The church owned land that it wasn’t using. The answer was obvious: build some housing.

So Clarendon Presbyterian Church started the process — rezoning, variances, public comment periods, lawyers, consultants, hearings — and five years later had spent over half a million dollars without housing a single person.

They’re not alone. Across Virginia, at least 30 faith communities have tried to build housing on land they already own. Fewer than half have succeeded.

A Deed Is Not a Permission Slip

The Church owns the land. They paid for it — with the congregation’s offerings. And the government treats their deed of ownership like a polite suggestion. Government will let you worship on Sunday. It will not let you act on the words of Jesus Monday through Saturday.

That is not property rights. And it is not religious freedom. Faith that can only be believed inside four walls is not faith. It’s a label.

Jesus didn’t say “love your neighbor” in theory. He said, “I was a stranger, and you invited me in.” That command used to mean real doors on real land. Today, too often, it runs straight into a planning-board obstruction.

What the Church Used to Do — and What Replaced It

The church used to do this work. Before housing authorities, there were parishes. Before Section 8, there were congregations. The church housed the widow. It sheltered the immigrant family. It gave the young couple somewhere to get their start.

It worked, imperfectly yes, but this is humanity we are talking about, because the immediate accountability was real. It was a lot harder to defraud a congregation that knew your face. You couldn’t ignore the widow your deacon visited every week. When something went wrong, the people sitting in the same pew felt it — and they responded. That kind of accountability cannot be written into a regulation. It requires proximity. It requires relationship.

What replaced it? People who process applications. And when the only information you have is what someone wrote on a government form, and when there’s no penalty for being wrong and no reward for being right, you get what you’d expect. Minnesota launched a housing stabilization program estimated to cost $2.6 million a year. By 2024, it was costing $104 million annually — the U.S. Attorney called it a “systematic and wholesale attack“ on state programs. That’s before you get to Feeding Our Future, where a nonprofit claimed to be feeding children and instead stole $250 million in federal funds — mansions, Mercedes, cash withdrawals, and wire transfers overseas. More than 60 people have been convicted. Conservatives already know this pattern. They’ve watched it happen in Medicaid, in food stamps, in childcare learing centers. The through line is always the same: the people approving the checks never knew the people cashing them.

Housing works the same way. The bureaucracy that decides who gets to build, and where, and how, operates on identical logic. No proximity. No accountability. No skin in the game. The planning board member who kills a church’s housing project will never meet the senior who keeps sleeping in her car because of it. That insulation isn’t a flaw in the system. It’s a feature of its design. Detachment for scientific objectivity is the goal.

Subsidiarity

There is an alternative, however, and despite the problem being a worsening crisis with origins that goes back decades. The solution is even older and rooted in the origins of our society. It’s called subsidiarity — the principle that every problem should be solved at the lowest level capable of handling it:

• The family handles what it can.

• The church handles what the family cannot.

• The community handles what the church cannot.

• Government handles what no one else can — and nothing more.

Alexis de Tocqueville saw this principle alive when he visited America in the 1830s. He marveled at it — churches, families, and local associations doing the heavy lifting on social problems without waiting for distant bureaucrats. He contrasted it explicitly with France, where authority flowed from the top down, and civil society had withered beneath it. He thought America had figured something out that France hadn’t. He was right.

And then we threw it away.

The people who threw it away were adherents to what I call Scientific Progressivism. Their claim was that the organic, bottom-up, locally accountable way communities had organized for centuries was declared irrational. Inefficient. Sentimental. The experts would handle it now. They displaced the institutions that actually knew the people they were supposed to help, replacing them with people who process applications. People who will never sit in your pew, never know your name, and are completely insulated from the weight of their decisions.

As government grew, civil society shrank. Every function the state absorbed was one that the church and the community had stopped performing. At first, because they didn’t have to, after all, the government had just promised to conduct a war on poverty and end it. But Today, after all these government failures, maybe it’s because they forgot how.

The housing shortage we’re living with right now — the unaffordable rents, the missing starter homes, the families doubling up, the seniors sleeping in church parking— is the direct, predictable result of replacing institutions that knew how to love their neighbors with a bureaucracy that can only process applications.

Faith in Action

When the government gets out of the way, churches deliver.

In San Diego, Bethel AME Church — a 136-year-old Black congregation in Logan Heights — looked at a vacant lot they owned and built Bethel One: 26 units of permanent housing for low-income veterans and seniors. No government subsidies. No tax credits. Entirely privately funded. It was completed in late 2025.

Cost per unit: around $275,000. Publicly funded affordable housing in San Diego routinely runs $750,000 per unit or more. When the church spends its own money — donations and loans from its own community — every extra dollar comes straight out of its own pocket. They have every reason to keep costs down and get it done. When the government spends other people’s money, those incentives disappear.

The difference wasn’t the mission. Every church in this story had the same commandments from Jesus they were attempting to follow; every government is trying to help the same impoverished folks. The difference was that Bethel AME’s land was already zoned for residential use, so they faced minimal barriers in bringing the vision to life.

Remove those barriers, and churches will move—delivering cheaper, faster, and more immediate care to the very people we claim we want to help.

A Movement That Needs Some Faith

Something is happening in this country. It’s quiet right now. But it’s real.

Florida has been peeling back the planning state’s grip on church land for four straight years — methodically, deliberately, piece by piece. This year they passed Live Local 4.0: a statewide mandate giving qualifying church property the right to build housing without a variance, without years of waiting. The House voted 98 to 4. The Senate, 35 to 0. That’s not a close call. That’s a consensus breaking through.

Virginia just passed its own Faith in Housing bill. A hard-won victory built directly on the determined struggle of congregations like Clarendon Presbyterian in Arlington. The new law eliminates the rezoning requirement for churches that want to build housing on land they already own.

Now the next congregation won’t have to burn hundreds of thousands of dollars in pointless fights with local governments just to love their neighbors.

Connecticut is moving. New York is pushing. A federal bill has been introduced. Legislators and churches across the country are looking at their land and asking the same question: Why are we waiting for permission to love our neighbors?

Thousands of congregations are sitting on land they own, in the heart of communities they’ve served for generations — with the relationships, the accountability, and the mission already in place. Ready to do what the government has spent decades failing to do. With their own land, their own people, and their own sense of responsibility.

There’s a depressing irony here. Much of the early momentum for Faith in Housing legislation has come from identifiably left-leaning states and progressive congregations—places like Connecticut, New York, and Arlington, Virginia. And that makes sense — where government has crowded out civil society the hardest, the pressure to reclaim it builds the fastest.

But the real opportunity isn’t just there. It’s in red and purple America, where the church is even stronger, the land is more plentiful, and the instinct to solve problems through family, congregation, and community is still alive and well. It’s just in a state of amnesia, and waiting for permission it was never supposed to need.

I believe that moment is coming. When America’s churches everywhere start to act again in their just social role, to do something incredible and take back charity and community service. Reviving subsidiarity in America again.

Your state could be next.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked — by rules we made, which means they’re rules we can change. And the people most ready to prove it aren’t lobbyists, developers, local, state, or federal agencies. They’re pastors. They’re deacons. They’re congregations that have been watching their neighbors struggle and have been told, year after year, that they need to ask permission first.

They’re done asking.

The question now is whether the government is ready to get out of the church’s way.

So when he was ready to retire, he did what many Americans dream of. He bought a piece of land, 10 acres in El Dorado County, near Lake Tahoe. El Dorado County, if you don’t know your history, this is where the gold rush started. This is where men crossed an entire continent to stake a claim and build something with their own hands.

A slice of Americana after working hard for 50 years under that California sun. He cleaned it up himself and he worked it with his hands. He fell in love with the process. He wasn’t asking for much. A modest manufactured home, 1,800 square feet, a place to grow old with his wife and raise their grandson.

He bought a prefabricated home specifically to save money, cut every corner he could. He did the work himself as much as he was able. And then he walked into a county permit office and they told him the permit to start building would cost $23,420.

23 grand for a traffic impact mitigation fee. For roads. Roads. Roads George Sheetz had nothing to do with. He was moving there. Roads that had problems long before he ever showed up. Problems caused by commercial developments and retail centers already in the area.

George said, you people are crazy. And they essentially said, well, you pay up or you don’t get to build. So he paid it. Under protest, but he paid it. Because he didn’t have a choice.

And that’s how it works when the government has you over a barrel. You either surrender the money or you surrender your dreams. This is wrong. It’s extortion. The government can’t charge you a ransom to use your own property, right?

In America, the land of the free, the home of the brave. George Sheetz isn’t some hedge fund developer trying to build a mega complex. He’s a retired construction worker who wanted a prefabricated budget house on his own land.

George’s story is bad enough on its own, but what keeps me up at night is what it says about everyone else what’s not seen. What do most people do when faced with fees like this? I suspect they just pay the money, extravagant or not. And worse, maybe many are walking away without building their American dream at all.

And that’s a part that no one really talks about. For every George Sheetz who fought back, I suspect there are thousands who just gave up, who looked at the fee, looked at the savings and walked away from the land they already owned and the life they were trying to build.

The American dream isn’t dead. It’s just being blocked by rules and fees and barriers that have nothing to do with safety and everything to do with government budgets, treating every guy who wants to build a house like an ATM.

Earlier, I had the opportunity to interview Deerson. He’s an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, and he was on the team that took the Sheetz case all the way to the Supreme Court. I want to understand what happened in the courtroom and where the law stands now and what this means for every American.

We’re going to get into the interview in a minute, but please, if you can. If you want a way to help the show for free, just like this post, wherever you’re watching. Just take a minute and like it. I won’t watch. Just do it real quick for me. It would be very helpful. Thank you.

David Rand:
David, welcome.

David Deerson:
Thanks very much, David. Glad to be here.

Rand:
Yeah. So before we get into the case, I want you to tell people about yourself and about the Pacific Legal Foundation and what you guys do broadly.

Deerson:
Yeah, thanks very much. I’m David Deerson. I’m an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation. I’ve been there since I graduated law school in 2018. It was my first job out of law school. I started out in the headquarter office down in Sacramento. Now I work remotely from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Pacific Legal Foundation is a nonprofit public interest law firm. We’ve been around since the early 1970s. We’ve been around for over 50 years. And although we are headquartered in Sacramento, we do have a national presence. So we take cases all over the country at the local, state and federal level.

And essentially, we sue the government to defend people’s constitutional rights. We have several issue areas that we work in. Although a flagship issue, the kind of central focus for us is and has always been property rights. But we do do work in equal protection, economic liberty, in administrative state, which is like forcing the government to play by its own rules.

And we have a, you know, I’m very proud to report that we have a strong track record at the United States Supreme Court with over 18 wins, probably more than that by my last count and a couple of decisions that we’re waiting on right now. So hopefully we’ll keep pushing that number up.

Rand:
So I wanted to hear how you found George. And did you come to him? Did he come to you? Like what’s the origin story with how he got connected to Pacific Legal Foundation?

Deerson:
Yeah, well, actually, George was referred to us through an attorney that we work very closely with in California. Fantastic land use and constitutional rights attorney who actually used to work for Pacific Legal Foundation a little bit before my time. His name is Paul Beard. He’s very active in California land use.

And so when it looked clear that this case was going up to the United States Supreme Court, he brought us on board to work with him.

Rand:
Well, here’s what I keep thinking about with this case as I was researching and looking at it and just getting frustrated by the whole story from the very beginning was that, I mean, George is the guy who should have been able to navigate this, right?

All this time in his career in construction, he knows the system in California better than almost anyone probably with all that experience. And yet he still needed a national law firm to fight this whole scenario. So what does that tell you about what the average person is up against when it comes to these impact fees?

Deerson:
Yeah, I mean, it’s just in this case, it’s just a brick wall. I mean, there’s nothing really to navigate. The county says, if you want to build your home, you’ve got to pay us this twenty three thousand dollars.

And by the way, in the state of California, there’s really nothing you can do about that because as far as California courts are concerned, the courts don’t apply any kind of meaningful scrutiny to impact fees that are imposed in county ordinances.

And so when you say meaningful scrutiny, you mean how closely it connects to like a particular service or a particular impact?

Rand:
Yeah, exactly.

Deerson:
So, you know, this case is all about the land use permit exactions doctrine, which is a fancy way to say that when the government tries to get money or property from you as a condition of granting you a land use permit, courts make sure that what they’re asking for from you is related in both kind and extent to some measurable impact that your development is going to have.

But for a long time, there was a kind of loophole recognized in several states, including in California, that said, if these fees are imposed in a county ordinance, rather than kind of imposed on an ad hoc basis by some local administrator, then we’re not going to apply that kind of scrutiny. We’re not going to ask how closely related the fees are to some actual impact that you’re having.

So really, the debate in this case was about whether the executive branch or the administrative branch, really, or a more legislative branch that’s creating county ordinances, if they were still subject to some amount of scrutiny about whether or not the impact fee had anything to do with impact.

Rand:
Right.

Deerson:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. At least, you know, that was what the case was all about when Sheetz first went up to the Supreme Court. Of course, there have been some developments since then. And we’re asking the Supreme Court again to take a second look because the case has changed a little bit since the first time.

Rand:
Hmm. Interesting. We’ll dig into that in a second. I want to get into all the court details. But real quick, before we go there, I want to get a sense for what the impact fees as a problem is.

So your team has published some research on what these fees look like actually across the country. And I wanted to see if you could give me the numbers on that. What does the average American pay for fees before they can even break ground on a new development?

Deerson:
Yeah. So in California, for total impact fees, we’re talking $30,000, which is certainly the highest in the country. You know, you look elsewhere and our data shows more like five to 10, up to 15. On average for most other states, California is certainly an outlier.

And when you talk about traffic impact fees in particular, El Dorado County in this case is an outlier even within California because they’re asking for $23,000 from Mr. Sheetz, which is routine in El Dorado County. But the California average traffic impact fee is something like $6,000. And the national average is about half that.

So what they’re asking for from Mr. Sheetz was an outlier, even in California, where they’re twice as high as they are in the rest of the country.

Rand:
What are they supposed to do with $23,000 that’s so important for one guy, his wife and his dog to move into a pre-manufactured home in that area? What are they going to do with that money?

Deerson:
Well, they’re going to use it to put it in the pool towards the $572 million worth of road improvements that they want to make. And in order to legally impose these fees, they have to make the case that George Sheetz, by building his small, humble home, is going to do $23,000 worth of impact on traffic.

But we know that not even the county really thinks that he’s going to have that impact. Because what they’ve actually done is shift a huge portion of the impact attributable to commercial developments onto residential developments. So essentially, they’re making Mr. Sheetz subsidize the traffic impacts of commercial developments, which are going to have much more impactful traffic effects.

Rand:
Right. We’re thinking like 16 wheelers here going into Walmart have less impact than him in his truck or Subaru or whatever driving up to his spot. Is that really what they’re arguing?

Deerson:
Right. Yeah, well, I mean, sort of. They acknowledge that really the big gas station or, you know, an 11,000 square foot office building, this is an example we like to use in our briefs, an 11,000 square foot office building that’s generating something like 500 additional trips, pays the exact same fee as George Sheetz’ less than 2,000 square foot house, generating a grand total of about nine extra daily trips.

Rand:
Oh, man. So, and I’ve been contending with this and thinking about it, he already pays gas taxes too. Like he has to do this on top of the gas, on top of his vehicle registration, on top of everything, all the other taxes.

How can they not pay for their roads if they have these other developments happening in their county, if they have new companies moving in, and obviously it’s a place with demand to move there? I mean, George wanted to move there. Why don’t gas taxes cover it? Why don’t the vehicle registration? He’s already paying lots of taxes.

Deerson:
Yeah, that’s a great question. And it really gets at the whole point behind the legal doctrine that’s supposed to protect George from having to pay these kinds of impact fees.

Because yeah, the correct way to pay for public goods that benefit the public is through general taxation. But of course, that’s very politically unpopular. It’s much easier politically for municipalities to shift that cost onto people who are coming to them at the permit desk.

There’s a huge power imbalance and an opportunity for what the Supreme Court has twice called extortion. Because when you need some benefit from the government, they say your money or your permit, you’ve got no choice.

Meanwhile, the voters who are voting for the county board don’t mind if George has to pay all of this. So really, this is a way to hide the political ball by forcing people like George to pay for improvements that really the public as a whole is benefiting from and should be paying for.

Rand:
Hmm. So let’s dig into the courtroom dynamic. So you weren’t there yourself, but your team was. What was the county’s argument really at the end of the day? Like, how did they try to anchor this into something tangible beyond just like, well, we get to, right? How did they get there?

Deerson:
You know, it’s really strange, David. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it. I don’t think many of my colleagues have.

When we got to the United States Supreme Court, there was one question presented to the court, and it comes down to that loophole I mentioned earlier, where some states say we’re not going to apply scrutiny if the fee is imposed by the legislative branch through an ordinance.

That was the only question before the Supreme Court. Does it make a difference if this fee comes from an administrative or executive officer or if it comes from the legislature?

And when we got to the Supreme Court, we were surprised to find the county basically totally rolled over on this issue. They had what the justices called radical agreement. There basically wasn’t an argument.

They said, yeah, you know, look, at the end of the day, George is probably right. It doesn’t really make a difference if it’s done from the legislative level. You know, we don’t think there’s anything wrong with the fee that we’re imposing, but the mere fact that it’s in our ordinance probably doesn’t shield us from scrutiny.

Let’s go back down to the California state courts to face that scrutiny. But yeah, at the Supreme Court, really, it was not much of an argument at all. It was basically no contest.

Rand:
So they kind of showed up to the big game and forfeited right at the last second. They got to the NCAA finals and just threw in the towel.

Deerson:
Yeah, that’s right. It was pretty fun to watch.

Rand:
Yeah, yeah. So was that really the moment you knew you had them?

Deerson:
It goes back down to the California Court of Appeals.

Rand:
But it looks like that one didn’t go your guys’ way. Can you tell me about that?

Deerson:
Right. So it actually skips the California Supreme Court because they didn’t want to look at it in the first place. And it went back down to the California Court of Appeals.

And they said, OK, the United States Supreme Court has now clarified for us that just because this is in the ordinance doesn’t mean that we’re going to rubber stamp it. But then essentially they go ahead and rubber stamp it anyway.

And, you know, what the scrutiny in this doctrine calls for is that the government has to show it made some kind of individualized determination about the relationship between the fee and the impact.

There’s an open question about how that gets applied when what we’re dealing with is a legislative fee schedule, rather than an administrative decision to apply it to one particular person.

And what the California Court of Appeals essentially decided is it doesn’t matter what the final number is. It doesn’t matter if there actually is any relationship between the impact and the fee. All that matters is that the methodology that the legislature used to come up with the fee schedule was rational.

And I don’t know if you know anything about courts and about the history of constitutional law. Rational is not a good test for the property owner, for the individual. Rational usually means government wins.

You know, as long as it’s not so absurd that you would find it in Kafka, then we’re basically going to rubber stamp it.

Rand:
Yeah. Yeah. The weird thing here is, in my view, in our view, you could find this in Kafka because, again, as I mentioned earlier, they’re shifting a huge amount of the impacts attributable to commercial development onto Mr. Sheetz.

So that’s their methodology, is that they’re intentionally and openly saying even though commercial developments contribute 40% of the problem, we’re only going to charge them 16% of fees, and we’re going to put the other 84% of fees on residential builders like George Sheetz.

To me, that methodology is not rational, and certainly the result is not rational. But the California Court of Appeals thought it was essentially fair enough.

The very silly argument that more residential development means more people moving in. People spend money. Therefore, more residential development is what leads to more commercial development. So we’re not going to charge the commercial. Because we’re going to say it’s the residential development that creates the need for commercial development.

Deerson:
Right.

Rand:
Well, they never read Say’s Law, apparently, because you have to make things before you can buy them. Right. So that’s a typical core ignorance of economics. Sorry, you were saying.

Deerson:
Yeah, so that was the Court of Appeals decision. We appealed that up to the California Supreme Court. The California Supreme Court declined to hear the case, but they did something sort of unusual in that they depublished the Court of Appeals opinion, which is sort of a signal that they said something’s not quite right about this, but we don’t want to fix the problem. So we’re just going to sort of sweep it under the rug.

Rand:
Wow. Is that judicial avoidance? Is that what that is? Just refusing to engage with your own profession?

Deerson:
It is. Right. Something’s fishy here. It’s our problem. Gosh, we wish it weren’t. Let’s treat it as if it’s not.

And so then, you know, the only remaining step is, again, to go back up to the United States Supreme Court, where we are. We’re asking the court to take a look at the case as it stands now to decide whether that’s true, that you don’t actually have to have an actual relationship between the fee and the impact. You just have to have some rational methodology.

And by the way, is the methodology that they used even rational in the first place?

Rand:
It seems like it’s embedded in the word fee, right? Like when I think of a fee, I don’t think of just raising money. It’s not the price of the thing. It’s a service on top of the price of the thing, right? So how can it be so disconnected from the proportionate use of the service and be rational, whatever that means?

And this all just feels very much like an Ayn Rand novel at this point. It just feels like, you know, all of the worst parts of government are just manifesting themselves to Mr. Sheetz’ life and just making this just hellish, just a nightmare for him.

Well, the California Supreme Court certainly did shrug. Yes, right, right. They did not bother bearing the weight of their responsibility on this one.

So I want to get back out for a minute and look again. I mean, I know you probably don’t know the numbers, but just begging the question, just asking the question of you and the audience, everything, how many people you know face this every day and then just pay the fee and move on.

And they don’t know Pacific Legal Foundation. They don’t get recommended to you. They don’t see that opportunity to fight this in the courts. What do you think about that?

Deerson:
Surely countless people. But I’ll tell you, there’s actually something that makes me even more concerned. And that’s the number of people who see these fees and say, you know, it’s not worth building at all.

And we’re in a national housing shortage.

Rand:
Or just the people who are just bearing the cost, right? So most houses are built by a developer. Those developers are capitalized or if they don’t have a lot of capital, they have good business relationships with banks and they can get out the loan.

But then how do they recoup their costs from the loan? They put that in the price of the house. And then so when people are going out and they’re looking at a house, they’re saying, why is it so expensive?

Well, there’s lots of reasons. It’s multi-causal. But at least one of them is these enormous impact fees, at least in the state of California.

Deerson:
Yeah, absolutely. Those costs are getting passed on to the consumers of these residential units. And again, that’s what makes it sort of politically attractive, because the people who already live in the county and who are voting for the decision makers in the county are more likely to have homes that they live in and own and are going to stick around there.

But it’s the people who might want to move into town and help the town grow that have to bear all of these costs. They don’t get a voice. And that’s part of what makes these impact fees so pernicious and part of why the Supreme Court has insisted that we have to apply meaningful scrutiny to them.

Rand:
Hmm. So if someone’s watching this and they have some similar phenomenon, some other impact fees someplace that they’re facing, you know, like what George dealt with, and it has nothing to do with the project in the same similar kind of fashion, you know, if they’re also being extorted, where do they start?

What do they do to try to fight these kind of rules from whatever state they’re in?

Deerson:
Well, I mean, naturally, they can always reach out to Pacific Legal Foundation and they can go to pacificlegal.org. And, you know, we’re happy to take a look and see if we can help.

But, you know, I think just you can sometimes write letters to your local officials citing these cases, pointing out what’s happened in Sheetz, pointing out how strict these tests are. And if the city officials get the sense that you may have a firm like Pacific Legal Foundation in your corner, it’s not unheard of that they might back off or they might find some exemption for you.

Of course, that’s unlikely. You know, they want to impose these fees. They want to get these fees. But what we’ve found in a lot of similar cases is that the government settles pretty quickly because they don’t want to get these bad court decisions that they know are very likely to come down that are going to invalidate their program altogether.

And so they’ll sometimes, when they’re in court, they’re highly incentivized to find ways not to apply the fee to whoever it is that’s suing them.

Rand:
There you go. So at the end of the day, a lot of this does look to me like an ordinance or legislative fix too, potentially, where if a state or locality wanted to make sure that this wasn’t getting out of hand, they could put some constraints on this, on some standard.

Is there anyone working on legislative angles for this sort of thing to try to make sure, at least at a minimum, just make sure fees actually act the way fees seem like they should work?

Deerson:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’ll continue to take the opportunity to plug PLF’s work because we also have a legislative arm and we have model bills on how states can make sure that their municipalities are staying on the right side of constitutional law in designing these impact fees.

I think it’s unlikely to come from the local municipal level because of those perverse incentives. Again, that’s exactly why there’s this heightened scrutiny in the first place, because cities just can’t help themselves. It’s such a politically convenient way to fill their coffers.

But you do see reform efforts at the state level who don’t like the idea that cities in their states are making it harder to build and are essentially extorting people at the permitting counter. So you are seeing efforts to reform impact fees at the state level, and PLF is heavily involved in those efforts.

Rand:
That’s great. Yeah. If you’re a regular voter at the doorstep and a local legislator walks your door, you say, what are you doing about building impact fees? You should check out Pacific Legal Foundation. Pass that along.

And if you’re a legislator watching this, obviously check out Pacific Legal Foundation for some great resources on model legislation, maybe some assistance.

So thank you so much for your time, David. That was a really great time.

Deerson:
Yeah, absolutely. It was a pleasure. Thanks again. Cheers.

President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers dropped a report yesterday. And it has a number in it that every American should see.

They call it the bureaucrat tax.

They calculate it by adding up every local fee, every permit delay, every zoning restriction, every code requirement. The total cost of all that government friction is the bureaucrat tax, and it’s estimated at over $100,000 ever single home in America. On average, that’s 24% of the price of a new house. For apartments, it’s 41%.

Not lumber. Not labor. Just the permission to build some housing. Exactly what I’ve been talking about in the past month since the launch of Build the Dream. Can you believe it’s already been a month?

Now here’s what that means in reverse: cut the bureaucrat tax, they estimate you could add 13 million homes to the housing stock.

We can do this without any new federal projects. No subsidies. No wealth transfers. Just by getting government out of the way.

The report points to real steps — for the federal and state governments. We’re going to break all of it down in the weeks ahead.

But the headline is simple. And it is a bombshell that should re-align the whole conversation on affordability on the right.

The housing crisis isn’t a mystery. It’s man-made scarcity. And President Trump’s own economists just put a $100,000 price tag on it.

Stay with us. The American Dream isn’t Dead, it just blocked by the Bureaucrat Tax,

We can Repeal it.

I’m David Rand. This is Build the Dream.

A list something like: four walls, a mortgage, a yard, and a two-car garage. The whole Leave It to Beaver picture, pre-approved and pre-packaged for broad consumption.

The impression this cultural shibboleth offers is that if Leave it to Beaver is not what you have, if you’re renting, if you’re still figuring it out, or if you have other values. You haven’t made it yet. You’re in the waiting room of life. The Dream is down the hall, and you’re waiting for its arrival.

That’s NOT the American Dream, at least not as I think of it. That’s a government-issued version of it. And it’s been used, quietly and effectively, to rig the housing system against everyone who doesn’t fit the approved mold.

The American Dream is Big Enough

It’s okay if homeownership is a major life ambition for you. I’m with you there; home ownership is important to me personally. But there are 45 million renter households in this country. Forty-five million families, workers, young people, retirees — living their lives, building their futures, while renting.

Baby Boomers were handed a script. Go to school. Get a job. Buy a house. Mow the lawn. These were the same people who burned their draft cards and questioned everything — and then, mostly, they followed the prepackaged plan anyway. For a lot of them, the most in human history, homeownership delivered the promise. They built incredible amounts of equity. The American Dream, as advertised, was very real.

And still, a third of them opted out altogether.

34% of Boomer-generation renters say they never want to own a home. 66% of them say they prefer renting as a reason they don’t own, and 61% say they’re relieved they don’t own a home. This is the wealthiest generation in American history — $83 trillion in net wealth — and a third of them chose a different path. That’s okay.

My point is that we need an accounting of the American Dream that is big enough for them, too.

If the wealthiest, most property-owning generation in American history couldn’t be sold on the script universally — what does that tell you about the rest of us?

Gen Z and younger Millennials — Americans under 35 — now represent more than half of all renters in the country. The generation after them isn’t only dreaming about a mortgage. Many are thinking about flexibility. About living near opportunity or a career that can take them anywhere in the world. Or doing the passport bro thing and living abroad while working in America.

For others, it’s a darker story; some watched their parents get buried in a house they couldn’t sell during 2008. They saw what it looks like when the approved script becomes a trap.

But regardless, many of my peers are making a different calculation based on the values they chose to embody. There are few things more American than that.

The problem isn’t that people are renting, as is so often portrayed in our culture. The problem is that the system makes it brutal for them when they do.

The $250 Problem

Here’s what brutal looks like in practice.

If you’re a renter earning less than $30,000 a year — and tens of millions of Americans are — after you pay rent, you have $250 left.

Two hundred and fifty dollars. Per month. For everything else. Food. Transportation. Medicine. A car repair. A birthday present for your kid. An emergency. A future. How many months would it take with no emergency spending to save up for any one of those? How do you build a life on that?

It cascades. On $250 a month, the car breaks down, and you lose the job across town because you can’t fix it. The prescription goes unfilled because something else came up. The parking ticket you can’t pay becomes a fine you can’t pay, becomes a warrant you didn’t see coming. One missed payment starts a chain reaction that takes years to climb out of.

You can’t plan around that. You can’t put down roots when the lease ends in twelve months and there’s nowhere else to go. You can’t build toward something when the present keeps getting more expensive faster than your paycheck does.

That instability doesn’t just strain a budget. It strains a marriage. Financial distress is consistently one of the top predictors of divorce — and not the kind of divorce where two adults move on and everything turns out fine. When a marriage breaks under financial pressure, children pay the price. Study after study, including a meta-analysis of 48 separate research papers, finds that children from divorced homes are roughly twice as likely to end up involved in crime. Researchers call it one of the most consistent findings in the social sciences. The broken home is the broken society, one family at a time.

It strains the decision about whether to have children at all. Young couples aren’t just choosing to wait — they’re doing the math and deciding the answer is no. When they do try later, biology doesn’t negotiate. Delayed family formation means more infertility, smaller families, and a birthrate that is now at an all-time low — less than 1.6 children per woman — well below the 2.1 needed to replace ourselves. We are a people slowly deciding not to have a future.

The downstream of that decision is already visible. Emptying towns. Closing schools. A demographic cliff serious enough that economists discuss it in whispers, because the honest version of it is too dark to say out loud. Who builds the roads? Who staffs the hospitals? Who funds the retirements? The answer, increasingly, is: not enough people.

This is what’s actually being stolen. Not square footage. Not a down payment. The family that would have been. The town that would have grown. The generation that never arrived because a zoning board made the first step, a place to live, too expensive to take.

We must do better, for our children’s sake.

Landlord Scapegoat

You may have read the compassion in the past two sections as a subtle signal of left-ism. I assure you that’s not my political philosophy. And even if I missed my mark on that assumption, I imagine you agree it’ll apply to some readers, which says more about our political culture than I have room to get into here. But I’m not a leftist.

There’s a second objection I can already hear: nobody should be making $30,000 a year in the first place. Fix wages, not housing. It’s a reasonable instinct. It’s also wrong — or at least, it’s incomplete in a way that matters. In a market where housing supply is strangled by regulation, wage increases don’t stay in workers’ pockets. Landlords don’t set rents based on what’s fair. They set rents based on what the market will bear. Raise wages without building more housing, and you’ve handed renters a raise that goes straight to their landlord. We already know this is happening: Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that cost burden is now climbing deep into the $45,000–$75,000 income range. This isn’t a poverty problem anymore. It’s a supply problem that only looks like an income problem. You cannot earn your way out of a shortage that the government created.

The problem is the shortage. The shortage is policy.

Zoning laws that ban anything but single-family houses on most residential land. Minimum lot sizes that make smaller, more affordable homes illegal before anyone even tries to build them. Environmental review processes that turn a straightforward housing project into a decade-long legal war. Parking minimums. Setback requirements. Design review boards.

Every one of these policies has a constituency. Each one makes it harder to build. Every one of them keeps supply artificially low — which keeps costs artificially high — which keeps that $250 right where it is.

What people forget is that landlords operate in a competitive market too. If there are no apartments available in your price range, your landlord knows it. You have no leverage. No choice. You take what’s offered — or you sleep in your car, if you have one.

If there are thirty options, you have the power. You can say no. You can walk away. You can choose a landlord who maintains the property, answers the phone, and treats you as a customer rather than a captive.

More supply doesn’t just lower prices on paper. It shifts power from landlords to renters. That’s the mechanism of accountability that puts the individual in the driver’s seat — not a politician promising to solve every problem, which inevitably leads to frustration and failure.

Property Rights Is the Answer

Need more conservative bona fides? How about this: I think the solution is older than the problem.

The government-issued version of the American Dream assumes somebody has to decide. That a planner, a zoning board, a city council — somebody in a room somewhere — has to determine what a neighborhood should look like, how many apartments are too many, how small a house is too small. What they end up deciding, underneath all of it, is what kind of life is worth building.

But what if everybody got to decide? What if builders and buyers, developers and renters — all of America — made that determination together, through millions of individual choices, without a committee in the middle translating their preferences into policy?

They can’t do it. Not because they’re stupid, but because no committee has ever been able to process the hundreds of millions of individual values, preferences, and visions of the good life that a free people bring to their housing decisions every single day.

The price mechanism does that. When a builder sees rising demand for smaller apartments near a job center and responds by building them, he isn’t following a government directive. He’s responding to what people actually want. When rents rise in one neighborhood and fall in another, that’s not landlords being cruel — it’s the market communicating reality. Millions of individual decisions about how to live, aggregated into a signal no planner could replicate.

Property rights are what make that system work. They give the builder the freedom to respond to what people need and get compensated for it. They give the renter the freedom to choose. They give the family the freedom to stay rooted, and the young professional the freedom to keep obligations light. Property rights don’t pick winners between those visions — they create the conditions under which all of them can be made real.

That’s the actual American Dream. Not Leave It to Beaver. Not a government-approved blueprint for a correct life. The freedom to pursue your own version of happiness — your own definition of the good, the true, and the beautiful — without asking permission from anyone.

Let’s Build the Dream

The American Dream was never just a house on a cul-de-sac with a two-car garage. It was always something bigger and harder to contain than that.

It’s the family that stays rooted in the town their grandparents built, but keeps out of a mortgage so they can save for his big business move next year.

It’s the 24-year-old who keeps his obligations light and spends a year in Southeast Asia before he figures out what he wants.

It’s the guy who rents the same apartment for twenty years because that’s what freedom looks like to him, while he turns his hobby into his career.

It’s the couple, starting out at the bottom, who save every dollar and claw their way to a down payment through sheer stubbornness and budget discipline.

All of them deserve a system that works for them. Right now, none of them have one.

The housing system we have wasn’t built for any of these people. It was built by and for the people who were already inside it — and defended, year after year, by politicians who mistake the approved script for the Dream itself.

Build the Dream exists because the American Dream belongs to everyone who’s willing to pursue it — not just the people who pursue it the approved way. We’re building a movement of people who understand that housing freedom is life freedom. That more homes mean more choices means more power in the hands of the people who actually live in them.

We’re done waiting for permission to build. Join us.

We’re going to unblock it with your help.

Her family told her to stop complaining about housing costs and bite the bullet. Just buy a starter home — something under $250,000. So she looked. What she found was a mold-infested townhouse in Middlesex, New Jersey. Crumbling walls. A biohazard of a mold problem.

Listed at the low-low price of only $244,000.

She posted the video. Half a million people watched it in days. The comments filled up fast — with sympathy and recognition. “My dad told me my $400,000 budget was crazy and I needed to find a starter home. Sir, that is starter home prices in most areas.” Another: “If I put a ‘under $300,000’ filter on in my area it just shows me vacant land.”

This meme of the housing market as impossible to enter is ubiquitous on social media. So you can’t buy. Fine. Then you rent, right? Except rent is crushing nowadays, too.

That’s the trap. Mortgages are too high to get in. The rent is too high to get out. Millions of Americans aren’t choosing between renting and owning — they’re just trying to survive whichever one they’re stuck in. Half of Americans are struggling to pay their rent or mortgage. Among Generation Z — the generation now entering adulthood, starting careers, trying to build a life — the number climbs to two-thirds.

Since 1960, the share of Americans spending over 30% of their income on housing has roughly doubled. This isn’t accidental; it’s the result of decades of policy choices shaping our housing future.

Housing should feel possible again. It doesn’t. And that gap — between what should be and what is — didn’t happen by accident. This situation affects everyone.

How it Happened

Zoning laws.

That’s the short answer. The longer one starts in the mid-twentieth century, when local governments across America began rewriting the rules for what could be built, where, and by whom. Single-family zoning spread city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood — making it illegal to build apartments, duplexes, or small starter homes on most residential land in America. Minimum lot sizes went up. Parking requirements multiplied. Permit processes that once took weeks stretched into months, then years.

Every one of those rules had an author: a bureaucrat planner, a mayor with an axe to grind, a county commissioner with a pet project, or just local governments looking to get some of those sweet-sweet federal HUD dollars for implementing a zoning plan. Washington made it very profitable for local governments to adopt land use central planning.

But if you’re searching for the deeper cause — the central villain — it becomes less a man and more a set of ideas best summarized by two words – Scientific Progressivism. Progressive planners genuinely believed that trained experts, armed with science and good intentions, should decide how American cities grow. Where you could build, what kind of building, how many units, how big, how tall, how far from the street. Even what the exterior had to look like: from the kind of screen door you could have, to the types of shrubberies you could plant.

They called it rational land use planning. It was actually the systematic removal of the individual’s right to build on their own land. Sixty years of evidence have now confirmed that it succeeded in “managing” but not planning. As seen by its systematic inability to plan for future generations and changes in market preferences.

But by their measurements, it worked. Planners controlled Growth. They tamed the seeming chaos of individual initiative and entrepreneurship. But the predictable downside was that only a narrow interest group got its back scratched in the process: incumbent land owners.

Now, the standard economic model would tell you that if you narrow the range of freedom to build stuff, you’ll get less stuff. But we don’t need to rely on deductive economic reasoning if that isn’t your bag. Reviews of the empirical literature have consistently found that zoning rules reduce supply, which increases prices, with density regulations alone explaining roughly 20% of the variation in housing growth across American cities.

A natural challenge to this is, what about increasing demand to move to a city, state, or country? Wharton economists studying high-cost markets concluded that it’s zoning and land-use controls — not demand — that are responsible for housing prices soaring above actual construction costs.

Though it definitely matters, systems that are property rights-based - not central-plan-driven - just have better outcomes, even and especially when demand is high. Despite having the second-largest population among the fastest-growing metros in America, Houston has maintained among the lowest home price appreciation. Houston has never had zoning as the rest of the country understands it. Studies found it remained far more price-competitive because local property owners could see rising prices and immediately take advantage of them. Bottom-up responses like this are inevitably faster than top-down.

A System Is What It Produces

A set of laws should ultimately be judged by the results it produces. America doubled down on scientific progressivism throughout the entire twentieth century — and the results are in.

It started with ideas: remember “Scientific Progressivism”? John Dewey gave the philosophy its intellectual foundation — the belief that trained experts, armed with science and good intentions, should guide the organization of society.

Herbert Hoover gave it teeth. As Secretary of Commerce in 1924, Hoover convened a panel of experts to write a Standard State Zoning Enabling Act that states could copy, proudly announcing that “the importance of this standard act cannot well be overemphasized.” The Government Printing Office sold 55,000 copies. Nineteen states had adopted it by 1925. Within a decade, zoning covered 70 percent of the U.S. population.

State legislatures took the model and ran with it, granting zoning authority to every municipality they could. Local governments built the bureaucracies — the planning commissions, the design review boards, the permit offices — and staffed them with people whose job was to manage growth, which in practice meant slowing it down.

And then folks on the ground figured out how to use the system. They showed up at zoning board meetings. They filed objections. They voted against the apartment building down the street. The justification was always something respectable: street parking, views, and crime. But underneath those justifications, the real reason would inevitably raise its ugly head. Building more units might lower their property values.

The intentions at the top were real. Clean cities. Healthier kids. Scientific rational planning, no more anarchy and messy freedoms. But so were the consequences at the bottom, the very real bill coming due today.

According to Harvard — one of the original intellectual cradles of American progressivism — since 1990, inflation-adjusted renter incomes have risen by less than one percent, while rents have risen by 20 percent.

Incumbents benefit when housing is kept scarce. Everyone else pays.

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The Dream Isn’t Dead. It’s Being Blocked.

Mai McConnell went looking for a starter home and found a biohazard. Half of Americans struggle to pay their rent or mortgage. Two-thirds of Gen Z can’t comfortably afford a place to live. And the share of Americans crushed by housing costs has roughly doubled since 1960.

This is the bill. Sixty years of rational land use planning, handed down from Dewey to Hoover to your state legislature to your local planning commission to the neighbor who showed up at the zoning board meeting — and you’re paying it.

The good news is that what the government built, the government can unbuild.

Cut the rules that ban starter homes and apartment buildings in most American neighborhoods. Speed up the permit process that adds years and tens of thousands of dollars before a foundation can be poured. Stop letting a handful of incumbent homeowners veto the housing their neighbors need. Restore the basic right of a property owner to build on their own land.

That’s it. No new federal agency. No billion-dollar program. Just governments — local and state — stopping the thing they’ve been doing for sixty years.

Fairness in housing means more choices, not more rules. And your kids should have the same chance to build a life that you did. Across Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike, that’s not a controversial idea.

It’s the most human one there is. We all deserve a shot at the pursuit of happiness.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked. By rules that we can change. By governments that answer to voters.

A home is where belonging happens.

And it’s fair. No more rules that create scarcity, protect insiders, and delay the next generation’s pursuit of happiness.

We can unblock the American Dream.

If this resonates, subscribe. Share it. Support Land Liberty Movement with a donation so we can keep exposing the problem and pushing solutions together.

He found a plot of land he could actually afford. An acre and a half on the edge of town. The plan was simple: buy the land, put a trailer on it, build equity, build a life. The math worked — barely, but it worked.

Then it didn’t.

He qualified for an $80,000 loan, but the “mobile” home costs $90,000. Jake is still renting, watching the plot he wanted get snapped up by an older couple buying their third house.

Maybe you’re reading this and thinking: them’s the breaks, kid. Life’s hard all around. Nobody said it was fair. It wasn’t easy when I was coming up either.

And look — those aren’t wrong. But there’s something else going on here. Something that changes the moral calculus entirely.

What if that manufactured home cost $10,000 more than it should have? What if the price was inflated by design — not by natural scarcity, but by a law written in Washington in 1974? A law so old that Jake’s parents weren’t born when it was written.

The federal government requires every manufactured home in America to be bolted to a permanent steel chassis. No exceptions. No matter if it’s going to sit on a foundation for the next fifty years and never move an inch. The chassis has to be there. And it costs $10,000.

Not directly, depending on the price of steel, but in total, in terms of design, engineering, fabrication, labor, and materials.

That’s what’s standing between Jake and the American Dream. Not laziness — he’s out hustling and getting a great tradesman job. Not bad choices — he’s a clean-cut young man looking to build a conservative trad-life he’s seen on Instagram.

A Rural Problem Too

And Jake isn’t alone. We tend to think of the housing crisis as a big-city problem. Unaffordable apartments in San Francisco. Bidding wars in Brooklyn. That’s the story we get told.

But rural America is getting hammered too — and in some ways harder.

Since 2019, the income needed to afford a home in rural counties has jumped nearly 106%, according to Redfin. That outpaces the rise in suburban areas (91%) and urban counties (88%). Median rural home prices climbed over 61% in that same period — from about $174,000 to $280,900. Median rural incomes? Up just 33%. From $52,000 to $69,000.

The gap isn’t closing. It’s widening.

In Colorado — where Jake is trying to build his life — some rural and exurban communities are experiencing housing crunches that would make a Denver city planner blush. We’re not talking about remote homesteads. We’re talking about the towns within an hour of a city — the places where a welder, a nurse, or an electrician can actually find work. Workers who took jobs in trades, agriculture, and healthcare can’t find anywhere to live that doesn’t consume every dollar they make.

The manufactured home was supposed to be the answer. Factory-built, lower cost, faster to place. For generations, it was how rural America housed itself. The path to a first home, a piece of land, a foothold.

What stands in our way is a rule nobody can explain, that nobody in Congress today voted for, that benefits nobody but the competitors to trailer manufacturers.

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Washington Bolted a Dolly to the Bottom of Your Home

In 1974, Congress passed the HUD Code — a national safety standard for factory-built housing. The goal was simple: bring order to a supposedly chaotic industry.

But when Congress defined a “manufactured home,” it included a requirement for a permanent steel chassis. Not because engineers demanded it. Not because builders requested it. Because homes were already being transported on steel frames, and Congress wrote down what they saw.

That’s it. A transportation mechanism — essentially a huge dolly — got frozen into federal law. And it’s been there ever since.

There are actually two categories of factory-built homes: manufactured homes and modular homes. They look nearly identical. They’re built in the same kinds of factories by the same kinds of workers. The difference is almost entirely legal.

Manufactured homes fall under the federal code — the 1974 HUD standard with the chassis requirement. Modular homes are exempt from the chassis rule but must comply with all local building codes wherever they’re placed. Thousands of them. Varying wildly by county, by city, by state.

Think about what that means for production. A manufacturer building modular homes can’t build the same design twice if it’s going into two different jurisdictions. Custom engineering for Chicago. Different custom engineering for Boise. Henry Ford’s entire insight — that standardization drives down cost — goes out the window. Modular homes are expensive precisely because the law makes scale impossible.

So businesses have two options. Build to the federal standard and attach a steel chassis that adds $10,000 to the price. Or build without the chassis and navigate a maze of local codes that make mass production unworkable.

Either way, the low-income family or individual trying to buy a home is left out of this picture because the law focuses on regulating the industry rather than fostering the most competitive, flexible environment for consumers and builders. The government built a kind of regulatory trap for business. Door one requires making the trailer more expensive, but it can be made with standardized mass production; door two means far less standardization and fewer economies of scale. Either way, the consumer is trapped with less affordable housing in rural America than there otherwise would be.

Worse still, trailer homes have their own local barriers. Zoning codes across the country restrict where they can be placed, ban them from residential neighborhoods, or confine them to dedicated parks. But if you look closely at why, the excuses are often window dressing for an aesthetic and class bias. “We don’t want those kinds of homes — or those kinds of people — in our neighborhood.”

Where I come from, that’s a euphemism for poor white folks and Native Americans. But this policy doesn’t discriminate — it’s just as brutal for a Black family in rural Mississippi, or a Latino family in South Texas. Manufactured housing is the most racially diverse affordable housing stock in America. It is, for millions of families across every background, the only realistic path to owning an asset — building the equity that becomes a down payment on a more middle-class home.

The chassis mandate makes this worse. The steel frame gives manufactured homes their trailer appearance, and that appearance gives local governments the visual excuse they need to zone them out. The federal government handed every snobby planning board in America a justification.

Fix the chassis rule, and you start to fix the stigma.

What We Would Have Done Instead

The guy running a manufactured-home factory has one job: to build a better home for less money than his competitor. That incentive never sleeps. Every dollar saved on materials is either profit or a lower price that takes a customer from the guy down the road. The pressure to innovate is constant, automatic, and brutal.

Regulators don’t have that pressure. They have the pressure to avoid being blamed when something goes wrong. So they write down what already exists, call it a standard, and move on. The chassis was there in 1974. So the chassis became the rule.

Meanwhile, every other industry kept moving.

Aerospace figured out that carbon fiber is stronger and lighter than steel. Automakers figured out that aluminum frames cut weight without sacrificing safety. Builders have been experimenting with cross-laminated timber, structural insulated panels, and 3D-printed components that can be fabricated at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.

None of it is legal in manufactured housing. Because the federal definition still requires a steel chassis. Want to use something lighter, cheaper, stronger? Fine — but your product can no longer be classified as a manufactured home. Which means it can’t be financed as one. The affordable loan programs that make these homes accessible to working families — gone. Because of a legal classification. Because of a dolly.

The government didn’t just add $10,000 to the price of Jake’s home. It locked the entire industry in amber and told every engineer, every entrepreneur, every factory owner who might have built something better: Not here. The Nixon administration already decided this. Come back never.

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A Fix Is Already on the Table

Here’s the good news. The fix exists, and it is moving on the federal level as we speak.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act passed the United States Senate in March 2026 by a vote of 89 to 10. Sponsored by Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren — who agree on almost nothing else — the bill is a sweeping housing package designed to cut red tape and unlock housing supply nationwide.

Section 301 of the Act eliminates the permanent chassis requirement for manufactured homes. The updated federal definition would include homes built “with or without a permanent chassis.” Manufacturers could still use a chassis if they want to. But they wouldn’t be forced to — and neither would the families buying those homes.

That single provision would save families between five and ten thousand dollars per home. It would unlock new designs — including two-story manufactured homes. And it would make it dramatically easier to place manufactured housing in traditional residential neighborhoods, where they belong.

But the ROAD Act doesn’t stop there. It ties federal Community Development Block Grant funding to housing production, rewarding communities that build and penalizing those that obstruct. It creates a new $200 million annual innovation fund for local governments that implement real zoning reform. I have mixed feelings about paying governments to do the right thing — but this system runs on money, and sometimes you work with what you’ve got.

I especially love that it streamlines environmental review for small infill and transit-adjacent housing projects.

The bill does have some unrelated riders — including a ban on central bank digital currencies, which I support, but which has no business being on a housing bill.

It is, in total, the most significant pro-housing federal legislation in a generation. And it does it without price controls, without mandating density, and without telling communities what to build. It simply removes the barriers that prevent communities from building enough. And it flips the original sin of federal housing policy on its head: instead of Washington paying localities to lock people out, it pays them to let people in.

Washington Getting in Its Own Way

Both chambers of Congress have already passed versions of this bill. The House voted 390-9 in February. The Senate voted 89-10 in March. By any measure, that’s overwhelming bipartisan support.

The problem is that they passed different versions. The Senate added new provisions — including the institutional investor restrictions and the digital currency ban — that weren’t in the House bill. That means the two versions need to be reconciled before anything goes to Trump’s desk.

At the State of the Union, Trump called on Congress to make the institutional investor ban permanent, saying, “homes are for people — that’s what we want. Not homes for corporations.” Senator Scott framed the bill explicitly as fulfilling that promise. The White House has formally thrown its support behind the package.

Senate Majority Leader Thune has said plainly that the President will need to exercise some leadership in the House to get reconciliation done. As long as events in Iran and the SAVE Act don’t consume all the oxygen in Washington, there’s a real shot.

The window is now through early May. After that, the legislative calendar gets crowded, and the moment may pass. Voters struggling to pay bills will remember who had the chance to address housing affordability — and it’s hard to imagine the greatest political calculator of this generation doesn’t know that.

The American Dream Isn’t Dead.

We keep hearing that the American Dream is over. That homeownership is a fantasy. That young people should just accept renting forever and be grateful for it. Own nothing and be happy — WEF nonsense.

That is, of course, a lie.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked by a law that predates the original Star Wars — not the Disney ones, we don’t talk about those.

It’s being blocked by zoning codes that treat working people like eyesores. By a regulatory apparatus that adds cost at every turn and then blames you when it’s unaffordable.

The system is stacked against you. Not because you failed, but because the rules don’t work.

Fifty-five percent of Americans already identify local rules and regulations as a major driver of housing costs. They’re right. And the chassis mandate is proof that the problem doesn’t stop there — it goes all the way to Washington.

We are in a rare moment. A bill with real teeth. Overwhelming support in both chambers. A president who campaigned on affordability. The window is open — but not for long.

Build the Dream exists for moments exactly like this one. To make sure the forgotten men and women of rural America don’t get left behind while Washington argues about everything else.

Follow us. Share this. Help us grow the movement — because the more people who understand what’s happening, the harder it is for Washington to ignore.

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

A few clicks and you’re scrolling through listings, watching prices climb higher and higher. A small house or modest apartment that once would have been a commonplace start to something new, today costs more than most families can reasonably afford. There just isn’t anything close to that magic number for your income… A spot that gives you space for saving money or aggressively paying off your debts.

It’s a strange loop — disbelief paired with a self-inflicted gaslighting. “It can’t be that I have out-of-whack expectations… I feel like what I need here is relatively modest, but these prices are insane.” It always ends in the same way: frustration, at yourself for not making more money, at your society, and maybe at life itself.

In some polling we did this month, we found that 66% of Americans say that housing costs have made it harder to build the kind of life they want. More than half have delayed or changed their life plans because of it, such as moving to get an education or start a job, getting married, or starting a family. This isn’t a fringe experience. It’s the defining financial reality of our time.

Naturally, when things seem so systemically broken, we zoom out to the political, and there we get a long list of hobgoblins to blame for our housing reality: greedy landlords, developers, and corrupt politicians. But that doesn’t really capture it, and for the most part, almost nobody in politics is being straight with you about why housing is the way it is, and how to fix it.

It’s man-made scarcity, perhaps done with the best of intentions, but with a very real and attainable solution. Lemme explain.

What You Actually Want

Here’s what you’re not asking for. You’re not asking for a subsidy. You’re not asking for the government to hand you an apartment or a house for free. You’re not asking anyone to feel sorry for you.

You just want something so very simple: a stable place to live. A future you can plan around. The ability to stay near your family, or a job in a community where you can build your life, without spending every dollar you make just to keep the rain off your head.

That’s it, that’s the whole thing.

New polling we commissioned bears this out, with almost complete clarity. When we asked people why they wanted out of housing affordability, the top answer wasn’t “get rich” or “beat the market.” It was “to afford a stable place to live.” 59% said that. Ahead of buying a home someday, ahead of everything.

The American Dream, in 2026, isn’t a McMansion, though that’s a fine dream for some folks. It’s stability! It’s a future you can picture. It’s the ability to make a plan and have it mean something.

What was once the ambition of every American, our collective Dream as it were, is now increasingly out of reach, and we all know it.

Building the American Dream

So what actually fixes this?

I plan to lay this out in every conceivable dimension over the coming months and years, to make the solutions tangible so we can change things for the better. This work is only possible with your support, so please consider a tax-deductible donation, an investment if you will, so we can amplify your voice and make your American Dream a reality.

To that end, here are some great starting points worth fighting for:

1. Bring back the starter home. You know what a starter home is. It’s a small house, the duplex, the townhome, what housing policy experts often call “the missing middle”. It is what many of us experience as the first rung on the housing ladder to the middle class–one that tens of millions of Americans climbed before the ladder got pulled up. We see this in the generational data — more on that later. But the starter home has disappeared from our communities because in most of the country, it’s just illegal to build them. Zoning codes prohibit them, and when they don’t, lot-size minimums rule them out; when those don’t, parking requirements force siting plans that limit the number of units and keep them expensive; and even when parking requirements aren’t a problem, they are still expensive because building codes require materials that keep things expensive.

2. Let builders build. If you want lower costs, you need more homes. No more paperwork and bureaucratic delays like planning commission debates. More homes, built where people actually want to live.

For example, Minneapolis eliminated single-family-only zoning in 2018. Since then, housing costs there have grown far more slowly than in comparable cities. Houston never had zoning in the first place and has been incredibly well-documented as the most affordable major metropolitan area in America.

And if zoning reform makes you nervous, don’t worry, we did it in my home state of Montana in 2023. We are building like gangbusters, seeing many new housing opportunities arise, and nothing has blown up yet. That’s because we didn’t just blow up our systems of the rule of law; we deconstructed the newer system stacked on top of the American tradition of property rights. We reinvigorated what built America, so we can revive the American dream.

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Why It’s So Hard Right Now

For most of American history, housing developed organically. Cities and towns weren’t the product of a single design imposed from above; they evolved through thousands of property owners responding to supply and demand. A street might contain small homes, duplexes, boarding houses, apartments, and neighborhood shops. Working families could rent rooms, move into modest homes, and gradually work their way up as their circumstances improve.

The crucial element was that entry points existed. Builders could construct smaller homes and denser housing when demand called for it. The ladder had a bottom rung.

Over the 20th century, that changed. Reformers argued that cities should be scientifically managed by planners who could design orderly communities and prevent undesirable forms of growth. Over time, they developed more and more tools to pursue their mission, tools we will show you. These tools are a poison to the American system. We will also show you the antidote.

Here’s what nobody in official Washington wants to say out loud: this is man-made scarcity. Housing is expensive because the rules are designed to keep it expensive.

Not by accident. By design. A system is best judged by what it produces, and the evidence is all around us.

The rules that make it illegal to build a duplex in most American neighborhoods weren’t written by the free market. They were written by planning commissions, city councils, and bureaucratic apparatus built over the last hundred years, built explicitly to control what gets built, where, and for whom.

Think about what that means. Local governments have effectively outlawed the most affordable housing types. They’ve made it a multi-year, multi-hundred-thousand-dollar legal process to build a single apartment building. They’ve effectively given neighbors veto power over what a property owner does on his own land. They’ve created a permission system so byzantine that only large, well-capitalized developers can navigate it — the very people most likely to build luxury units, not starter homes.

In our survey, 55% of Americans agreed that local rules and delays are a major reason housing is expensive. That’s a great start, but those are rookie numbers. Build the Dream exists to get that number to 100% — to expose the real problems, advance real solutions, and build the movement for change.

What is man-made is man-fixable

This crisis is man-made and therefore man-fixable.

There’s no law of physics that says a hardworking 28-year-old can’t afford a one-bedroom apartment in the city where she got her first real job. There’s no natural force that makes it impossible for a young couple to buy a modest house without a combined income in the six figures. These outcomes aren’t fate. They are the downstream consequences of decisions — specific, traceable, reversible decisions — made by governments at every level over many decades.

No law of God says your grandkids have to grow up three states away because your hometown priced them out. Nobody handed down a ruling that says you must leave the people you love — your parents, your siblings, your church, your whole context — because rent kept outpacing your raise. That families get separated this way, that the places that shaped us become places we can no longer afford — that’s not a force of nature. That’s a choice someone made. A rule someone wrote. And a consequence that falls entirely on you.

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

If policy helped create the problem, policy can fix it. Not with a new spending program. Not with rent control, which every economist worth their salt will tell you makes scarcity worse. But by getting out of the way. By repealing the laws that make it illegal to build. By shrinking the permission bureaucracy. By trusting property owners and builders and communities to meet demand the way Americans always have: by building.

The Dream Needs Builders

Here is where most commentary on housing ends with a sigh and vague call for leadership.

But that’s not me, that’s not us.

The man-made scarcity is real, but so is the solution. From states like my home state of Montana, to New Hampshire, Florida, and Texas have already proved that property rights-based housing reform can pass and it can work.

They prove that politicians who lead on it get rewarded for their labor.

What this requires is a movement that understands the problem at its roots. Not just as a supply-and-demand puzzle but as a fundamentally moral problem. A philosophical problem of governance – who decides what, where, and when. A movement based in the American tradition, that the government does not have an unlimited right to tell a property owner what he can and cannot do. Property rights are the foundation of American freedom. It’s the thing that built this country, and it’s what can fix this crisis.

That’s what Build the Dream is for.

We’ll be publishing regular long-form pieces — on the history of how we got here, the policy changes that can fix it, and the politicians blocking the way. We’ll name names. We’ll show our work. And we’ll treat you like an adult capable of handling the actual argument, not a talking-point summary designed to confirm what you already believe.

If you think this generation and everyone after deserves a real shot at building a life in this country — if you believe the American Dream isn’t nostalgia, it’s a birthright being blocked — this is your movement.

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