was dead and rich people were to blame. But it isn’t dead, it’s being blocked.

We can rebuild the American Dream. We can build again, and have a society defined by broad prosperity.

Let’s rebuild the American Dream together.