We’ve all experienced the Zillow Doomscroll loop. The cause can come in many forms. Maybe your lease renewal lands in your inbox and the rent is going up — again. Maybe you’re looking to change cities for a job, or you got a promotion and thought, “Maybe now I can make the leap.” For me, it was driving past a neighborhood, seeing a for-sale sign, and not catching the price. So I looked it up.
A few clicks and you’re scrolling through listings, watching prices climb higher and higher. A small house or modest apartment that once would have been a commonplace start to something new, today costs more than most families can reasonably afford. There just isn’t anything close to that magic number for your income… A spot that gives you space for saving money or aggressively paying off your debts.
It’s a strange loop — disbelief paired with a self-inflicted gaslighting. “It can’t be that I have out-of-whack expectations… I feel like what I need here is relatively modest, but these prices are insane.” It always ends in the same way: frustration, at yourself for not making more money, at your society, and maybe at life itself.
In some polling we did this month, we found that 66% of Americans say that housing costs have made it harder to build the kind of life they want. More than half have delayed or changed their life plans because of it, such as moving to get an education or start a job, getting married, or starting a family. This isn’t a fringe experience. It’s the defining financial reality of our time.
Naturally, when things seem so systemically broken, we zoom out to the political, and there we get a long list of hobgoblins to blame for our housing reality: greedy landlords, developers, and corrupt politicians. But that doesn’t really capture it, and for the most part, almost nobody in politics is being straight with you about why housing is the way it is, and how to fix it.
It’s man-made scarcity, perhaps done with the best of intentions, but with a very real and attainable solution. Lemme explain.
What You Actually Want
Here’s what you’re not asking for. You’re not asking for a subsidy. You’re not asking for the government to hand you an apartment or a house for free. You’re not asking anyone to feel sorry for you.
You just want something so very simple: a stable place to live. A future you can plan around. The ability to stay near your family, or a job in a community where you can build your life, without spending every dollar you make just to keep the rain off your head.
That’s it, that’s the whole thing.
New polling we commissioned bears this out, with almost complete clarity. When we asked people why they wanted out of housing affordability, the top answer wasn’t “get rich” or “beat the market.” It was “to afford a stable place to live.” 59% said that. Ahead of buying a home someday, ahead of everything.
The American Dream, in 2026, isn’t a McMansion, though that’s a fine dream for some folks. It’s stability! It’s a future you can picture. It’s the ability to make a plan and have it mean something.
What was once the ambition of every American, our collective Dream as it were, is now increasingly out of reach, and we all know it.
Building the American Dream
So what actually fixes this?
I plan to lay this out in every conceivable dimension over the coming months and years, to make the solutions tangible so we can change things for the better. This work is only possible with your support, so please consider a tax-deductible donation, an investment if you will, so we can amplify your voice and make your American Dream a reality.
To that end, here are some great starting points worth fighting for:
Bring back the starter home. You know what a starter home is. It’s a small house, the duplex, the townhome, what housing policy experts often call “the missing middle”. It is what many of us experience as the first rung on the housing ladder to the middle class–one that tens of millions of Americans climbed before the ladder got pulled up. We see this in the generational data — more on that later. But the starter home has disappeared from our communities because in most of the country, it’s just illegal to build them. Zoning codes prohibit them, and when they don’t, lot-size minimums rule them out; when those don’t, parking requirements force siting plans that limit the number of units and keep them expensive; and even when parking requirements aren’t a problem, they are still expensive because building codes require materials that keep things expensive.
Let builders build. If you want lower costs, you need more homes. No more paperwork and bureaucratic delays like planning commission debates. More homes, built where people actually want to live.
For example, Minneapolis eliminated single-family-only zoning in 2018. Since then, housing costs there have grown far more slowly than in comparable cities. Houston never had zoning in the first place and has been incredibly well-documented as the most affordable major metropolitan area in America.
And if zoning reform makes you nervous, don’t worry, we did it in my home state of Montana in 2023. We are building like gangbusters, seeing many new housing opportunities arise, and nothing has blown up yet. That’s because we didn’t just blow up our systems of the rule of law; we deconstructed the newer system stacked on top of the American tradition of property rights. We reinvigorated what built America, so we can revive the American dream.
Why It’s So Hard Right Now
For most of American history, housing developed organically. Cities and towns weren’t the product of a single design imposed from above; they evolved through thousands of property owners responding to supply and demand. A street might contain small homes, duplexes, boarding houses, apartments, and neighborhood shops. Working families could rent rooms, move into modest homes, and gradually work their way up as their circumstances improve.
The crucial element was that entry points existed. Builders could construct smaller homes and denser housing when demand called for it. The ladder had a bottom rung.
Over the 20th century, that changed. Reformers argued that cities should be scientifically managed by planners who could design orderly communities and prevent undesirable forms of growth. Over time, they developed more and more tools to pursue their mission, tools we will show you. These tools are a poison to the American system. We will also show you the antidote.
Here’s what nobody in official Washington wants to say out loud: this is man-made scarcity. Housing is expensive because the rules are designed to keep it expensive.
Not by accident. By design. A system is best judged by what it produces, and the evidence is all around us.
The rules that make it illegal to build a duplex in most American neighborhoods weren’t written by the free market. They were written by planning commissions, city councils, and bureaucratic apparatus built over the last hundred years, built explicitly to control what gets built, where, and for whom.
Think about what that means. Local governments have effectively outlawed the most affordable housing types. They’ve made it a multi-year, multi-hundred-thousand-dollar legal process to build a single apartment building. They’ve effectively given neighbors veto power over what a property owner does on his own land. They’ve created a permission system so byzantine that only large, well-capitalized developers can navigate it — the very people most likely to build luxury units, not starter homes.
In our survey, 55% of Americans agreed that local rules and delays are a major reason housing is expensive. That’s a great start, but those are rookie numbers. Build the Dream exists to get that number to 100% — to expose the real problems, advance real solutions, and build the movement for change.
What is man-made is man-fixable
This crisis is man-made and therefore man-fixable.
There’s no law of physics that says a hardworking 28-year-old can’t afford a one-bedroom apartment in the city where she got her first real job. There’s no natural force that makes it impossible for a young couple to buy a modest house without a combined income in the six figures. These outcomes aren’t fate. They are the downstream consequences of decisions — specific, traceable, reversible decisions — made by governments at every level over many decades.
No law of God says your grandkids have to grow up three states away because your hometown priced them out. Nobody handed down a ruling that says you must leave the people you love — your parents, your siblings, your church, your whole context — because rent kept outpacing your raise. That families get separated this way, that the places that shaped us become places we can no longer afford — that’s not a force of nature. That’s a choice someone made. A rule someone wrote. And a consequence that falls entirely on you.
The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.
If policy helped create the problem, policy can fix it. Not with a new spending program. Not with rent control, which every economist worth their salt will tell you makes scarcity worse. But by getting out of the way. By repealing the laws that make it illegal to build. By shrinking the permission bureaucracy. By trusting property owners and builders and communities to meet demand the way Americans always have: by building.
The Dream Needs Builders
Here is where most commentary on housing ends with a sigh and vague call for leadership.
But that’s not me, that’s not us.
The man-made scarcity is real, but so is the solution. From states like my home state of Montana, to New Hampshire, Florida, and Texas have already proved that property rights-based housing reform can pass and it can work.
They prove that politicians who lead on it get rewarded for their labor.
What this requires is a movement that understands the problem at its roots. Not just as a supply-and-demand puzzle but as a fundamentally moral problem. A philosophical problem of governance – who decides what, where, and when. A movement based in the American tradition, that the government does not have an unlimited right to tell a property owner what he can and cannot do. Property rights are the foundation of American freedom. It’s the thing that built this country, and it’s what can fix this crisis.
That’s what Build the Dream is for.
We’ll be publishing regular long-form pieces — on the history of how we got here, the policy changes that can fix it, and the politicians blocking the way. We’ll name names. We’ll show our work. And we’ll treat you like an adult capable of handling the actual argument, not a talking-point summary designed to confirm what you already believe.
If you think this generation and everyone after deserves a real shot at building a life in this country — if you believe the American Dream isn’t nostalgia, it’s a birthright being blocked — this is your movement.
Subscribe. Share this. And let’s build the dream together.
