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.

It is the easiest thing you can do to help us build the movement. Thank you!

A builder pulls up to a half-acre lot on the edge of Boise. Walkable to a school. A grocery store down the road. He has done the math at his kitchen table the night before. He wants to build six small homes. Eleven hundred square feet. Two bedrooms, one bath. The kind of place a young couple buys before they buy something bigger. The kind of place a widow downsizes into. The kind of place a working family scrapes together a down payment for, builds equity in, and trades up from in seven years.

He opens the city’s land development code.

The minimum lot size says he can fit four homes, not six. The setbacks shave fifteen feet off the buildable area of each parcel. The parking minimum requires two off-street spaces per unit, which means the driveway eats half of what’s left. The floor-area ratio caps the footprint, making eliminating some shapes for its footprint and placing a maximum size limit too. The height limit cuts off a second story that would have made the math work anyway.

By the time he closes the codebook, he has room for three homes. Not six. And the only way three homes pencils — given what he paid for the land, what the framing crew charges, what the bank wants on the loan — is if he builds them big. Twenty-four hundred square feet. Four bedrooms. Three baths. Granite. The whole package.

He didn’t want to build that. The young couple he was thinking about can’t afford it. Neither can the widow. But the codebook didn’t ask what he wanted to build. It frankly doesn’t care.

That is the story of American housing in a nutshell, since the explosion of land-use codes of every type over the past 60 years. Every line in that codebook does the same thing — making small homes illegal, making big homes the only thing left to build, and then telling young people that all they need to do to get ahead is work a little harder and stop complaining.

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What’s a Minimum Lot Size?

A minimum lot size is the backdoor to preventing density that zoning doesn’t cover to keep builders and property owners of all types from getting too cheeky to get around the other rules.

It is often layered on top of single-family or multi-family zoning specifically to bar any use of the land that might house too many people too close together.

The policy establishes a floor on how small a place can be for someone to live in it. Want to put in a tiny home? Not here, too small. Want to build a condo for around 2,000 square feet? Sorry, the minimum lot size for this area is 2,500 square feet.

The Defense You’ll Hear

There is a common defense of this arrangement. You’ll hear it from the trade press, economists, planners, and politicians defending the status quo. It goes like this: houses cost more because they are bigger and they have more stuff in them. Granite countertops. Master suites. Three-car garages. Walk-in closets. People want amenities and big houses. Builders deliver. End of story.

It is not the whole story. It is not even most of it.

As with all good defenses, it has some truth. Yes, houses got bigger. The median new home in 1973 was 1,525 square feet. By 2015, it peaked at 2,467. It has settled around 2,300 today. Living space per person in a new home roughly doubled in fifty years, even as the average household shrank.

But what the defense of the status quo misses is that this change in house size in America occurred within a regulatory regime that made the alternative effectively illegal.

In 1980, about 40 percent of newly built single-family homes in this country qualified as starter homes. By 2019, that number had collapsed to roughly 7 percent. In raw production, the country built 418,000 starter homes a year in the late 1970s. By 2020, America had built 65,000. An 84 percent drop in a single category of housing in a single lifetime. Over the same stretch, homes with four or more bedrooms went from one in five new builds to nearly one in two.

The rules did not just make small homes harder to build. They also made larger homes easier to finance. Builders build what the rules allow and what the financing will support. Families buy what is available. It appears to be a consumer preference, but it is actually 2 forces working together to drive a consumer trend.

The Houston Experiment

The chief economist at Zillow, Orphe Divounguy, put it plainly when mortgage rates doubled in 2022, and builders tried to pivot to smaller homes: “When a builder goes in there and tries to actually build something that would sell in today’s market, they just can’t.”

They tried. The rules said no.

There is one major American city that took a different path. I’ve talked about Houston before, but it’s worth noting that it’s never been Shangri-La. They never had zoning but they do have minimum lot sizes; still, Houston proves demonstrative.

In 1998, Houston cut its minimum lot size from 5,000 to 1,400 square feet within the I-610 loop — the inner ring highway that circles the central city and older neighborhoods. The success of the initial reform— measured in construction activity, price effects, and household savings — gave Houston the evidence base to expand it citywide in 2013. In 2013, it extended the reform citywide. That is a 72% increase in the amount of land the law requires you to control before you are allowed to build a single home. The pattern repeated: where the reform applied, smaller homes appeared

The 1998 reform alone produced more than 40,000 new townhomes that sell for roughly 37 percent less than other single-family homes in the city.

Emily Hamilton at the Mercatus Center wrote the definitive academic study of what Houston did and what came of it. Her finding stated plainly: when Houston made small homes legal again, builders built small homes again, and households kept more money.

“Houston gave us something the rest of the country doesn’t have. A clear before and after. We can see what the market produced when the minimum lot size was 5,000 square feet, and what it produced when those rules were relaxed. Builders shifted toward smaller-lot construction almost immediately. And the affordability gains showed up at the household level — not in white papers, in people’s monthly payments.”

— Emily Hamilton, Mercatus Center, on Build the Dream

Per Hamilton’s research, a 2022 follow-up study estimated that the typical Houston household received the equivalent of an $18,000 windfall from the 1998 reform. As with any price-savings mechanism, lower-income households benefited more than higher-income households.

Houston is not perfect. No city is. But Houston ran the natural experiment that most American cities refused to run. The result was not chaos. The result was more housing.

The System Is Stacked

Here is what the amenities defense gets wrong at its core. The choice between a 1,200-square-foot starter home and a 2,500-square-foot house with three bathrooms and granite countertops is not a choice American families have been allowed to make. The first option is functionally illegal in most American cities. The second option is the only thing builders are permitted to construct profitably.

When you eliminate the cheaper alternative, the expensive product becomes the only product. That is a permission system that only appears to be a market.

The median age of a first-time homebuyer in this country is now 40. An all-time high. First-time buyers, who historically made up about 40 percent of home sales, made up 21 percent in 2025. What we have built is a country in which the entry-level homeowner is forty years old, finally arriving with the down payment for the 2,400-square-foot house his parents bought at twenty-eight.

The system asks the next generation why they are not keeping up. The answer is in the codebook, the government rules that prevent housing especially for the least well off trying to buy.

Bring Back Starter Homes

Houston shows the path. So does Auburn, Maine, Florida, Idaho, Texas, Connecticut, and New Hampshire — finally clearing out the rules that made first homes impossible to build.

This is not experimental policy. This is the policy that produced every neighborhood your grandparents bought into. The postwar Levittown. The 1960s Cape Cod. The 1970s ranch. The homes that made the American middle class possible the first time around were built under codes that let small be small.

We do not need a new system. We need the rules out of the way of the system we used to have.

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

Bring back the starter home — the kind of place regular people used to be able to afford. Let builders build the homes that families can actually buy. Let the next generation get a foothold the way the last three generations did, before the codebook ate the ladder.

That is what housing freedom looks like. That is what life freedom looks like.

That is what we are here to build.

David Modica is a man from Marblehead, Massachusetts, who went viral a few weeks ago for speaking to his town’s planning committee. He described, with hilarious surgical precision and in a very Massachusetts style, what paperwork compliance looks like. Or rather, what appears to be a scam.

Here is the background: In 2021, Massachusetts passed the MBTA Communities Act (also called 3A). The law mandates that 177 towns—including Marblehead—rezone at least one area for multifamily housing (three or more units) by right, or face millions in lost state grants and potential lawsuits.

It’s a mandate approach. The state said: You will allow density, or we will take money and sue you.

Marblehead tried the honest path first. In 2023 and 2024, town planners proposed rezoning actual neighborhoods, but voters rejected the plans. They didn’t want apartments near their homes. They didn’t want their neighbors to have the power to build more.

So the planning board got creative.

Instead, Marblehead rezoned 32 acres of a private golf course—Tedesco Country Club—plus a small patch of Broughton Road. Technically compliant. Practically useless. The golf course owners aren’t building apartments, and the rest already have townhouses. So housing supply will not budge. The state law is satisfied, but the housing scarcity problem remains.

David saw it immediately. You can’t build houses on a golf course. There were already townhouses on Broughton Road—this designation changed nothing. So what was the vote actually for?

He said it. “We’re trying to make sure we build no houses.”

“Are we trying to do nothing? Because it seems like we’re doing nothing.”

Why Mandates Fail (And Why Locals Get Away With It)

Town officials (a planning board) respond to the people who show up to meetings—property owners, current residents, people with skin in the game. They don’t respond to renters who don’t live there yet. They don’t respond to future residents. These people have no vote. They fund no campaigns.

The core problem is best understood through public choice economics. Politicians, like everyone, respond to incentives. In many towns, there is a tremendous disincentive to restore property rights because they perceive that not doing so maximizes their reelection odds by catering to current constituents.

When a state mandate says “rezone or lose money,” towns will rezone. But they’ll rezone in a way that satisfies the letter of the law while gutting its purpose. A golf course rezoning is compliant. It’s also useless for the spirit of the law.

The mandate approach assumes towns will act wisely under pressure. They won’t. They’ll act narrowly—doing the minimum required to avoid punishment while preserving what matters to the political process, not necessarily what would be best for the individuals who live in their town.

The Empowerment Approach

Contrast the mandate approach with solving the problem through property rights-based empowerment. Empowerment reallocates power from the locality back to the individual property owner. It says: you can build on your land without asking permission from the planning committee.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. Eliminate the variance process, scrap minimum lot sizes and parking mandates, allow ADUs, and let any owner build 3+ units by right if it meets basic fire and infrastructure codes.

This flips the incentive structure. When an owner can build without a vote—when the permission system gets out of the way—housing gets built regardless of whether the town council likes it. Empowerment works better because builders and property owners respond to incentives as well. When the permission system is the bottleneck—when you need a vote, a variance, a conditional use permit, public hearings, legal fees—builders don’t build. When they can build by right, they do.

Massachusetts 3A tried to thread this needle. It’s a mandate that, in theory, results in more housing but fails to empower in reality. So it fails to resolve the core barrier: the political question of who is empowered to do what.

Following His lead

David’s sardonic and Socratic delivery was hilarious, but he wasn’t joking—and Marblehead isn’t alone.

This same quiet sleight-of-hand is playing out in dozens of other towns right now. Rezoned industrial parks no one will touch. Empty lots behind shopping centers. Remote parcels that will never see a shovel. The law gets checked off, the grants stay safe, and nobody outside the planning-board meeting ever hears about it.

We only spotted this one because a single resident stood up and said the quiet part out loud on camera.

So here’s the ask: if your town just pulled a similar move—rezoned a golf course, a gravel pit, or some other nowhere-land to “comply”—tell us. Drop the details in the comments, shoot us a message, or send a screenshot of the town meeting vote. The more of these we surface, the harder it gets for any of them to pretend it’s working.

Because the American Dream isn’t dead, it’s blocked. We will unblock it when we empower the everyday land owner to solve the problems his community faces. That starts with exposing the government. Help us out.

If you don’t know, FreedomFest is the largest gathering of the liberty movement in the country. It runs July 8–11 in Las Vegas at Caesars Forum — and this year is a big one. It opens on the 250th anniversary of the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. They have Dean Cain (Superman!) doing a dramatic reading of the Declaration. Glenn Beck is running an immersive history presentation. Steve Forbes is returning as George Washington. And a formal Independence Ball to close the week.

It sounds like they are pulling out all the stops. You don’t want to miss it.

The speaker list looks great, too — Senator Rand Paul, Kennedy, Steve Forbes, Adam Carolla, Rob Schneider, Marissa Streit, Nick Shirley, Sharon Lechter, and Patrick Byrne. Hundreds more across four days of debates, workshops, and the kind of hallway conversations that actually matter.

And then there’s me. No, really, they’re gonna let me speak on our vision for bringing back the American Dream. I’ll be on stage representing you! Talking about why the American Dream feels so far out of reach — and what we do about it. The oldest fight in human history. The one between people who want to build something and the politicians who decide whether they’re allowed to.

Here’s the BTD Exclusive Deal:

Use code DREAM100 at checkout for $100 off any Regular Attendee, Attendee Plus, Pros Pass, or VIP Full Pass. Pick your pass first. Apply the code at the end.

👉 Register here

This is a real discount, not a “valued at” gimmick. FreedomFest extended it specifically to the Build the Dream community, and it stacks on whatever pass tier you want.

There are a lot of ways to mark America’s 250th. Parades. Cookouts. The standard stuff. All good.

But once a year, the people who really care about freedom — the entrepreneurs, the writers, the policy folks, the activists, the weirdos (like me), and the believers — gather in one place to argue about what the next 250 years should look like.

I’d like you there. I’d like to shake your hand and thank you in person for subscribing and sharing in this effort with me.

Wednesday night, the House delivered, but on their terms.

House Republican leadership posted their amendment, and the worst provision in the bill — the 7-year forced selloff that froze the build-to-rent market and would have cost 72,000 rental units a year — is gone. Build-to-rent gets a clean exemption. So does renovate-to-rent. So do affordable housing projects using LIHTC.

That clears the runway for what actually matters in this bill. And there are many great reforms that remain, like NEPA reform.

I’ve focused more on Section 301, which repeals the 1974 federal mandate that forces every manufactured home in America to be bolted to a permanent steel chassis—a dolly that adds $10,000 to the most affordable form of homeownership left in this country, especially for rural Americans.

ICYMI: we covered exactly why on Build the Dream:

The only question left is whether the Senate accepts the fix. Senator Warren helped write the selloff rule. She may not want to let it go.

She should. Americans cannot afford to wait.

It is the easiest thing you can do to help us fix the housing crisis. Thank you!

President Trump’s economists just put out a report.

And it has a number in it I want every conservative in America to see.

They call it the bureaucrat tax.

It’s calculated by adding up local fees, permit delays, zoning restrictions, and code mandates. When you stack them all up, they add over $100,000 to the cost of building a single home.

The bureaucrat tax should reset our understanding of housing economics. It is making the cost of a new house 24% higher and adds 41% to the cost of building an apartment.

Nearly half the cost of an apartment is getting government permission, as reflected in the tax and its name.

So that tells us what is not the primary driver of the out-of-this-world, hard-to-afford housing prices. It’s not lumber, labor, greedy developers, or dastardly landlords.

It’s the permission system.

A builder submits plans. Every code met. Every box checked. Every requirement satisfied. He can still be denied. Not because anything is wrong. Because many planning boards across the country have discretionary authority to say no for any reason — or no reason at all.

That’s the racket. That’s who’s charging you $100,000 to own a home.

And the President’s own economists just put it in writing. Very encouraging to see.

What Your Gut Already Knew

Something always felt off about the standard housing story, didn’t it?

The left tells you it’s greedy landlords, Wall Street, or dastardly developers. That “late stage” capitalism is why a 40 year old middle income millenial can’t afford a starter home. We are told that the answer is more government programs, more subsidies, more “affordability” mandates written by people who have never poured a foundation in their lives.

Your gut said no, and it was right.

President Trump’s own economists are confirming what working Americans have felt in their bones for thirty years. The housing crisis is not natural; it’s man-made scarcity. Built permit by permit, board meeting by board meeting, by a professional class that decided their home values mattered more than your kid being able to buy one.

The answer is less government. Not more.

Cut the bureaucrat tax, the report says, and we could add 13.2 million homes to the housing stock. No subsidies. No federal housing projects. No Mamdani-AOC-style wealth transfers.

Just getting the government out of the way and returning to the American way of doing things: building.

What About Immigration?

Now, let me address the elephant in the room.

A lot of good people on our side believe the housing crisis is primarily an immigration story. The theory is that if you close the border, deport the lawbreakers, and housing fixes itself.

The border fight is righteous. I’m with you. Every reason to close it. Every reason to deport criminals. Every reason to enforce the law we already have on the books. I’m down to clown. But President Trump’s own economists were honest. They named two drivers of the housing crisis, and one is much bigger than the other.

The Biden-era immigration surge pushed real house prices up 3.2% from 2022 to 2024. For sure, immigration drives demand and matters.

But also, the bureaucrat tax has been in place since before Biden and has been compounding in effects for decades. If you’re thinking clearly about it, it seems obvious that a two-year demand surge is a secondary-order cause of the primary. The bureaucrat tax is an ever-worsening century-old drag on every family that has ever tried to buy a home in this country.

I’m not asking you to stop caring about the border. I’m asking you to see the bigger villain standing right behind it. I hope President Trump meets every success in his immigration policy—as I understand it—but let’s not kid ourselves. We won’t solve housing without substantial reform to how we build in America.

A Hundred-Year-Old Racket

It’s key to understand that this villain isn’t new.

The planning class driving the bureaucrat tax didn’t show up in 2021. They didn’t show up with Obama. They’ve been at this since the 1920s — Progressive Era bureaucrats who decided that experts with degrees should decide where you live, what you build, and who gets in. A hundred years of stacking rules on rules. A hundred years of telling American families that their land isn’t really theirs until a board signs off, getting worse and worse, more hubris and power hungry year after year.

That’s the system President Trump’s economists just put a $100,000 price tag on.

Think of it like the FDA, the NIH, and all the agencies that have lost so much public credibility since COVID. Prior to 2020, most Americans thought of them as a largely benign institution. Until we realized they were so profoundly corrupted by their powers that they couldn’t be trusted.

I’m here to tell you today: the same philosophy that created the FDA created your local planning board, and they are just as human, just as prone to the same errors of power and miscalculation.

President Trump is Making Moves

You gotta give President Trump his due on this report because they kill it.

• He ended Biden’s coercive green-energy mandates at HUD and USDA — the CEA estimates that alone shaves $31,000 off the cost of every federally financed home.

• He buried the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which forced localities to waste resources drafting so-called equity plans just to qualify for federal dollars. Good riddance.

That’s real progress on the part of the problem Washington actually controls.

And the report doesn’t stop there. It lays out a blueprint every state legislature in America should be reading.

• By-right approval. If your plans comply with the code, you get your permit. Full stop. No vote. No public hearing. No neighbor-pressure campaign where the loudest person in the room gets to veto your property rights.

• Capped timelines. 60 days maximum. The bureaucrat doesn’t get to run out the clock.

• Capped fees. The permission fee can’t be weaponized as a back-door tax on building.

• Third-party inspections. So a builder isn’t held hostage waiting six months for the one county inspector.

The point of all of it is to make the permission system predictable. That matters more than it sounds. Uncertainty is a tax too. When a builder can’t know whether his permit takes six weeks or three years, he prices that risk into the project — or he walks away. And the families who needed that housing never know what they lost. When government inspectors take forever, it adds cost and so on.

But the Report Doesn’t Go Far Enough

These are good reforms. I think we’d be far better off if more states implemented them. I’ll be honest, though, they don’t go far enough. They make the permission system faster but they don’t end it.

And the permission system is the problem.

The real fix — the one that unlocks thirteen million homes — is older than zoning itself. It’s called property rights. It’s both a simple, more radical, and a more conservative solution to unlocking those 12 million new homes.

Returning to property rights means returning the core job of local government to protecting people from genuine harm, not centrally planning all land in their area. They should be making sure your neighbor doesn’t build a tallow-rendering plant next door and flooding your neighborhood with a smell that imposes real costs on people.

But gosh darn it, let a family build an accessory dwelling unit to house a grandmother without having to beg a board for permission. Let that builder add a few units to his mixed-use development plan.

That’s not radical. That’s America before the Progressive Era got its hands on your deed.

Texas Isn’t Waiting

Here’s the good news. Some red states aren’t waiting on Washington.

In 2025, Texas passed the most sweeping pro-housing reform in its modern history. Four bills. Signed by Governor Abbott. Every one of them is tearing through the permission system, choking the state’s fastest-growing cities.

The headliner is Senate Bill 840. It ended the rezoning shakedown in one stroke. If you own commercial land in a major Texas city, you can build housing on it — by right. No public hearing. No supermajority vote. No years of limbo waiting for a board to return your calls. A vacant strip mall in Frisco that could produce 82 units under the old rules can now produce 156.

That’s ending the bureaucrat tax. That’s real.

And Texas isn’t alone. Florida’s Live Local Act overrode local zoning statewide — Miami alone has 20,000 apartments in the pipeline as a result. Montana passed the country’s most sweeping red-state zoning overhaul in 2023 and just won at its own Supreme Court. Tennessee and Kentucky have moved too.

The playbook exists. It works. Red states are running it.

Whoever Solves Housing, Wins

Here’s the political reality.

Since the pandemic, Americans have ranked cost of living as their single top concern. Above immigration. Above foreign policy. Every region. Every demographic.

Whoever solves housing wins. Full stop.

And the conservative movement is uniquely built for this fight. Because the villain isn’t capitalism. It isn’t builders. It isn’t families. It isn’t even your landlord, not really.

It’s a hundred-year-old bureaucratic priesthood that decided your land isn’t really yours — and an American tradition of property rights that says otherwise.

President Trump’s economists just put the price tag on it. $100,000 per home. Thirteen million homes locked up. An entire generation told the American Dream isn’t for them.

That’s the MADA agenda. Make the American Dream Again.

An America where you work hard, follow the rules, and afford a place to build a life — that was always here. It just needed a President willing to say it plainly, and a conservative movement willing to take on the planning class that’s been blocking it.

The American Dream isn’t dead.

It’s being blocked by the bureaucrat tax.

And we can unblock it.

He found a 13.55-acre parcel at 699 Newnan Crossing Bypass in Newnan, Georgia. The land was already zoned General Commercial. He didn’t need a handout. He didn’t ask for a subsidy. He saw workers near jobs and retail with nowhere affordable to live, and he proposed a solution: 272 apartments, 12 townhomes, and 7,500 square feet of new commercial space.

The Planning Commission voted unanimously to deny it. The City Council followed through on February 26, 2026.

The lot is still empty. The workers are still driving.

Think about what just happened. A private citizen, risking his own money, on land he controls, responding to real market demand, was told no. Not because the land was unsafe. Not because the infrastructure would collapse. Because the old rules say commercial zones stay commercial. Because a board of planners decided they knew better than the man writing the checks.

This is not bad luck. This is the rule in most American cities.

The People Paying the Price

Every day that housing isn’t built near jobs, real people bear the cost. Workers lose hours in traffic that never should have existed. Families miss dinners. Kids miss bedtime stories. Paychecks that should be building savings disappear into gas tanks instead.

That’s a conservative argument. Strong families, time at home, money that stays in your pocket instead of your fuel tank — that’s what’s at stake when builders are blocked from putting housing near jobs. This isn’t about forced density, fifteen-minute cities, or whatever urban planners are selling this year. The left will take this same problem and use it to justify telling you where to live, making driving expensive, and designing cities around their preferences instead of yours. That is tyranny dressed up as environmentalism.

The conservative answer is simpler. Let builders build where the market tells them to. When housing prices rise along commercial corridors near job centers, some people choose to live there. Others won’t. Nobody gets forced. But the option exists — and right now it doesn’t, because the zoning rules say no before the builder can even ask the question. Nobody is saying you have to live near work. Some people like the space. Some people like the drive. That’s fine. But right now, in most American cities, you don’t get to choose — because the housing near the jobs was never built. The choice was made for you, by a planning board, before you ever showed up.

What happened in Newnan is that shortage made concrete and personal. The homes were practically ready. The demand was real. Someone was willing to build them. A government board said no, and nobody driving two hours to work got a vote.

A Rule Twisted Beyond Recognition

For most of American history, mixed use wasn’t a policy debate — it was just how towns worked. Shops on the ground floor, families living above them. That’s how Main Street was built. Single-use zoning came along and flipped it, and it was built on a real insight: you probably shouldn’t put apartments above a fat rendering plant or next to heavy industry.

But somewhere along the way the rule stopped distinguishing between a steel mill and a coffee shop.

A commercial zone is a commercial zone. No housing. Doesn’t matter what’s there. That is the logic that left 13 acres of commercially zoned land sitting empty next to jobs and retail in Newnan, Georgia — because a rule written for one problem got applied to everything, forever.

Who Decides

What makes Newnan particularly revealing is this: the owner already had General Commercial zoning. He still had to file a rezoning request just to unlock the right to add residential units on his own property. The board denied him on the grounds that “reasonable economic use” was still possible under the old rules. In other words, you can still use your land for something — just not what you want to use it for.

In Newnan, the median household earns $82,292 a year. Average rent for a one- or two-bedroom apartment ranges from $1,600 to $1,700 a month. A local developer looked at that commercially zoned lot next to jobs and retail and concluded it would pencil out — 272 apartments, 12 townhomes. Maybe he knew the workers personally. Maybe he ran the numbers cold. It doesn’t matter. He was the one who would go bankrupt if he was wrong.

Yet one councilman, Jim Thomasson, responded: “I don’t want us to get ahead of ourselves and have too much supply.”

The councilman believes he knows better than the builder what the market will bear. He doesn’t. The builder knows his market — who’s renting, what they’ll pay, and whether the units will fill. He’s not working from theory. He’d better be right, or he goes broke. If the councilman is wrong, nothing happens to him. We’re letting the wrong person decide — and getting the inevitable consequence: high prices and an empty lot.

That is central planning in a sentence. A board of people who own none of the land, risked none of the capital, and will bear none of the consequences — substituting their judgment for the builder’s. The Progressive Era didn’t die. It just moved to the Planning Commission.

“So if we wait for these guys (government) to decide when they’re (builders) going to build, we’re going to be waiting a long time before we do anything.”

– Councilman Guillaume, the sole city councilman who voted for the project

A Ladder to Climb

There was another argument against the project. More insidious than the first.

The developer, they said, was planning to charge too much in rent. It sounds compassionate. It isn’t. Believe it or not, building more housing — including at the top of the market — lowers the cost of housing for everyone.

Picture a ladder. At the top are the newest, nicest units — brand new construction, fresh paint, the highest rents in town. At the bottom are the oldest, more worn-down units — the ones a young couple or a working family can actually afford. In between is everything else.

When you add a rung at the top, people move up. The family in the mid-range unit moves into the nicer one. Their old place opens up for the family one rung below. That family’s place opens up for someone else. All the way down. Every new unit at the top pulls the whole ladder forward.

Economists have a name for this. They call it filtering. It’s not a theory somebody dreamed up last week. It’s been documented in the housing literature for seventy-five years.

“It is a well-recognized phenomenon that housing tends to move downward in the quality and value scales as it ages. Thus housing that is introduced at or near the top descends gradually through successively lower value strata… Thus, used homes would be released to be passed down to successively lower levels until the effect reached the bottom of the market. This process is popularly referred to as filtering down.”

— Richard Ratcliff, Urban Land Economics (1949)

Now flip it. When you block a rung at the top — when you tell a builder his rents are too high and send him home — the family that would have moved up stays put. The unit below them never opens. The family below that stays put, too. The whole ladder freezes. Nobody moves. Nobody upgrades. Nobody climbs. So the inflationary pressures can’t be fought by increased supply and filtering.

And the family at the bottom of the ladder — the one the council claims to be protecting — gets nothing. No new unit opens for them. No downward pressure on the price they’re paying. They just stay where they are, paying what they’re paying, for a unit that keeps getting older while rents keep going up.

The councilman who voted no thought he was protecting working people from housing they couldn’t afford. What he actually did was make sure the housing they can afford never opened up.

Other States Figured This Out

Florida passed the Live Local Act in 2023 and has strengthened it every year since. The law lets developers bypass zoning restrictions on properties zoned commercial or industrial — no rezoning required, no public hearing, no planning board vote. The state decided that commercial land near jobs is exactly where housing should go, and that local boards had proven they couldn’t be trusted to say yes. The latest update passed the Florida legislature in March 2026.

Florida’s bill isn’t perfect. It requires 40% of units to be priced below market for thirty years — which jams the ladder I just described. Some builders will just walk away when the math doesn’t work and we’ll get less housing then we otherwise might.

I’d rather it didn’t have that provision. But compared to where Florida was before — where commercial land stayed commercial, period — this is a good step toward property rights. A partial win that unlocks thousands of homes beats a pure principle that unlocks none.

Montana passed reforms allowing more housing types by right on commercially zoned land — without requiring owners to beg a board for permission. And here’s what that means in a place like Bozeman or Missoula: every apartment that goes up on a commercial corridor is a house that doesn’t go up on a mountainside. Density in town means open land stays open. The elk stay where the elk belong. The ecosystems that make Montana special don’t get carved into cul-de-sacs.

This is a conservation point, not an environmental one. If you actually care about the land — not just as a talking point, but as a place you hunt and fish and raise your kids near — then housing on commercial corridors isn’t a threat to Montana. It’s how Montana stays Montana.

The pattern is the same everywhere it works: get out of the way, and builders build. Keep the permission system in place, and you get empty lots next to full job centers, workers driving two hours, and families eating dinner at 9pm.

The Bottom Line

Bennett Wooten had the land. He had the plan. He had the market demand. He had the capital. And a government board — people who own nothing, risk nothing, and will answer for nothing — told him no.

The lot sits empty. The workers keep driving. And somewhere in Newnan, a family is eating dinner at 9pm because that’s when dad finally got home.

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

These rules were written by people. They can be rewritten by people. Other states have done it. The only question is whether we have the will to demand it.

I’m David Rand from the Land Liberty Movement. This is Build the Dream.

If this resonates, subscribe. Share it. Support the Land Liberty Movement so we can keep exposing the problem and pushing for real solutions.

Let’s build the American Dream together.

Heads Up: A quick-response series from Build the Dream—unfiltered takes on developing stories.

The Head’s Up this week is in my backyard — Bozeman, Montana — and the right just embarrassed itself on a housing story that I gotta highlight. What played out here over the weekend is a microcosm of a much larger problem. And if we don’t solve it, we will lose our future in every sense of the word.

What just happened in Bozeman

On Friday, Gallatin County and the City of Bozeman broke ground on a project called Hidden Creek. 182 apartments. Five buildings. Set aside, in perpetuity, for renters earning 30, 60, and 70 percent of the area median income. It’s funded through the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program and propped up by money from roughly twelve different public and private sources — including about $4.5 million from the county and the city.

Why this isn’t the Build the Dream answer

I want to be clear about my point of view on government-subsidized housing. I believe it is immoral, doesn’t solve the problem, and creates more problems. Let me say plainly why.

Hidden Creek is the local government picking winners. It uses your tax dollars and federal tax credits to build a small number of units that are walled off from the rest of the housing market forever. The rent isn’t set by what regular people are willing to pay or what builders are willing to risk. It’s set by Washington’s AMI calculation and a deed restriction that lasts until the heat death of the universe.

It’s redistribution. It’s money out of taxpayers’ pockets, handed to whoever can fill out the application, with minimal federal oversight and repeated cases of fraud across the country.

And it won’t even work.

We’ve known this for decades. In a 2005 study published in the Journal of Public Economics, Wharton’s Todd Sinai and Joel Waldfogel found that government housing subsidies don’t actually increase the housing stock — they merely substitute it for private construction. Follow-up research on the LIHTC program estimated crowd-out as high as 70 percent. HUD’s own literature review admits it: “the long run net effect on housing supply is less than the number of subsidized units.”

Translating that: when the government drops a subsidy into a housing market, private builders mostly stop building the units they would have built anyway. Total supply barely moves; it may even be less than it otherwise would have been. The overall price level — what your neighbor pays for a one-bedroom — does not come down.

So who benefits? A small number of lottery winners who land a unit in the subsidized project. A handful of developers and tax-credit syndicators get to collect fees from the federal tax expenditure. Banks that buy the credits to lower their own tax bills. Local politicians who get to take credit, create a constituency, graft, and pull.

That’s why they spend our property tax dollars on this rather than cutting property taxes by spending less.

Who pays? Everyone else.

Federal taxpayers bear the cost of the tax credit and the COVID-era stimulus dollars. Yes, they are still just sitting around like a ticking inflation bomb of newly created money. Cash from the same printing press that caused housing inflation in the first place and continues to create problems in the economy.

And the renters competing for market-rate apartments get no relief at all. They keep paying inflated rent on a price-inflated supply that the subsidy program promised to fix and didn’t.

This is: Tax everyone. Inflate everyone. Help a few.

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The right lit up — and shot the wrong target

Over the weekend, several right-leaning accounts on X went after this story hard. Some were very reasonable in expressing concerns about inter and extrastate migration to Montana and Montana losing its character as a result. But some began using it as an example of why the work of the Frontier Institute —Montana’s leader in property-rights-based housing reform — and that somehow, this is all a result of the Montana Miracle.1

They didn’t train their fire on the actual policy problems of the subsidized project. They fired instead at the entire agenda of a market-based, property rights-based housing reform approach. This is a solution that we’ve seen grow in popularity in many states. From first movers in Montana to more recently in Texas, Idaho, and Florida, all are heading in that direction with others.

But this approach to housing reform and the Frontier Institute had nothing to do with Hidden Creek; all of the statutory authority and government policy that allows for subsidized housing precedes the housing reform packages of 2023 and ‘25. In fact, part of the Montana Miracle reforms included banning inclusionary zoning – a specific kind of subsidized housing– and ending rent control.

Principle & Progressivism

You cannot win a policy fight if you cannot tell friend from foe.

That’s what you’re watching with this story and the circular firing squad afterward. Accounts with hundreds of thousands of impressions can’t distinguish between a government tax-credit project and a property rights organization. They sound similar. Both contain the word “housing”. Both involve buildings. Case closed, fire away.

They are opposites.

One uses your tax dollars to build a permanently price-controlled island. The other says: Get out of the way and let your neighbor build an ADU if he wants to.

One is the government deciding what your community looks like. The other is your community deciding for itself, one decision made in a state of personal liberty, at a time.

If the right cannot make that distinction, the right will lose every housing fight in America, and soon thereafter every election in America. And it will deserve it because it has lost the plot on what principles we are attempting to conserve, and it will lose any political ability to solve actual social problems.

The Lesson

The Montana Miracle is a revival of the Western tradition’s basic tenets. It is so ironic that some influencer “conservatives” would oppose them because lowering prices in Bozeman, thanks to market processes, might allow - not just native Montanans - to live here comfortably but also newcomers.

Don’t get me wrong, in many ways, I wish Montana had stayed my family’s secret spot, too. I’m very concerned about the growth of cartel activity in my town. About the sudden spike of non-English speakers and the politics that come with a bunch of people from the coasts moving here. Although we’ve been talking about that problem in Montana since before 2012, it appears to have made us more partisan and more consistently team Republican, which has its own dangers for conservatives.

Sure. We can take steps to address some of those problems, but we can’t bar Coloradans or Washingtonians from moving to Montana; the Constitution doesn’t allow it. The best localities can do about illegal immigration is work with ICE, which, unfortunately, Bozeman’s city government refuses to do.

Should we not leverage conservativism to serve the people of Montana? Can we not take on additional efforts that will enable the everyday citizens to solve the many challenges this new era has given us? What if we could do this by leaning into our philosophy rather than away from it? The solution from the critics appears to be to do nothing and allow Montanans to just suffer with reduced economic opportunity as rents skyrocket and mortgages become absurd.

Well, I’m from here, my children are here, and I refuse to do nothing.

I hope to see a future where the right fires its criticism at planning boards, mandates on free enterprise, and the decade-long permitting fights that created the problem. Not at the property rights organizations doing the actual work of unblocking American housing from the disaster of scientific progressivism.

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

And we are never going to unblock it if we can’t distinguish between redistribution welfarism and Western tradition property rights.

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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