Mai McConnell is 27. She works in pharmaceutical marketing.
Her family told her to stop complaining about housing costs and bite the bullet. Just buy a starter home — something under $250,000. So she looked. What she found was a mold-infested townhouse in Middlesex, New Jersey. Crumbling walls. A biohazard of a mold problem.
Listed at the low-low price of only $244,000.
She posted the video. Half a million people watched it in days. The comments filled up fast — with sympathy and recognition. “My dad told me my $400,000 budget was crazy and I needed to find a starter home. Sir, that is starter home prices in most areas.” Another: “If I put a ‘under $300,000’ filter on in my area it just shows me vacant land.”
This meme of the housing market as impossible to enter is ubiquitous on social media. So you can’t buy. Fine. Then you rent, right? Except rent is crushing nowadays, too.
That’s the trap. Mortgages are too high to get in. The rent is too high to get out. Millions of Americans aren’t choosing between renting and owning — they’re just trying to survive whichever one they’re stuck in. Half of Americans are struggling to pay their rent or mortgage. Among Generation Z — the generation now entering adulthood, starting careers, trying to build a life — the number climbs to two-thirds.
Since 1960, the share of Americans spending over 30% of their income on housing has roughly doubled. This isn’t accidental; it’s the result of decades of policy choices shaping our housing future.
Housing should feel possible again. It doesn’t. And that gap — between what should be and what is — didn’t happen by accident. This situation affects everyone.
How it Happened
Zoning laws.
That’s the short answer. The longer one starts in the mid-twentieth century, when local governments across America began rewriting the rules for what could be built, where, and by whom. Single-family zoning spread city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood — making it illegal to build apartments, duplexes, or small starter homes on most residential land in America. Minimum lot sizes went up. Parking requirements multiplied. Permit processes that once took weeks stretched into months, then years.
Every one of those rules had an author: a bureaucrat planner, a mayor with an axe to grind, a county commissioner with a pet project, or just local governments looking to get some of those sweet-sweet federal HUD dollars for implementing a zoning plan. Washington made it very profitable for local governments to adopt land use central planning.
But if you’re searching for the deeper cause — the central villain — it becomes less a man and more a set of ideas best summarized by two words – Scientific Progressivism. Progressive planners genuinely believed that trained experts, armed with science and good intentions, should decide how American cities grow. Where you could build, what kind of building, how many units, how big, how tall, how far from the street. Even what the exterior had to look like: from the kind of screen door you could have, to the types of shrubberies you could plant.
They called it rational land use planning. It was actually the systematic removal of the individual’s right to build on their own land. Sixty years of evidence have now confirmed that it succeeded in “managing” but not planning. As seen by its systematic inability to plan for future generations and changes in market preferences.
But by their measurements, it worked. Planners controlled Growth. They tamed the seeming chaos of individual initiative and entrepreneurship. But the predictable downside was that only a narrow interest group got its back scratched in the process: incumbent land owners.
Now, the standard economic model would tell you that if you narrow the range of freedom to build stuff, you’ll get less stuff. But we don’t need to rely on deductive economic reasoning if that isn’t your bag. Reviews of the empirical literature have consistently found that zoning rules reduce supply, which increases prices, with density regulations alone explaining roughly 20% of the variation in housing growth across American cities.
A natural challenge to this is, what about increasing demand to move to a city, state, or country? Wharton economists studying high-cost markets concluded that it’s zoning and land-use controls — not demand — that are responsible for housing prices soaring above actual construction costs.
Though it definitely matters, systems that are property rights-based - not central-plan-driven - just have better outcomes, even and especially when demand is high. Despite having the second-largest population among the fastest-growing metros in America, Houston has maintained among the lowest home price appreciation. Houston has never had zoning as the rest of the country understands it. Studies found it remained far more price-competitive because local property owners could see rising prices and immediately take advantage of them. Bottom-up responses like this are inevitably faster than top-down.
A System Is What It Produces
A set of laws should ultimately be judged by the results it produces. America doubled down on scientific progressivism throughout the entire twentieth century — and the results are in.
It started with ideas: remember “Scientific Progressivism”? John Dewey gave the philosophy its intellectual foundation — the belief that trained experts, armed with science and good intentions, should guide the organization of society.
Herbert Hoover gave it teeth. As Secretary of Commerce in 1924, Hoover convened a panel of experts to write a Standard State Zoning Enabling Act that states could copy, proudly announcing that “the importance of this standard act cannot well be overemphasized.” The Government Printing Office sold 55,000 copies. Nineteen states had adopted it by 1925. Within a decade, zoning covered 70 percent of the U.S. population.
State legislatures took the model and ran with it, granting zoning authority to every municipality they could. Local governments built the bureaucracies — the planning commissions, the design review boards, the permit offices — and staffed them with people whose job was to manage growth, which in practice meant slowing it down.
And then folks on the ground figured out how to use the system. They showed up at zoning board meetings. They filed objections. They voted against the apartment building down the street. The justification was always something respectable: street parking, views, and crime. But underneath those justifications, the real reason would inevitably raise its ugly head. Building more units might lower their property values.
The intentions at the top were real. Clean cities. Healthier kids. Scientific rational planning, no more anarchy and messy freedoms. But so were the consequences at the bottom, the very real bill coming due today.
According to Harvard — one of the original intellectual cradles of American progressivism — since 1990, inflation-adjusted renter incomes have risen by less than one percent, while rents have risen by 20 percent.
Incumbents benefit when housing is kept scarce. Everyone else pays.
The Dream Isn’t Dead. It’s Being Blocked.
Mai McConnell went looking for a starter home and found a biohazard. Half of Americans struggle to pay their rent or mortgage. Two-thirds of Gen Z can’t comfortably afford a place to live. And the share of Americans crushed by housing costs has roughly doubled since 1960.
This is the bill. Sixty years of rational land use planning, handed down from Dewey to Hoover to your state legislature to your local planning commission to the neighbor who showed up at the zoning board meeting — and you’re paying it.
The good news is that what the government built, the government can unbuild.
Cut the rules that ban starter homes and apartment buildings in most American neighborhoods. Speed up the permit process that adds years and tens of thousands of dollars before a foundation can be poured. Stop letting a handful of incumbent homeowners veto the housing their neighbors need. Restore the basic right of a property owner to build on their own land.
That’s it. No new federal agency. No billion-dollar program. Just governments — local and state — stopping the thing they’ve been doing for sixty years.
Fairness in housing means more choices, not more rules. And your kids should have the same chance to build a life that you did. Across Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike, that’s not a controversial idea.
It’s the most human one there is. We all deserve a shot at the pursuit of happiness.
The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked. By rules that we can change. By governments that answer to voters.
A home is where belonging happens.
And it’s fair. No more rules that create scarcity, protect insiders, and delay the next generation’s pursuit of happiness.
We can unblock the American Dream.
If this resonates, subscribe. Share it. Support Land Liberty Movement with a donation so we can keep exposing the problem and pushing solutions together.
