She did exactly what she was told to do. She put her name on the waitlist for subsidized housing. As a jobless mother of three, she figured she’d be near the top of anyone’s list.

Weeks went by. Then months. Then more than a year. Nobody called.

Here’s how Ruth actually got her family a home. She took a job at a doughnut shop. She opened a rental listings site. She found a three-bedroom house for $1,600 a month. She applied, and she moved in within a week. Her own summary: “This was way easier because the market had gone down.” (Wall Street Journal)

No caseworker. No income verification. No sitting across from a government office explaining your work history and your finances so somebody can decide whether you deserve help. A landlord had an empty house, Ruth needed one, and they made a deal.

The average income-restricted three-bedroom in the Portland metro rents for about $1,800, according to Yardi Matrix data cited by The Journal.

A private landlord beat the government program. On price and on speed.

The Journal ran her story on September 25 under this headline: “Portland Real Estate Is Such a Mess That All Housing Is Affordable Housing.”

A mess. A mother gets her kids out of a relative’s living room and into their own house in seven days, for less than the subsidized rent, and the paper of record for American capitalism calls it a mess.

So ask the obvious question. A mess for whom?

The bet Portland made

For most of the last decade, Portland ran on a simple theory. Rent only goes up. People without much money will never keep pace. So the only humane answer is for government to build subsidized units and put people on a waiting list once those units fill up. And they do fill up – usually – because who doesn’t want free money for your rent?

The city took that theory seriously. Portland declared a housing state of emergency in 2015. Voters then approved a city housing bond in 2016 and a regional Metro bond in 2018, worth hundreds of millions of dollars in total, to build income-restricted apartments.

That was a bad bet from the start. A subsidized apartment costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to build, takes years to open, and houses one family off a list. Meanwhile, the shortage underneath kept growing. When Tina Kotek took office as governor, the state estimated Oregon was short about 140,000 homes (KOIN).

Portland spent a fortune managing the shortage. Nobody in that system got paid to end it.

Only one thing ends a housing shortage: more homes.

What happened when Oregon built

Oregon added roughly 45,000 multifamily units between 2021 and 2025, concentrated in Portland and Bend, according to an analysis of Apartment List data published by the Portland Area Rental Owners Association.

Plenty of those were the new towers with rooftop decks and dog wash stations, the kind of building activists call “luxury housing” and show up at city council to stop. They matter anyway. When a buyer or renter with a six-figure salary moves into the new building, he leaves his ten-year-old apartment behind. Someone else moves into that one and leaves her older place behind. Down the chain it goes. Every new front door, even an expensive one, loosens up the whole city.

Build enough of them and the balance of power flips. Landlords stop picking tenants. Tenants start picking landlords.

That’s Portland now. The median rent on a new lease in the Portland metro fell 1.8 percent year over year to roughly $1,600, the largest drop among West Coast metros, per Apartment List data reported by Axios. Statewide, Oregon’s median rent posted its first year-over-year decline since 2020 (PAROA). Roughly 40 percent of Portland’s market-rate apartments now rent within 15 percent of nearby income-restricted units, according to Yardi Matrix, and new luxury buildings are offering months of free rent and still sitting partly empty.

People who qualify for income-assisted housing are competing with folks who earn six figures for a nice place to live because it’s affordable. That’s the “mess”? Seems like a good thing.

Why the subsidized apartment can cost more

There’s a second half to this story that almost never gets explained.

Subsidized rent in America doesn’t track what apartments actually cost. It tracks a formula. Most new subsidized rentals are financed through the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, created by Congress in the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (HUD). Rent caps on those units are pegged to area median income. When local incomes rise, the ceiling rises automatically, whether or not anyone would pay that much on the open listing sites.

So in Portland, rents on regular apartments went flat because there were finally enough homes to go around. Rents on subsidized apartments kept climbing. Washington’s formula raised the ceiling every year, and many of those buildings raised their rents right up to it.

Just east of Portland, in Gresham, federal rules cap a tax-credit two-bedroom at $1,675 a month. Zillow puts a comparable unsubsidized apartment at $1,525 (Street Roots/OPB). In Gresham, the subsidized apartment is allowed to cost more.

Let’s get this straight. A program built to save poor families money. Allowed to charge them more than the listing across the street. After making them prove they’re don’t have the resources.

The investors get the tax credit. The developer gets a fee. The politician gets a ribbon to cut. Everybody in the deal comes out ahead except the family it was supposedly built for.

That family pays the premium. That’s government charity. That’s central planning: formulas control the outcomes; people and lives are just variables in steering the economy; results are a distraction because all that matters is the intention.

Population Decline

There’s reasonable pushback here, and it deserves a straight answer. People did leave Portland too.

Multnomah County lost 13,900 residents, about 1.7 percent of its population, between 2020 and 2024. It was one of only two Oregon counties with negative net migration over that stretch, losing 15,800 people to out-migration. The Portland metro as a whole also had negative net migration, and its small population gain came entirely from births outnumbering deaths (Oregon Employment Department).

So Portland had softer demand and a supply surge at the same time. The story isnt merely a question of supply. The real question is what else matters.

Demand in Bend went up. But Bend also built. The city went from fewer than 5,000 apartments before the pandemic to more than 8,000, and 2025 was on track to add more new units than any year in its history (Bend Bulletin). Rents spiked when remote workers poured in, peaking around $2,280 in August 2021. Then the new buildings opened. Today the median new lease runs about $1,750, down 23 percent from that peak (Apartment List). People didn’t stop wanting to live in Bend. Bend just built enough homes.

On the other side sits Eugene. Lane County issued fewer multifamily permits than almost any comparable market, and since January 2020 Eugene’s rents have climbed 26 percent, faster than the national increase of about 20 percent. Portland’s rose 2 percent over the same stretch (Apartment List).

This Oregon data tells an interesting story about the trade-offs of each policy and how dramatic the effects are. We have the same state laws, but localities are acting very differently in how they handle building. It shows that when you let people build, prices fall. Block building, and they climb. Build while people leave, as Portland did, and prices fall hard enough that a jobless mother of three can find a house on her own in a week.

Some will credit Oregon’s 2019 rent control law (a national first). I can’t see how it could take credit. The law caps rent increases at 10% a year at most, effectively helping only incumbent renters. When a unit turns over, the landlord sets any rent he wants, and buildings under 15 years old are exempt entirely and the rate cap doesn’t apply for 15 years for new construction. The rents that fell were new leases, like Ruth’s, in buildings like the new towers. Rent control doesn’t appear to have touched them since the market is experiencing a supply-and-demand deflationary wind.

Who actually thinks this is a mess

So why does the Wall Street Journal call it a mess? Because it talked to the people who run the old system, and for the old system this really is a crisis.

About 2,200 income-restricted apartments in Portland, 8.3 percent of the city’s subsidized stock, are sitting vacant. That’s the highest rate CoStar has ever recorded. Nonprofit owners are cutting staff, breaking loan covenants and selling buildings (WSJ).

In Northeast Portland, a new $53.8 million development built with tax credits and the regional housing bond struggled to fill studios and one-bedrooms whose restricted rents sat near market rate. Its operators started offering a month of free rent, according to the committee that oversees the bond (Street Roots/OPB). Nonprofit providers are now raising their marketing budgets to pull tenants away from private buildings.

$53.8 million, for apartments people didn’t want at the price the formula set.

This has landed in the housing debate in a revealing way. Quintin Mecke, who writes for a coalition of San Francisco affordable-housing nonprofits, answered the Journal with a concession: “The market worked for Ruth.” Then he added: “For a while.”

He makes two arguments. First, the subsidized buildings are failing because of a bad funding formula. He’s partly right, as I laid out above. Second, cheap rent can’t last, because builders stop building when rents fall. “Affordability, in market terms, is the failure condition,” he writes. His fix: transfer far more public money to nonprofits and let them hold the homes forever.

Convenient.

I want the same thing he does: a city where a family like Ruth’s has real choices. Where we part ways is his assumption that the rules causing the artificial scarcity are permanent. His case only works if zoning, permitting, fees, and a federal finance system that won’t lend into falling prices are all fixed facts of life. City councils, state legislatures, Congress and the Fed set every one of them, and every one can be changed. Yes, builders and their banks stop when rents fall below what it costs to build. But government sets much of that cost. Take property rights seriously, let builders work efficiently, make small homes legal again, and Ruth’s good month can become normal.

We’ve watched this play out before. When Congress stopped setting airfares in 1978, the old carriers warned that falling prices would wreck the industry. Real fares fell. Passenger traffic roughly tripled. Banks kept lending, because the airlines that learned to fly a seat cheaper than the fare were good bets. Flying went from a luxury to something a working family does every summer.

It happens across the economy. Economist Mark Perry tracks it in what he calls his “Chart of the Century.” From 2000 to 2025, the price of a TV fell more than 95 percent. Software, toys and cell phone service got cheaper too, while average wages rose 127 percent. Nobody calls the TV business a failure. Manufacturers kept building, kept competing and kept getting better at it, and they made money the whole way down. At the other end of Perry’s chart sit hospital services, childcare and college tuition, the sectors where licensing, mandates and gatekeepers decide who gets to produce and how. Their prices climbed faster than paychecks. Home building behaves like that second group. Its productivity has gone backward for fifty years, and the rules are a big part of why it can’t follow the TV down.

When producers are free to compete, and answer mainly for the harm they cause, they find ways to profit while prices fall. Especially when they can’t rely on “free” government money. Airlines did it. TV makers did it. American industry did it for most of the late 1800s, when prices drifted down for decades while output boomed. Home builders can do it too.

Let them, and Ruth’s good month becomes everyone’s status quo.

Portland is the proof

Portland just ran the experiment for the rest of us. You can spend decades and billions trying to subsidize your way out of a shortage. Or you can let people build until the shortage ends.

One of those put Ruth on a list. The other put her in a house.

Picture that in your town. A young couple, both working, opens an app and finds three places they can pay for and still save. A mom leaving a bad situation has somewhere to go by Friday. A landlord has to earn your business.

That’s a normal country. That’s the America your grandparents grew up in.

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

We went from zero subscribers, to a couple dozen (thanks mom), to around 80,000 across all our platforms. Views keep climbing. Somebody recognized me at a conference recently, which was both really cool and really bizarre.

I’m proud of the long-form work, especially the mini documentary on accessory dwelling units with Dave Lewis and the episode with Alex Horowitz from Pew.

I’ve got room to improve. There’s awkward phrasing here and there, and cutting shorts the way the algorithms want them has been a challenge.

But the short-form is working. The video on churches being blocked from building housing was our first real viral hit. A lot of people learned for the first time that a government will happily shut down a church trying to serve its own community. Red-pilling people is the best part of this gig.

What’s coming

We spoke at FreedomFest to a room full of libertarians and conservatives, with some light heckling, the kind I relish.

I’ve been invited to speak at YIMBY Town, the largest gathering of pro-building advocates in the country. I went to Miami to speak at two colleges. And I’m getting invitations onto bigger podcasts.

Those are signals of success. They’re also incomplete ones. Getting out there isn’t the mission. The mission is returning property rights to the American people.

Why this one is different

Content is a strange business, and Build the Dream sits in an odd spot, because I’m not selling anything. I’m selling a beautiful idea.

I’m trying to convince people they don’t have to doom scroll Zillow into oblivion. That there’s hope, and not the kind that depends on more of the same approaches that got us here. Something uniquely American. Solutions that lean into our own heritage.

We don’t have to wait for DC. We don’t have to wait for November to see who takes the reins. We just have to start speaking up, get educated, and find the motivation to do something.

That’s why I keep saying the American Dream isn’t dead. Because it isn’t. Anything dead is gone, and short of a miracle it isn’t coming back. This isn’t a miracle. It’s a practical set of solutions that would unblock the thing that only looks dead.

The ask

We started with seed funding from generous donors who wanted to see whether we could build something. We did. Now I need help taking it further.

The content engine is running. We’re reaching thousands of people a day organically. There are some genuinely interesting mini docs coming, more on that soon.

If you can give $5 a month, we can keep this going and find out how far it goes. A fancy cup of coffee or a cheap hamburger.

If you want to support us here, click upgrade to paid at the top of the page. If you’d rather make a tax deductible donation to the Land Liberty Movement, you can do that here: https://donorbox.org/build-the-dream

This has been the most meaningful work I’ve done in my life. I can’t wait to see how far you and I can take it.

And it belonged to regular people. A guy from Queens with a truck and a plan could build a life there.

People still move to New York believing that. What a lot of them don’t know is that the dream is broken. People are leaving. Businesses are leaving. And the city’s answer has been to double down on the same policies that got it here.

I talked with Larry Sharpe about it. He was born in Manhattan, joined the Marine Corps at 17, built a trucking company from nothing and sold it. In 2018 he ran for governor as the Libertarian candidate, pulled more than 95,000 votes, and put his party on the New York ballot for the first time in its history.

I asked him what it would take for a young man today to build what he built.

A license to walk a dog

His first move back then was finding the largest truck that didn’t require a CDL, because the licensing was that harsh.

It has not gotten easier. In New York State today, you need a license to braid hair. You need a license to walk a dog. He is not joking.

On the other side of every one of those rules is a person who wanted to work and got handed a form instead. Some fill it out. Some give up. Some go underground.

Then there’s hiring. Larry walked me through the math on paying someone twenty dollars an hour. Decent money, not great. The payroll tax runs about sixteen dollars on top, so the employer is out thirty six. The worker is taxed too, and takes home somewhere around fourteen.

Two thirds of that money goes to the government. Everybody in the deal loses except Albany.

New York built the American economy doing the exact opposite of this. Farming, finance, and forward thinking, as Larry put it. The Erie Canal was New York. Fashion was New York. Glassware. Kodak. Built by people who did not wait for permission.

Why a bad answer wins

You would think a city squeezed this hard would try something different. Instead it elected a democratic socialist.

Larry says that is the most predictable thing in the world. When people are desperate and want an answer, and the choice is the status quo that is failing them or a bad answer, they will take the bad answer. It is at least an answer.

And New Yorkers have not had a real choice in a generation. No Republican has won a statewide election there in 24 years. Not senator, not governor, not attorney general.

Part of why is that the people who disagreed left. Two million people packed up over the last twenty years. That is more people than live in all of Manhattan. A lot of them wanted lower taxes and fewer rules, and every time one of them left, the people who stayed agreed with each other a little more.

Do that for twenty years and one way of thinking dominates everything.

The trap inside all of it

Here is the mechanism. The more decisions a government makes for you, the more every decision becomes a vote. What you can build. What you can sell. What you pay your workers. How many people can sleep under one roof.

And when everything is up for a vote, losing an election means losing your way of life.

That is the trap. It sounds fair because everybody gets a say. But when the majority decides everything, the people who disagree have two choices. Go along or go away.

Two million chose to go away.

Compare that to a place where people own things and decide for themselves. Your neighbor can build a duplex. You can keep your big yard. The guy down the street can cut hair in his garage without being hassled. You do not have to agree with each other on nearly as much, because it is not on the ballot.

That is how people who think differently live side by side. Take it away and the ones who think differently leave, the conversation narrows, and eventually the people in charge only hear their own voices.

When you know you cannot lose, you do not have to deliver.

The city is the slumlord

New York politicians talk about punishing slumlords. Larry’s answer is to ask who the biggest slumlord in the state actually is.

It is the city.

The New York City Housing Authority runs more than 160,000 apartments. In 2018, federal prosecutors announced it had stopped doing required lead paint inspections and lied to federal regulators about it. Children living in its buildings were poisoned. When inspectors came around, managers covered holes with painted cardboard and shut the water off so leaks would not show.

The winter before that, 320,000 tenants lost heat at some point. Families slept in their coats.

The city admitted it in 2019 and signed a deal putting the housing authority under a federal monitor. That monitor is still there. The authority’s own estimate of what its buildings need in repairs is north of 78 billion dollars.

If you want to see what happens when government owns the housing, there is a longer running experiment. On many Indian reservations the family living on the land does not own it. The federal government holds it in trust. You want to build a house, you need Washington’s permission. You want a mortgage, the bank will not lend on land it cannot take back. A simple lease can sit on a desk at the Bureau of Indian Affairs for years.

The result is some of the worst housing in America, among people who would build if they were allowed to.

What the rules actually produce

Try building a home in New York. The zoning map tells you what you can put on your own land, and on most lots it is not much. Want to build bigger, you need a rezoning, which means hearings in front of the community board, the borough president, the planning commission, and the city council. Any one of them can slow you down. Any neighbor who shows up can drag it out.

Then the environmental reviews, the permits, the inspections. Years can pass before anyone pours a foundation, and every one of those years costs money. Lawyers, consultants, interest on the loan while the land sits empty.

The builder does not eat that cost. You do, in rent.

Plenty of builders look at the process and walk away. Those homes never get built at all.

So there are not enough places to live, prices climb, and people at the bottom get squeezed into whatever is left. A basement that was never designed to be an apartment becomes one. A dining room gets a curtain and a mattress. Five people share a place built for two.

None of it is legal and none of it is safe. It is what is left.

In September of 2021 the remains of Hurricane Ida dumped more than three inches of rain on the city in a single hour. Water poured into basements across Queens and Brooklyn. Thirteen people died that night. Eleven of them drowned in basement apartments. One was a two year old boy trapped with his parents in Woodside.

Most of those apartments were illegal. The city knew places like them existed. By its own estimate, more than 100,000 New Yorkers live in basement units.

They did not live there because they wanted to. They lived there because it was what they could afford.

Those families did not die because they broke the rules. They died because the rules left them nowhere else to go.

Then it writes more rules

The city’s answer to crowding is more law. Limits on how many unrelated adults can live together. A minimum number of square feet per person in a bedroom.

On paper that sounds reasonable. Nobody wants ten people in a closet.

But think about what enforcing it requires. Somebody has to know who sleeps in your apartment, how many beds are in each room, whether your roommate is your cousin or a guy from Facebook Marketplace. City Hall cannot see any of that, so it relies on your neighbors to see it for them.

That is what 311 is. A hotline where anyone can report you and you never learn who did. An inspector shows up, counts the people, counts the beds, and if the numbers are wrong the city can order everyone out.

First the government makes housing scarce. Then it trains neighbors to watch each other. When you make housing illegal, you end up policing the people trying to live in it.

As Larry put it, the building inspectors carry badges and look like cops, because they are kicking in doors. If you have to give your building inspectors badges, maybe the problem is the rules.

It does not have to go this way

Larry’s view is that you beat bad ideas by showing people something better, and he points to Argentina. Milei told people up front that ending rent control would hurt for a year, and asked them to give him that year. Argentina’s government reported real rent prices fell nearly 27 percent in the first seven months, and listings in Buenos Aires roughly tripled.

Closer to home, Houston never adopted zoning and remains one of the cheapest big cities in America to buy a house.

But his deepest point was about ownership.

Gentrification only hurts if you rent. If you own, it is the best thing that could happen to you. So make more owners and the problem mostly goes away. When wealthy people leave a place they leave with a check. When renters leave, they leave with a moving bill.

Even a small place counts. A studio, a tiny home, something on top of five other people. If you own it, you leave with something.

Every rule that blocks the small building, the tiny home, the legal basement apartment, keeps somebody on the wrong side of that line. And a city of renters with nothing to lose will keep voting for whoever promises to freeze the rent.

The city is still in there

In the summer of 2020, restaurants were dying, so the city did something it almost never does. It got out of the way. It waived the usual permits and let restaurants build outside.

No three year review. No hearings. Within weeks, thousands of restaurants had tables on the sidewalk and in the street. Plywood, string lights, heaters. Some ugly, some beautiful, all of it built fast by the people who needed it built.

Streets that had been parking spots came alive at night.

Then the city came back with the rulebook, and most of those sheds are gone now.

But for a moment everybody saw it. Give New Yorkers a little room and they build fast, everywhere, at every price.

Now point that same energy at housing. Basement apartments made legal and safe. Small buildings on empty lots. Old offices turned into homes. Rent coming down because there are finally enough places to live. Kids who grew up in Queens able to stay and build a life in Queens.

The people who built New York showed up with nothing and made one of the greatest cities in the world.

I like to think that city is still in there. It is waiting on permission it should never have needed in the first place.

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

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

Rent swallows close to a third of your paycheck. Education costs are through the roof. Health care is damn expensive, if you even bother getting insurance. Groceries keep climbing.

If you’re out of school and in the job market, you can apply to hundreds of openings and hear back from three bots.

Worse, you might be back in your childhood bedroom with 25 million of your peers. Or splitting a two-bedroom four ways.

And all of that sits on top of a technological revolution that’s making everyone feel crazy and isolated. In 2010, people in their twenties spent almost 13 hours a week with their friends. Now it’s five. The share of Americans who say they have no close friends has gone up fourfold since 1990.

You have a group chat with thirty people in it, and you haven’t seen any of them in months.

Everybody’s busy, everybody’s broke, everybody’s tired.

Here’s what should worry you most. The ideas that made this moment so bad are gaining popularity rather than falling out of favor.

No, really.

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A pitch for power

“Democratic socialism” has been gaining ground on center-left politics, hammering — correctly — on how everything is so expensive and the American Dream feels out of reach. It’s particularly infectious because it also taps into social isolation with another call for a politics of meaning.

Zohran Mamdani rode that message all the way to New York City Hall. Bernie Sanders fills arenas with it on tour. AOC built a movement on it.

They are touching on something real. Something very tangible for ordinary people who don’t see a way to realize their potential in an America so unlike the one their parents told them they’d come to adulthood in.

But the democratic socialists are selling fool’s gold. It looks like tangible solutions, but it’s something else entirely.

The new vanguard of the left makes three promises about how to make American society better:

1. Put experts in charge of steering the economy.

2. Decide more things through the democratic process.

3. Redistribute more wealth from the rich to the poor.

Which is strange, because we already ran all three experiments and that’s how we got here.

Especially in housing.

American soviets

Who decides whether a home or apartment building gets built in your town?

You’d think the person who owns the land. But you’d be wrong.

Across the country, bodies of officials — usually appointed by the people we elect — decide whether a new development can proceed. They’re called planning boards. Their job is to steer the business of building things in your city according to their plan. They put out five-, ten-, and fifteen-year plans laying out how they’ll use their powers to direct the city’s future.

That’s promise number one, sitting in your city hall right now. This seemingly unassuming, American-sounding institution is a funhouse-mirror reflection that always reminds me the Russian word for council is soviet. Not the country — the committee. The Petrograd Soviet translates to the Petrograd Council. Meaning the vision of the USSR was not one council, but many; their policy of “democratizing” production meant each business was run by a soviet, each industry by a soviet, tiered all the way up to Moscow. A soviet union to industrialize and steer the future of the new international revolution.

Your town has one too. It meets on Tuesday.

Democracy expresses itself in the appointment process, in public meetings, and in the whole architecture of power that defines the land-use planning regime. Being appointed hasn’t insulated these boards one bit from public pressure. When you come to work and 40 angry boomer taxpayers yell at you to kill an apartment building, you might find yourself feeling quite democratically inclined to listen to the people in your “steering of the economy”.

Planners care about their standing among the people who matter in politics — the ones who donate, vote, and attend city hall meetings. They don’t suddenly become public servants because we put a badge on them. They respond to political incentives, not what young, low-income people care about, they don’t vote, donate or participate much. Much less the people who don’t even live there yet, but would if they could. But even if they did, they’d likely never know, because much of this happens behind closed doors well before it’s in open committee. Such is the reality of wielding political power.

That’s promise number two.

Democratic socialists already won in democratizing what gets built; it just isn’t producing the fruits they’d assumed, which is if you give enlightened, educated people power and tell them to wield it for the common good, well, of course they would. But they don’t, they won’t, they can’t. Democracy doesn’t provide the incentive to do that because democracy is about who shows up and can be represented.

Eat the rich, starve the middle

As for the trademark “eat the rich” narrative in housing, we’ve been attempting wealth transfers for a long time by taxing property value. The idea is to tax more people with nice, big homes and fewer people with modest housing.

Again and again, property taxes hurt middle-class folks the most, and they’re no boon to renters — even if renters never see how much of their rent goes to the government.

The biggest move in this area might be Los Angeles’s Mansion Tax, which mostly didn’t tax mansions. It taxed apartment buildings and the land you’d build them on. It was sold to the public as a way to bring housing costs down and alleviate homelessness.

It obviously failed. RAND estimates the tax is costing Los Angeles more than 1,900 new homes a year, and this June the city council is weighing a fix.

Here’s the full breakdown I did on LA’s experiment and why they’re already planning to redo the whole program.

That’s promise number three. We’ve been trying to soak the rich for paying for services but wind up shooting the middle class instead every time. Democratic socialists in America insist this is not their intent, but ultimately we can reasonably suspect either it is indeed their intent because that’s exactly what they do to fund the welfare state in Nordic countries. Or they are too incompetent to do it. Or it’s impossible to do.

Progressives were third-way socialists

Most progressives of prior eras were socialists who had the good sense to drop the label. They kept private ownership under public management rather than going the full USSR, North Korea, or Cuba model.

They argued that the chaos of private property needed taming by smart experts and democratic checks on property rights. So they systematically implemented zoning and building codes across the country, and gave us today’s broken system.

We live under democratic socialism in housing. That’s the problem.

America also underwent a cultural shift, where we started to see housing as a government-provided right. FDR called it “the right of every family to a decent home”.

But the federal government couldn’t do much beyond financing, so it spent ninety years making it easier to finance a house or pay rent. The FHA in 1934. Fannie Mae in 1938. The mortgage interest deduction. Section 8 vouchers. Down payment grants.

Every generation of politicians found a new way to hand buyers and renters more money to spend on a home.

You can print money for homes. You can’t print homes.

When local rules freeze how many homes get built, and federal policy keeps pumping dollars into buying them, those dollars have nowhere to go but into the price.

The crackdown on consequences

When prices explode, and people get outraged, the democratic socialist arrives to blame greedy developers, plus some vaguely worded Marxist claptrap about factories and wealth.

That feels compelling, because — yeah — when government makes assets artificially scarce and then pushes money into the system, asset owners get huge valuations. Inequality between asset owners and everyone else goes up.

So what do the democratic socialists actually offer? A bigger dose of the same medicine, or a crackdown on the price response their own policies created.

This June, Mayor Mamdani went for the crackdown. His appointees on the Rent Guidelines Board froze rents on about one million “stabilized” apartments.

Note the euphemism. Not “controlled.” Not “forced rents.” Stabilized.

It sounds like relief. But the board’s own index found the cost of running those buildings rose more than five percent this year. When the rent can’t cover the new boiler, what do we expect to happen?

Predictably, in the long run, the owner sells or walks away. And Mamdani has created a tremendous disincentive to build the next apartment building.

All of this lands on top of years of money printing in Washington that drove up the landlord’s taxes, insurance, and maintenance costs.

If you want to discipline a landlord’s profits, and I do, then we must build more apartments down the street. Competition does that job better than any rent board ever will.

Mamdani deserves credit for one thing. He’s called out the zoning rules that drive up rent, and he backed the charter changes that reduced the city council’s power to veto housing. I just wish he’d apply the same economic logic to rent control.

He’s hardly alone. National figures like AOC and Bernie have called for nationwide rent controls — an even more disastrous policy.

Price controls promise fairness and deliver shortages. A shortage of the things people need is just another word for poverty.

And this isn’t just a housing phenomenon. It bridges all of the major issues democratic socialists are talking about.

Higher education

Washington flooded campuses with federal student loan subsidies. Meanwhile, federally recognized accreditors decide which schools get access to that money, making it exceedingly rare to see a new college or any innovation in the space.

More subsidized money chases the same classroom seats. Economists at the New York Federal Reserve found that when subsidized loan limits went up, tuition rose by about sixty cents on the dollar.

Worse, when government is the investor, it has no incentive to make sound financial decisions. It never answers for a bad loan. And it made student debt nearly impossible to discharge in bankruptcy.

If your local barista took out one of these loans and found no job that could pay it off, that’s partly because policy removed the only question that mattered: how does this get paid back?

Then, in 2010, Washington shut down the bank program and made itself the only federal student lender.

Washington held $112 billion in student debt in 2007. It holds about $1.6 trillion today. Source: Federal Reserve Economic Data, series FGCCSAQ027S.

Health care

Since World War II, the tax code has rewarded employer-provided insurance, which is why your coverage is tied to your job. Medicare and Medicaid poured trillions more into demand.

Now watch the supply side. About thirty-five states still make hospitals get a certificate of need — permission from the state — before they can build or expand.

Medicare doesn’t just pay for care. It decides how many new doctors the system is allowed to train on the federal dime. Congress froze that number in 1997. Raising it takes an act of Congress.

The state boards that decide who may practice medicine are staffed by practicing doctors — an arrangement the Supreme Court took a hard look at in 2015, when it ruled that a licensing board run by the people it regulates doesn’t get automatic antitrust protection. The body that accredits medical schools is co-sponsored by the American Medical Association, and most state boards make graduating from a school they approve a condition of your license.

So the people already inside the profession decide how many more get in. That’s what I’d call a government-sponsored trade cartel.

You’ve seen this structure before. It’s the planning board for doctors.

Twenty-seven states have pushed back a little, most of them only recently, by letting nurse practitioners treat patients without a physician looking over their shoulder. I helped pass that reform in my home state. The doctors’ lobby fights it every time.

So we capped the buildings, capped the doctors, and blocked other qualified, medically trained people from providing care. Then we acted surprised at the bill.

And the fix on offer is to put Washington in charge of even more of it with “Medicare for All” — the same move it made on student loans in 2010. Will see more of the same? I suspect so.

It’s all the same thing

Housing. College. Health care. Same recipe. Same result.

More democracy means more political decision-making over what gets built, which usually means less of it.

More experts means the decision goes to people farthest from the problem, who bear no consequences for failing to act. Again, it means less.

Eating the rich is popular, because envy is common. But it doesn’t create prosperity where poor people do better. It creates fewer rich people, while leaving the inflation that hammers everyone else untouched.

Democratic socialism wants to serve you a second helping of the poison destroying our country.

Young Americans are right to be angry. Most of you followed the script, did everything according to the best advice at the time, and the game feels rigged. Because it is rigged.

Let people build on their own land. Let builders build. When homes get built, prices stop outrunning paychecks, and you get your future back. Do the same in healthcare and education, and we get back to something approaching prosperity, abundance, and the American Dream.

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

The first was the normal way. Eighty-nine homes, eight stories, and everything that comes with asking a city for permission. Hearings. Design reviews. Neighbors lined up at the microphone to explain why this particular building will end civilization.

The second barely asked the city for anything. Six stories, filed under a new state law called SB 79, which lets you build apartments near transit stops whether the city likes it or not.

So which one did Palo Alto approve?

If you know anything about Palo Alto, you’d guess the small one. Less density, and they can’t really stop it anyway. Say no to the bigger evil.

You’d be wrong. The Planning Commission approved the bigger project. Eighty-nine homes, eight stories, all of it.

Because that was the version where the city still got a say.

For decades the city held all the cards. A builder could spend two years and a fortune on drawings, hearings, and traffic studies, then watch a council vote it down because thirty angry people showed up on a Tuesday night. Every application was a gamble, and the house always won. That killed projects that got proposed. It also killed the ones nobody bothered to propose, because the math never worked.

Housing Wire reporter Richard Lawson has a name for what happened in Palo Alto. He calls it the shadow effect. Spooky. I like it.

A state housing law changes how a city votes even when nobody uses it. You won’t find SB 79 anywhere on that Palo Alto permit. You’ll find it in the room. Every commissioner knew it was there.

SB 79 took effect July 1st. Near major transit stops, it sets minimum heights and densities that local zoning can’t go below. The developer put that on the table. Jeff Smith, the director of development, said what everyone already knew. They wanted the city’s input and approval. But if that didn’t look like it was going to happen, the SB 79 option was sitting right there. Not the outcome he wanted. Just one he had.

That raises a fair question. If the state law was right there, why bring the harder plan at all?

Because a builder isn’t doing one project and leaving town. He’ll need that same city to approve his next one, and the one after that. Go over their heads today and they’ll remember it. Smith wanted the input, the feedback, and the approval. SB 79 was what he’d use if none of that was coming.

Then Commissioner Bart Hechtman turned to the neighbors who came to oppose the project and told them the truth. There’s another version of this. You’ll have a lot less to say about that one. And one thing that could push the owner in that direction is if this review drags on forever.

The commission approved it. Only two voted no, and even those two thanked the developer for not taking the other route.

The opponents got told to be realistic. By the government. That is not how Palo Alto hearings usually go.

This isn’t just a California thing.

In 2023 Florida passed the Live Local Act. If a developer’s plans meet certain requirements, the city has to approve the project on land zoned commercial, industrial, or mixed use. No rezoning. No public hearing. I’m not thrilled with all the requirements, but that’s a strong law for opening up building.

And some developers are choosing not to use it, for the same reason as Palo Alto.

Pinnacle, a Miami developer, is building income-restricted senior housing in Fort Lauderdale on an old office parking lot, with $40 million in financing already closed. The project qualified for Live Local. Pinnacle went through the city anyway. Partner Tim Wheat told Housing Wire that Live Local is what let them find the land, buy it, and line up the money. When it came time to build, they chose to work with the city instead.

Look at what the law actually did there. It didn’t get the building approved. It got the building financed. The bank knew exactly what was legally allowed on that land, so the usual uncertainty was off the table. Government kills projects on a whim, and that makes lenders nervous. Live Local took that risk out of the deal. Then Pinnacle turned around and worked with the city anyway.

That’s the real use of these laws. Not a shortcut you take. Leverage you hold.

Then there’s the 440-unit project in Fort Lauderdale where the developer skipped Live Local and went through regular review. Mayor Dean Trantalis was relieved. He told the Sun Sentinel that Live Local ties the city’s hands, and the regular process gives his staff more flexibility.

Normally I wouldn’t cheer a mayor calling a property rights law handcuffs. But look at the result. The mayor gets his flexibility, and 440 apartments are sitting in front of his staff. The city has every reason to find a way to say yes, because the other version is one they have no say in at all.

So here’s what all this means.

These laws change who has to prove themselves. For fifty years the builder had to justify the building and the city never had to justify anything. Saying no was free.

Now both sides have a reason to stay at the table. The city stays because it can be cut out. The builder stays because he needs them again next year. Neither one is doing it out of goodwill. They’re doing it because the other one finally has an option.

Nobody in these stories stormed out of the room. That’s what gives me hope.

The obvious way to judge a housing law is to count the permits filed under it. The bigger payoff is in how people behave. What a planning commissioner thinks is a normal thing to say at a hearing. What a developer believes is possible when he looks at an empty parking lot. Whether a city sees new housing as a threat to manage or a deal to close.

A light-touch law that sets a clear floor can change how an entire approval system works, including every project that never mentions it.

These laws could be stronger. I’d like to see California and Florida keep pushing toward real limits on local power over private property. But these smaller steps are doing more than anyone expected, and that’s worth celebrating.

Remember where we started. These cities used to hold a veto. Now they’re at the table. You can count that in homes.

So the next time someone says a state housing law barely got used, ask a better question. Ask how many homes got approved because it existed. Because for the first time, the city and the builder were standing on the same ground.

That’s the shadow effect, and it’s pointing the right direction.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s been blocked. And state laws are unblocking it right now.

The answer was no. The property is zoned for one house.

She pushed back. Thirty-seven acres. Plenty of room. It’s for her children, so they’d have somewhere to live at 18, 19, 20. The man behind the desk kept repeating the same thing. Not zoned for that.

She posted about it. The video went viral, because most people had no idea this applied to land you own outright.

What her deed is actually worth

That’s how property works in this country now. You own it, but you don’t control it. Which means you don’t really own it in any meaningful sense.

You pay taxes on it in most states. You just can’t decide how to create value out of it unless the government approves.

Ashley had a plan for her life built on the assumption that the property was hers, because the deed has her name on it. The government, usually invisible until you fall into one of its traps, had its own plan, and the power to end hers.

This is why I talk so much about the origins of zoning and building codes. If Americans broadly understood that our property rights are conditional on the approval of unseen bureaucrats, and that there’s a way to fix it, there would be change.

The runaround

Eventually a second official was more helpful than the first. She pulled up a map. There’s five acres Ashley could parcel off to build one home.

But Ashley doesn’t want a big house. She wants three tiny homes in the back corner. A family compound.

Every solution they hand her is a vision she doesn’t have. One more big house is not her plan. It’s the government’s plan. So everything else is not allowed.

Sometimes I think the purpose of variances and rezoning is just to exhaust people, so there isn’t reform. It leaves a little hope for more freedom, which gets bogged down in the reality of fighting a bureaucracy until people give up and settle for the best they can get.

Does the government care?

Here’s what everyone needs to understand: the system and the people inside it are not the same.

You can have good people at the counter who care, who feel for you, who want to say yes to Ashley and everyone else building the life they want. They work inside a system of power, and that system says no.

This isn’t the private market, where two people cut a deal that leaves both better off. This is politics. What matters here is whether you have pull, whether you’re somebody.

We’re taught in school that government is supposed to serve us. That’s the formulation in our founding documents. But in practice government serves abstractions and special interests. The general welfare. Community safety. Equity and inclusion. Climate planning. Stakeholder collaboration.

All of it is patina over the underlying reality of the land use planning system. Post hoc justification for experts wielding power to manage the rest of us.

How this actually changes

I hope Ashley gets her tiny homes. I don’t have much hope for the variance or the rezone. The process is usually brutal.

These rural fights mostly go unseen. But we saw one break through.

Dave Lewis got too old for his split level and wanted to build a small home near his orchard so he could live close to his grandkids. The government said no. He walked into the Montana legislature and told that committee his story, and it blew them away.

Now across Montana, if there’s a home on a lot, you can build an accessory dwelling unit.

That doesn’t fix what Ashley is facing. But it’s a crack in the wall, and it happened because one man showed up where it mattered and raised his voice.

Ashley raised hers to her audience and revealed what government actually is, and how it limits the pursuit of happiness. That’s how we get property rights back. Telling these stories and naming the injustice, one case at a time.

Ashley has figured out that the American Dream is blocked. My message to her, and to you, is that blocked doesn’t mean dead. It can be unblocked. We know how. We just need the political will.

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

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

The math your grandfather planned his life around is gone. Source: U.S. Census / FRED.

I’ve spent sixteen years solving big political problems in my home state. Working to make things better for my neighbors. I’ve taken up the challenge of housing because it’s so important to the future of this country, and I’ve been studying the issue for 5 years now.

Today I’m going to tell you what’s actually causing it. Then I’ll show you the way out, because there is one.

Start with what we know for sure. America knows how to build. Our builders are the best in the world. Hand a crew a lot and a permit, and they’ll frame a house in weeks, as good as any house in the world. The skills, materials, and land all exist. Fly across this country and count the empty ground below you; walk through any city, and you’ll find vacant lots and derelict buildings in need of redevelopment. And of course the demand exists. Millions of people want a modest house they can pay for, and they want it badly enough to work decades for it.

So let’s take stock of our housing situation at the highest level. We’ve got willing builders. Lots of land, empty and otherwise. And yet, not enough houses. Scarcity is the starting point for reality, but scarcity like that does not occur naturally. I conclude this because it fails the smell test of what an economy is, which, when you step back away from the abstractions it is basically the processes by which we transform things into products to solve other people’s problems. We do this in billions of different ways, but for some reason, housing is broken. I think someone manufactured the situation we are in.

I think we live in an era of artificial scarcity, especially in housing.

This plays out once you dive into the public policy. You look at the literature and you realize that in most American cities and towns, it is illegal to build a small, cheap house. I mean that literally. What a scandal that goes so unseen in our public discourse. And that’s likely because it isn’t a law that says, “thou salt not build small houses”; it’s all laws by proxy that, in effect, make them illegal.

Start with minimum lot sizes. Your town draws a map, and across most of that map the law says every house must sit on a quarter acre, a half acre, sometimes a full acre or more. This one rule, with a few lines of code, does more damage than every other rule combined. Because land is the biggest cost in housing. When the law forces every home to have a big, expensive lot, the cheap house becomes mathematically impossible. No builder on earth can put a $200,000 on $300,000 of mandatory dirt. So they build what the math allows: the big house, and only the big house. Local governments killed the starter home. Builders just built what they were legally allowed to.

Now stack the rest on top. These are all topics I’ve already explored in previous episodes:

• Parking mandates that force builders to use space for parking, or more parking than what makes sense on the ground.

• Plot dimension and setback requirements that kill off other designs

• Permit processes that run months, sometimes years, and every month adds costs to your dream home.

• Public hearings where anyone who already owns a home nearby gets a microphone and a veto over homes for the people who don’t.

More than a quarter of a new home is regulation, spent before a nail is driven.

Add up the fees, the studies, the delays, the compliance, and by the homebuilders’ accounting, it comes to $132,000 per new house. About thirty percent of the price. That’s all before a single nail is driven.

You’re paying for this bureaucracy tax – as President Trump’s economists put it – on your shelter. The most fundamental human need. It cannot be that we tax such a need like a luxury and ration it like a privilege. But we do.

Where did all this come from? It’s older than you think. In the 1920s, American cities started drawing maps that dictated what could be built where, and who, in practice, could live near whom. In 1926, the Supreme Court blessed the whole project in a case out of Euclid, Ohio, in an opinion that described the apartment house too close to some other kinds of housing as “a kind of parasite”. That is the actual word the Court used. Parasite. That idea, that ordinary people’s housing is a nuisance to be zoned away from “respectable” neighborhoods, got copied into tens of thousands of local codes. It has been compounding for a hundred years. Every decade the rulebook got thicker. It never once got thinner on its own.

Our country turned on itself; it shut down the pathway to homeownership because it made apartments more scarce, and then it made smaller – cheaper – developments of all kinds nearly extinct. Starter Homes used to make up around 40% of all new home construction; now they make up 7%.

It’s time to put the Starter home on the endangered species list and do something about it.

This is how that decline played out for real people. For half a century, a typical American house cost about three years of a typical family’s income. Your grandfather’s banker built his career on that math. Whole lives were planned on it. Today the national number is five. Dozens of major metros are past five. The priciest markets run eight, to ten years and beyond.

What changed is that the government decided it knew best, and it has screwed everything up.

Now, who’s the villain here? I want to be precise, because getting this wrong wastes a movement’s energy. The villain is a system, yes, with particular actors who bear more responsibility than others — for sure.

It’s a century of accumulated code, enforced by planning departments, defended by an ideology that says experts should decide what you may build on land you own. Many of the people inside that system are decent. But frankly, that doesn’t matter so much. The system produces artificial scarcity anyway, and by creating this outcome it produces unnecessary suffering. Because protecting what already exists by forbidding what comes next is the job description. And artificial scarcity always has beneficiaries —its stakeholders, as politicians put it—which is why the system never reforms itself.

But it can be reformed from outside. I know because I watched it happen, up close, in my home state. In 2023, Montana passed a package of reforms the press started calling the Montana Miracle.

• Backyard homes, legalized statewide.

• Duplexes, legalized.

• Permit timelines, cut.

• Taller buildings enabled, with single stairs for those old narrow lots.

And so many others, with more to go for sure, but a massive step in the right direction.

It happened because regular people, builders, renters, young families, parents who wanted their kids to stay in Montana, showed up and told their legislators the truth: these rules are the problem, and you can repeal them. A legislature repealed them with bipartisan support. Over opposition from some of the most powerful lobbies in our state.

Just people empowered with property rights.

Can your state do the same? I think so. That’s the whole project of this Build the Dream effort. Fifty states, thousands of codes, one fight and a movement to take them on. Every episode, we take one piece of the machine, we trace it back to the room where it was written, and we show you exactly how it raises your rent or kills your starter home. Because you can’t repeal what you can’t see, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Your voice matters. So we don’t stop with views, comments, and likes. I need your story; I need your support to move this forward, and together our movement can put pressure on these politicians to see the truth: they can’t fix this with more schemes in a flawed system. But we can fix it by empowering the people again.

Your support means following along with me, learning with me, sharing this effort with your friends and family. Staking your claim and drawing your line in the sand.

Look at what’s going on right now: major movements to change how privacy laws work in states across the country due to Flock cameras – a real fight, wherever you are on it. This change is happening bottom-up because people see a threat, and they are watching, engaging, and sharing the content that leads to activism in city halls and state legislatures.

We can do the same on housing, you and I. That’s my vision and why I call it a movement.

Before I let you go, I wanted to sketch out how we’ll know we’ve won. And I want you to actually picture it:

• Starter homes on small lots in your hometown, in communities people want to live in.

• A converted garage studio apartment that helps pay your mortgage.

• A cottage where your mother lives near her grandkids instead of three states away.

• Rent that leaves room for a life, for a future.

• Apartments built for families to get started, at a price that lets them realize that dream of homeownership if they work hard and discipline their budget.

None of that is a fantasy. All of it was legal within our elders’ living memory, and all of it can be legal again. In so many ways, housing freedom is life freedom.

The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s blocked. And anything blocked can be unblocked. We only need the political will to unblock it.

If you agree, if you can see my vision and want to see it realized in America in your lifetime.

Welcome to the fight. Join our movement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me explain.

You know her

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

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

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

The mismatch

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

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

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

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

The mortgage

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

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

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

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

The tax

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

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

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

The capital gains

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

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

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

The illegal cottage

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

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

Think about what that means.

1. She wants less house.

2. The market wants to give her less house.

3. A builder would happily build her less house.

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

Her exit is your entrance

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

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

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

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

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

Her exit is their entrance.

Government: the hidden villain

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

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

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

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

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

Come home

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

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

Let’s rebuild the American Dream together.

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

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

Fifteen gallons.

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

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

The number that ends the argument

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

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

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

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

That’s seventeen to eighteen times safer.

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

What actually changed

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

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

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

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

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

There is no such thing as perfect safety

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

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

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

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

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

There is no such option. There never was.

The housing they’re keeping off the menu

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

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

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

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

The part that should bother you

By not building, we are making things less safe.

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

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

The same room, the same night

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

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

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

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

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

What we should actually do

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

The answer is to stop blocking the new ones.

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

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

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

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

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

It isn’t protection.

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

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

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

See you then!

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

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

Save the Date: Substack-Only Live Stream

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

• Where: Right on Substack

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

Let’s keep building,

David Rand

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

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

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

The rule almost nobody has heard of

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

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

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

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

What the rule quietly outlawed

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

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

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

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

The safety case, examined honestly

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

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

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

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

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

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

States are starting to notice

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

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

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

The permission system, one rule at a time

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

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

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

What changes when the rule changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is not an accident. It is the point.

What this actually costs

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

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

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

What Texas actually fixed

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

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

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

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

The numbers so far

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

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

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

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

How cities answered

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

A few examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not just the number of rooftops”

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

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

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

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

The man who would not name the city

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

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

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

Local control is not the same as property rights

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

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

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

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

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

A better answer than endless lawsuits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Send this to someone

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

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

Somebody has to show up on the other side.

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

We can unblock it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me explain how.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You tell me.

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

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

But something doesn’t add up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t intend to lose slowly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The city made the builders pour acres of parking anyway.

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

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

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

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

The Invisible Line Item

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

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

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

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

Where the Rule Came From

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Poison Pill

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Happens When You Repeal It

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody Is Coming for Your Truck

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re part of this movement too.

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

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

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

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

How and why is this happening?

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

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

An Invisible Thief to the American Dream

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And worse still.

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

A Machine for Rulers, not the Ruled

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

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

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

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

When in doubt, lie with statistics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is the next drink offered to cure the hangover.

It’s policy, not natural order

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

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

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

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

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

It is not. It never was.

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

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