September 13, 2025 • 30 mins
Newt talks with Salim Furth, Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Urbanity project at the Mercatus Center about America’s housing affordability crisis. Their discussion centers on the pressing issue of housing affordability in the United States. With high home prices and rents, state legislators are increasingly pursuing housing reform, setting records for new laws aimed at unlocking home building. Furth highlights the challenges and potential solutions in housing policy. They discuss the declining optimism among young Americans regarding their standard of living, with home ownership being a significant barrier. They explore the impact of housing costs on the American dream, the role of state legislation in addressing these issues, and the potential for market-driven solutions.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
In this episode of News World. With no relief from
high home prices and rents, more and more state legislators
are interested in pursuing housing reform. As a result, state
legislatures set new records for the number and strength of
new olls intended to unlock home building. In his new
policy brief for the Mercadas Center, Framing Futures, pro housing
(00:27):
legislation goes vertical in twenty twenty five, Salim Firth describes
how states past record breaking housing reforms in twenty twenty five,
easing parking rules and zoning across the United States. I'm
really pleased to welcome my guest, Celine Firth. He is
a senior Research Fellow and director of the Urbanity Project
(00:49):
at the Mercadas Center at George Mason University. His research
focuses on housing production and land use regulation. He frequently
advises local governments and tests of before state and federal legislatures.
He earned his PhD in economics from the University of Rochester, Silliam.
(01:19):
Welcome and thank you for joining me on News World.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Thank you so much, Speaker Kings.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Can you describe briefly what is the Urbanity Project?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Yeah, we are a small group of researchers within this
research center at George Mason University. He's a public university
in Virginia, but we are kind of independently funded. Where
we are liberty minded oriented towards markets. Somebody once described
us as where the people in Washington who say that
markets are the problem and markets are the solution. Another
(01:49):
way we describe ourselves is bridging the gap between academic
ideas and real world problems.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
A New Wall Street Journal Paul found that only twenty
five percent of Americans believe they have a good chance
of improving their standard of living. That's a record low
since that survey began in nineteen eighty seven. What do
you think is behind this sharp decline in optimism?
Speaker 2 (02:10):
That's amazing, that's really sad. Home prices are just the
biggest thing in almost anyone's budget, and especially young people.
When I talk to folks younger than me, like my
little brother's age, they hardly believe that they are ever
going to be able to buy a home in the
areas where they grew up or in the areas where
they work now. I was watching a panel with a
(02:31):
young legislator in New Hampshire, Joe Alexander, and he said
that his cohort, he's about thirty now, and his college friends,
he is still the only one who owns a home.
And these are, you know, smart young people. They went
to college, They did things the right way, right the
way that society told them. If you stay in school,
get a degree, work hard, you're going to get the
(02:54):
American dream. And most of them are renting.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
One of the surveys indicates that nearly seventy percent of
Americans now say the American dream that if you work hard,
you'll get ahead no longer holds true, or maybe never did.
What does this say about the current economic situation and
the kind of experiences they're having in life.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
I do think it used to. I mean when I
read older books or policy papers written by generations before me,
even before you, it was taken for granted that you
could leave your farm, or leave your country an ocean away,
come to an American city, work hard, and either you
(03:36):
or perhaps your children would have the American dream of
owning a piece of land, the house on top of it,
and essentially controlling your own future. Because I think that's
what it is. It's not being anyone's servant and not
being anyone's boss. We're not feudal lords and we're not
feudal peasants. We are people in control of our own lives,
(03:56):
making our way day by day. And I think that's
the core of the can dream. And fundamental to that
is being able to live somewhere where you have control
of your own property and that means ownership.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
But of that belief has declined that dramatically. That has
huge implications for the future of the country.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
That's right, and it means young people are going to
be supportive of radical solutions left and right. People are
willing to say, well, just burn it all down. It's
not working for me. And I think that's really sad
because if you look at most of the high level numbers,
if you look at well has our unemployment, Well, we're
doing really well. We've had low unemployment through major economic shocks,
(04:38):
through COVID, we've managed to sort of ride that out
in our economic policy makers deserve a great seal of
credit for that. We have high rates of education, lower
rates of teen pregnancy, lower rates of crime in our
big cities. Like a lot of things are going really
really well. And the one big big thing that is
blocking people from feeling like they are fully in control
(05:02):
of their lives is that they can't afford to buy
a house. I really think that's kind of a lynch
pin in a society that's otherwise enjoying record levels of abundance.
If I press a few buttons on a little computer
in my pocket, someone will send me a new pair
of shoes or a burrito to my house. That's phenomenal.
And yet if I don't have the house, all of
(05:25):
that feels a little bit empty.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
The Wall Street Journal poll found that fewer than one
fourth of the respondents said they were very confident they
could buy a home if they wanted to. Fifty six
percent over half said they had little or no confidence
they could buy a home. How central is this both
to the housing crisis and to the sense of the
economy now working.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
I think it's absolutely central. Other things are working fine, right.
People have jobs, they're getting paid better than their parents were,
better than their grandparents. But especially if they're in a
high productivity coastal city with the great biotech jobs or
the great jobs in Silicon Valley, they're looking at, you know,
all their wages may have doubled in a generation. Home
(06:08):
prices have quadrupled, and you know, you can do a
couple things. So one thing that a lot of people
are doing is moving to the Sun Belt, right They're
moving to San Antonio or Atlanta or Jacksonville, where the
job opportunities aren't quite as good, but the home prices
are much more reasonable. Or they're staying put in a
place like Buffalo, New York, or a Flint, Michigan, where
(06:30):
the job opportunities are distinctly poor, but there's a lot
of kind of older housing and if you don't mind,
you know, dealing with some repairs, you can have a
big place. Or they're doubling up, tripling up, renting in
the big cities and keeping that job and having, you know, again,
lots of good things in their lives, but not being
able to make that next step and say, hey, now
I own my own condominium, my own townhouse, my own
(06:53):
single family home, quarter acre, and I'm going to get
married and I'm going to have children. So those steps
I think are really blocked for people who want to
have upward mobility and live in the most expensive cities.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
I'm very curshed when we see the declining birth rates
for Americans to what extent do you think that is
a function of the inability to buy a home and
have a sense that you could actually have a secure future.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
It has to matter. I don't think we have a
good number that we can put on it yet. I
know some really smart researchers who are working on this question.
But we know, for example, that the price of cars
is a barrier to having a third child because it's
expensive to get a car that fits three kids. Houses
a lot more than a car, and kids tick up
a lot of space in a house. I got five
kids myself, so I know a thing or two about this.
(07:42):
And if you can't get a place with a couple
of bedrooms, nobody's going to have kids living in a
one bedroom apartment. We need three bedroom, four bedroom places
of all kinds. And that's why I'm excited about townhouses.
I think those are the house type that's the cheapest,
that's the entry level for that tenty six year old
who's like I found the person I want to spend
(08:02):
my life with. I want to have children, but I
need a bedroom for the kids to live it. I
just it can't not matter. It has to matter.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
In your analysis, how central do you think this idea
of being able to own property to the whole fabric
of what has been historically America.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Yeah, it's very important because, like I said, my conception
of what it means to have the American dream of
being middle class, it's not being a lord, not being
a peasant. It's having control of yourself. And to do
that you need to have some control of the property
that you live on. Renting is great. I have nothing
against renters. There's an important time of your life for moving,
(08:43):
trying out a new place, trying out a new job.
I never want to sound like I'm putting a slur
on that, because the other aspect of the American dream
is mobility, right, It's that ability to pick up move
across the country. People used to do that when they
couldn't even send a letter home reliably. And now bizarrely,
we're moving, as best we can tell, less than Americans
have ever moved. And it's easier than it's ever been.
(09:06):
Load your possessions of the car, drive across the country.
It's safe and easy compared to what our forebears went through.
And yet we don't do it. And a big part
of that is that the places with opportunity are too expensive.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
There is a large part of that just sheer price
that people just can't afford to do it.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
There's a young lady I've known since she was a
twelve year old. She's babysat my kids. She's now spreading
her wings, moving out of her own her parents' home,
and she wants to be an actress. And you can
think of all the generations of talented young women who've
moved out to Los Angeles and tried to make it
in Hollywood and the odds aren't great, but gosh, that's
such an American story, and that's what she wanted to do.
(09:45):
And she looked at it, she gave it a serious look,
and she said, you know, I can't even get an
apartment anywhere near Hollywood, and it's not worth pursuing my
dream there. I'm going to go to a secondary city.
Atlanta has kind of a second or third tier film industry,
and I'm going to try to break in through during
commercials or smaller TV shows in Atlanta. And I just
(10:07):
it's so sad that someone with a big dream, an
unlikely dream, she wants to make it to the big leagues,
and instead she's gonna settle for hoping to make it
in the minors because she can't afford a single room
to rent in a great American city.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
You've pointed out from your work that part of the
response has been a tremendous increase in state legislative efforts
to increase housing supply. I mean the numbers that you've reported,
where you go from like ten housing supply goes past
them the last six months of twenty two to one
hundred and four housing supply bills passed in the last
(11:03):
six months. What's happening at the state.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Level, and that's the good news is that we aren't
the only people who understand this, and I think state
legislators in the last two maybe three election cycles, they've
had a new plank in their platforms, our Democrats and Republicans.
They are telling their voters, I'm going to do something
about the cost of living, about the cost of housing,
(11:26):
about home ownership. They didn't used to say that, right,
This was just not part of the job of being
a state rep and now it is because that's the
biggest problem in their constituents' lives. And so once they've
told their voters, I'm going to do something. Then they
come to people like me and they say, hey, Salim,
what do I do? How do I untie this? Knot
(11:47):
bring home ownership back into the realm of possibilities, open
up the rentals that someone like my former babysitter could take.
We've given them good advice to lots of other folks. Researchers,
advocates are out there giving them good advice. And I
think it's actually really important to note there are bad ideas, right.
There are ideas like, well, let's just ban Wall Street
(12:08):
investments in housing. Well, those are small potatoes. You wouldn't
do much of anything anyway. Or let's use rent control,
let's just stop the rent. So zar On Mondomi wants
to do this in New York City. Well that's counterproductive.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Explain why it's counterproductive.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Rent control at best stops your rent from going up. Well,
it's really high to begin with, so at best you
get a declining product. Right, Your apartment kind of gets
worse and worse over time. So there's still apartments in
New York City. They're really rent controlled ones. They don't
even have hot water because then they got rent control
in the forties, they didn't have hot water and it's
(12:40):
never been worth the landlord's money to put in hot
water and get back a few bucks a month. And
so you want to extend this system to every apartment
in New York City. Again, at best, you're freezing the rents.
That's not good enough. If you go to a place
where they're actually building a lot of housing and they
say we're gonna let it rep We're going to let
developers come in here, make money, build towers, build townhouses,
(13:03):
build subdivisions, then guess what The rent goes down. That's
the story in Denver, that's the story in Austin. The
rent is actually falling. Even in Montgomery County, Maryland, where
I live. It's been a place that has embraced growth
and the result is on average, rents fall over time,
they don't rise. And so we can do better than
rent control. The market actually can beat rent control. So
(13:26):
instead you do rent control, you get a falling quality
and stagnating prices instead of rising quality and falling prices,
which is what you can get from a market.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Why is it so hard to explain that in a
place like New.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
York Because they've poisoned the well for so long, They've
made it so hard to build for so long, they've
completely forgotten what a functional market looks like. So when
they're thinking about, oh, well, if I don't have the
government on my side beating up on my landlord, then
my landlord is going to like put me over a barrel.
(13:58):
And that's true because they haven't let anyone compete with
their landlord. But if they said, hey, your landlord could
try to get you over a barrel. But hey, there's
a new building opening up a block away, and the
condos there are twenty five percent cheaper than your apartment,
so you can go buy a condo. Because we let
people build a ton of new ones and they're trying
to get them off their hands. And that's what happens
when you let a market work, is you will have
(14:21):
producers competing on price, and you'll get lower rents and
lower prices and rising quality instead of the opposite.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
But as I understand it, in New York, there is
currently no possibility of passing that kind of positive reform.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Mayor Eric Adams he had a number of issues and
is the reason he's losing his seed, but he looked
like he was going to make some serious steps towards
allowing more housing. He had a City of Yes agenda,
which was mostly positive. It wasn't about rent control. And
there's a balant initiative actually that should go before the voters,
which would remove the prerogative of city councilors to unilattery
(15:00):
kill any project in their district. And guess what, the
city council is trying to keep the voters from having
the chance of voting on this ballot measure. So that's
a big fight. We'll see how it plays out. But
there's at least a chance that the voters of New
York City will be able to take this into their
own hands and it at least makes some steps towards
allowing more construction.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
How much is the not in my backyard attitude slow
down everything that raised costs? I was very struck. In
nineteen ninety six, we did a Republican National Convention in
San Diego, and I've been working with Jimmy Carter on
Habitat for Humanity, so we decided we would build a
Habitat for Humanity in San Diego. And the cost of
(15:44):
the permits was greater than the total cost of building
the same house in Georgia. That it was a great
education for me because here we are, we're trying to
help a poor family earn the right to have a
decent house by helping them build a house. And it's
quite clear that San Diego County had no interest in
(16:05):
affordable housing for poor people.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
That's right. One of my friends helps run Habitat for
Humunity in Austin, Texas, and at a certain point he
just gave up on buying land. It had become so
expensive and they don't have fees like that in Texas.
But the land crisis because land that you were allowed
to build on had become so scarce and so much demand,
he could not make it make sense for his organization
(16:30):
for a couple of years, and so instead he worked
with me and others to bring good ideas to the
Texas state legislature. So one of the things they did
is they capped fees. Another thing is they said, in
the big Texas cities, you have to allow small lot sizes.
You can't say every home needs a quarter acre. You've
got to be able to go down to three thousand
square feet, which is like a large townhouse lot or
(16:52):
a small lot for a small habitat type home. That's
going to make sense for habitat Austin and the other
big Techxas cities. If they can find a site that's undeveloped,
they can say, okay, we can put on a half
acre site. Now we can put six or seven homes
instead of one or two, and then all of a sudden,
the math makes sense for them and those kind of
(17:14):
starter homes, even if you're not a charity. So Lenard
one of the biggest homebuilders, they're building tiny homes in
Texas because Texas has passed laws state and local to
say we want to have entry level home ownership. We
understand this is not most people's dream to own a
little house on a postage stamp the size of an apartment. Sure,
but maybe that's where your dream starts. You start building equity,
(17:37):
you get control, and eventually you can build an addition
on that tiny house.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
From that standpoint, what is that dear to the fear
of people in existing houses that their home value will
go down.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
We've made people to promises in this country and they're incompatible.
One is that their home price will always go up,
and the other is that their children will be able
to afford to buy a house. And there's some middle
ground where you have a stable asset and you're able
to sell your home for a little bit more than
you bought it to account for inflation. But your children,
with their incomes can still buy homes, and that bargain's
(18:10):
broken down. It's obviously broken in one direction. And so
I think people like you and I who own our homes,
we have to accept that it's not going to be
a hedge fund. It might be stable. It's a stable
store of value, it's a place to live, it will
continue to be a good place. The reality is building
a few more homes in your neighborhood does not tank
your home price. And accepting that something maybe not literally
(18:33):
in your backyard, but across the street or three blocks away,
in what you've kind of thought of as open space
but was actually just somebody's land, and that person wants
to subdivide their land and put a townhouse development, and
saying if we don't build this kind of thing, my
children will never be able to afford a home in
this community, and accepting that and saying supply and demand
are going to keep prices moderate, and that's okay. Moderate
(18:57):
growth is okay. I don't need my house to be
a hedge Fund.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
So few tracked these reforms, and it looks like on
the surface, the Texas may be the most reform oriented
state legislature.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
It was their first time, their first real like steping
into the rodeo and making some big things happen, and
it passed I think seven eight nine bills this year,
really impressive ones. But there's other states that have been
working on this for a long time. California, to its credit,
they were in the deepest hole and they've been trying
to climb their way out of it for the longest.
(19:28):
There's still in a hole you don't want to be
where California is, But I give them credit for trying
to work in the right direction. Montana and Washington State, though,
are actually my champions.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
What made the difference? Why did those two coalesce and
suddenly become very reform oriented.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
So in Montana, right, it's a red state, but they
have included the Democrats and reform efforts. And a big
part of that was especially after COVID And actually I
just was chatting with Senator Danny Zolnikoff from Montana. He said, Gosh,
I hate the show Yellowstone. It was the hit show
when everyone was stuck at home during COVID and hated
their condos in California, and so they all moved to Montana.
(20:08):
And it doesn't take a lot of Californians to be
a big number of people in Montana. And they came
with all this home equity that they had from selling
what they owned in California and brought it and they
could just outbid almost any local Montana And so they'll
complain about it. You can complain, but this is a
US constitution. You can't stop people from moving to your state.
What you can do is say, we're going to make
(20:29):
it really easy to build houses, so we can have
brand new homes for the people who loved Yellowstone on
TV and want to move out here, and they could
buy those eight hundred thousand dollars brand new homes, and
let's keep the existing Montana homes at three hundred four hundred,
where at least in Montana has a fighting chance. And
then eventually, if we do enough and maybe people forget
about Yellowstone, then those prices start to come back down
(20:50):
to where they were.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
But Montana is a huge state. You have a lot
of space in Montana for people to still show up.
You do.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
But I think this is interesting. People don't want to
live in the middle of nowhere. They don't even want
to live in a lot of the kind of boring
prairie towns. Right, so you get billings or great falls,
those aren't having the boom that Missoula and Bow's Men,
which are near the mountains are having. Some people want
to live where there's beautiful views of the mountains and
some nice local amenities. They want to have a grocery
(21:20):
store in a hospital reasonably, and they want to be
able to walk some places and not just do the
half hour drive and if they bought a ranch in
the country. And that's true not just in Montana, but nationally.
People want to have walkability and that means building houses
near where other people are. Right. If it was just
a matter of like, well, can we build a few
more homes on some ranches twenty miles from town, that
(21:42):
wouldn't have been an issue. But the demand was for
more homes in town. And that's where you have to
kind of balance these interests and say, hey, for Montana's
to own their homes. If you want your kids to
be able to live in town, and you want to
see your grandkids. You have to build some homes for
ca Californians too, and that's a tough trade off. I
(22:02):
really applaud Montanas for coming together across party lines and
saying we can only build our way out of this.
We cannot complain our way out of it.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Some people have been suggesting that the federal government owned
so much land, for example in Nevada, that you could
literally build entire new cities. I mean, is that plausible,
I mean.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
You could building new cities is a fraud endeavor. It
works once in a while, but usually it fails. So
you were probably in office as part of passing the
Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act. So that's a great
model at bipartisan roots, with your involvement in Harry Reid's
and it should just be expanded nationally. There's no other
big city that's as much federally constrained as Las Vegas.
(22:58):
Like Las Vegas. If you go to the last subdivision
to throw a rock, it lands in federal land all
the way around the city.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
I think the FED zone like ninety something percent of Nevada.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
That's astonishing, right, Nevada needed the most, but other cities
need this too. And there's federal land around some of
the smaller cities in Utah, Idaho, Montana. It's not as much,
it's not as severe, it's not perfect, but it works
south of Nevada, Snipoma, that's what they call it. It works.
And just taking that model national and saying, hey, anywhere
that the FED zone land, you should be able to
(23:31):
sell that land to a private developer who has a
plan to bring water and sewer, turn it into urban
or suburban space, and then the Feds are able to
take that revenue and improve conservation land. That's really special, right,
the places that are beautiful, the national parks where we
need upkeep and amenities. It creates a revenue stream and
is able to improve public land in Nevada. And so
(23:53):
it's really a win win for conservation and home prices.
But I think it could be overstated. There's all this land,
but as I said, in Montana, most people don't want
to live a twenty mile drive from the grocery store,
and so that the amount of demand that you can
siphon off on federal land is moderate.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Yeah, and everything that's going on, do you expect the
pace of reform to accelerate or to slow in twenty six.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
It's a great question. So election years are usually a
little bit down, it might be about the same level
because I think there's a general upward trend. We've seen
every year for the last four or five years, rising interest,
rising numbers of states that are saying this is our
problem too, and our home praises don't seem to be falling.
The thing that would really take the wind out of it,
(24:37):
as if home praises collapse, if we had a big
recession and everybody shifted their focus from cost of living
to unemployment, for instance. But aside from the election, of
the election issue, we'll take some people away. People don't
want to take big risks. They're spending more of their
time out on the campaign trail. I think we'll be
at least moderately up in twenty six, and I think
we'll see states in the middle of the country. Right.
(24:58):
We talk to people in Michigan and I these are
not booming coastal economies, but they still feel the pinch,
and so they are leaning and saying we need some
of these same solutions. And we didn't think we needed
to economize, but we need to make sure that you
can build a backyard cottage in Des Moines, or that
you can have a hud code manufactured home installed anywhere
(25:18):
in Michigan, because sometimes the price of construction is just
too great.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
The struggle between the classic stick built housing and the
capacity of factory built housing has been a real tension point,
and as it always seemed to me that the potential
for dramatically better factory built homes that frankly were indistinguishable
from the classic is there, and there's something we probably
(25:43):
should use a lot more of.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Yes, there are a few reforms moving right now so
to make hud code factory built homes a little bit
more like stick built ones. Part of it is that
moving the work indoors doesn't save you that much, right.
It helps a little bit in cold climates, but then
you have the cost of shipping, so there hasn't been
huge savings without a lot of automation. So there are
some entrepreneurs who're trying to make factory built much more
(26:09):
productive by using advanced manufacturing techniques, the kinds of things
that the administration is kind of trying to bring back
to the US. Technically, we'll see how that works. You've
still got to deliver this product, which is very large
and cumbersome to a home site. The stick built will
always have the advantage that you can move the lumber
as lumber instead of moving in as a house.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
If the wave of reforms a you monitor and you encourage,
if they continue save for the next ten or fifteen years,
what do you think housing in America will look like
fifteen years from now?
Speaker 2 (26:41):
I love that question, so I think if you're in
Texas or Arizona, you won't notice at all, because essentially
what they're doing there is trying to protect what they've
had for decades, and they're trying to fight back against
recent increases in regulation. When I talk to people in Arizona,
they're just trying to get back to twenty nineteen. If
you're in Massachusetts or Maryland, certainly in California, it could
(27:05):
be a totally radical shift. You could be seeing completely
new types of housing innovations. You could be seeing kinds
of neighborhoods literally have not been built since the fifties.
You can be seeing a lot more tall apartment buildings
because there's so much demand for space that if you
take your renters and spread them out, they're just going
(27:25):
to take up a lot of space, and you say, well,
when we've got mass transit systems and major cities with
hundreds of thousands of jobs and in narrow space, we
need to build thirty story buildings by those transit stations.
So you might see completely different looks in some of
those places because they need so much change. They have
been sitting it out for fifty years, and it's going
(27:47):
to be a lot of catch up for them.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Do you think that from a young person's standpoint, they'll
have a better opportunity the generation that grows up, say
fifteen years from now, we'll have a better opportunity to
buy house.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
One hundred percent very sad if it was not the case.
You know, if I meet somebody just in general conversation,
if they are younger than me, they almost always agree
with me on policy. That's like, doesn't matter whether they're
lefty or righty, whether they're from the middle of the
country the coasts. They just instinctively say, oh, we need
to build more housing. None of my friends can afford
(28:20):
a home. And if I meet somebody who's my parents' age,
unless they have kids who are in this process, they
might have tuned out. They might be like well, things
are fine. My property taxes are a little too high.
That's my only complaint, and they can be a little
checked out and they can sometimes miss it. I'm really
encouraged when I do meet someone in that generation. Action
met someone at the playground last night. I was a
(28:40):
grandfather of some playmates in my children, and he gets it.
It was in Oakland, California, and he gets it. He said,
we need your stuff in Oakland because nobody can afford
a house.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
So I want to thank you for joining me. This
is a really important question about the whole future of
the country, because if we lose a generation, they no
longer who believes the American dreams possible. Then it's ironically,
on our two hundred and fiftieth anniversary as a country,
we're really putting the whole country at risk. Your policy brief,
(29:10):
Framing Futures pro Housing Legislation goes Vertical in twenty twenty five,
is available now for citizens across the country who are
interested in helping solve this problem. You can go to
Mercadis dot org and I think you'll find that this
brief really gives you some ideas for your state and
your legislature and Selim. I want to thank you for joining.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Me now, mister speaker, It's been a privilege. I really
look forward to continuous conversation with a lot of other
people too.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
Thank you to my guest, Selim Firth. You can get
a link to his policy brief framing futures pro housing
legislation goes vertical in twenty twenty five on our show
page at newtsworld dot com. Newtworld is produced by Getting Wish.
We sixty an iHeartMedia are executive producers Guardnzie Sloan. Our
researcher is Rachel Peterson. The art work for this show
(30:00):
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
at Gingrish for sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I
hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us
with five stars and give us a review so others
can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of
Newtsworld can sign up for my three freeweekly columns at
gingrishwo sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This
(30:24):
is Nutsworld.
In this episode of News World. With no relief from
high home prices and rents, more and more state legislators
are interested in pursuing housing reform. As a result, state
legislatures set new records for the number and strength of
new olls intended to unlock home building. In his new
policy brief for the Mercadas Center, Framing Futures, pro housing
(00:27):
legislation goes vertical in twenty twenty five, Salim Firth describes
how states past record breaking housing reforms in twenty twenty five,
easing parking rules and zoning across the United States. I'm
really pleased to welcome my guest, Celine Firth. He is
a senior Research Fellow and director of the Urbanity Project
(00:49):
at the Mercadas Center at George Mason University. His research
focuses on housing production and land use regulation. He frequently
advises local governments and tests of before state and federal legislatures.
He earned his PhD in economics from the University of Rochester, Silliam.
(01:19):
Welcome and thank you for joining me on News World.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Thank you so much, Speaker Kings.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Can you describe briefly what is the Urbanity Project?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Yeah, we are a small group of researchers within this
research center at George Mason University. He's a public university
in Virginia, but we are kind of independently funded. Where
we are liberty minded oriented towards markets. Somebody once described
us as where the people in Washington who say that
markets are the problem and markets are the solution. Another
(01:49):
way we describe ourselves is bridging the gap between academic
ideas and real world problems.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
A New Wall Street Journal Paul found that only twenty
five percent of Americans believe they have a good chance
of improving their standard of living. That's a record low
since that survey began in nineteen eighty seven. What do
you think is behind this sharp decline in optimism?
Speaker 2 (02:10):
That's amazing, that's really sad. Home prices are just the
biggest thing in almost anyone's budget, and especially young people.
When I talk to folks younger than me, like my
little brother's age, they hardly believe that they are ever
going to be able to buy a home in the
areas where they grew up or in the areas where
they work now. I was watching a panel with a
(02:31):
young legislator in New Hampshire, Joe Alexander, and he said
that his cohort, he's about thirty now, and his college friends,
he is still the only one who owns a home.
And these are, you know, smart young people. They went
to college, They did things the right way, right the
way that society told them. If you stay in school,
get a degree, work hard, you're going to get the
(02:54):
American dream. And most of them are renting.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
One of the surveys indicates that nearly seventy percent of
Americans now say the American dream that if you work hard,
you'll get ahead no longer holds true, or maybe never did.
What does this say about the current economic situation and
the kind of experiences they're having in life.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
I do think it used to. I mean when I
read older books or policy papers written by generations before me,
even before you, it was taken for granted that you
could leave your farm, or leave your country an ocean away,
come to an American city, work hard, and either you
(03:36):
or perhaps your children would have the American dream of
owning a piece of land, the house on top of it,
and essentially controlling your own future. Because I think that's
what it is. It's not being anyone's servant and not
being anyone's boss. We're not feudal lords and we're not
feudal peasants. We are people in control of our own lives,
(03:56):
making our way day by day. And I think that's
the core of the can dream. And fundamental to that
is being able to live somewhere where you have control
of your own property and that means ownership.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
But of that belief has declined that dramatically. That has
huge implications for the future of the country.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
That's right, and it means young people are going to
be supportive of radical solutions left and right. People are
willing to say, well, just burn it all down. It's
not working for me. And I think that's really sad
because if you look at most of the high level numbers,
if you look at well has our unemployment, Well, we're
doing really well. We've had low unemployment through major economic shocks,
(04:38):
through COVID, we've managed to sort of ride that out
in our economic policy makers deserve a great seal of
credit for that. We have high rates of education, lower
rates of teen pregnancy, lower rates of crime in our
big cities. Like a lot of things are going really
really well. And the one big big thing that is
blocking people from feeling like they are fully in control
(05:02):
of their lives is that they can't afford to buy
a house. I really think that's kind of a lynch
pin in a society that's otherwise enjoying record levels of abundance.
If I press a few buttons on a little computer
in my pocket, someone will send me a new pair
of shoes or a burrito to my house. That's phenomenal.
And yet if I don't have the house, all of
(05:25):
that feels a little bit empty.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
The Wall Street Journal poll found that fewer than one
fourth of the respondents said they were very confident they
could buy a home if they wanted to. Fifty six
percent over half said they had little or no confidence
they could buy a home. How central is this both
to the housing crisis and to the sense of the
economy now working.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
I think it's absolutely central. Other things are working fine, right.
People have jobs, they're getting paid better than their parents were,
better than their grandparents. But especially if they're in a
high productivity coastal city with the great biotech jobs or
the great jobs in Silicon Valley, they're looking at, you know,
all their wages may have doubled in a generation. Home
(06:08):
prices have quadrupled, and you know, you can do a
couple things. So one thing that a lot of people
are doing is moving to the Sun Belt, right They're
moving to San Antonio or Atlanta or Jacksonville, where the
job opportunities aren't quite as good, but the home prices
are much more reasonable. Or they're staying put in a
place like Buffalo, New York, or a Flint, Michigan, where
(06:30):
the job opportunities are distinctly poor, but there's a lot
of kind of older housing and if you don't mind,
you know, dealing with some repairs, you can have a
big place. Or they're doubling up, tripling up, renting in
the big cities and keeping that job and having, you know, again,
lots of good things in their lives, but not being
able to make that next step and say, hey, now
I own my own condominium, my own townhouse, my own
(06:53):
single family home, quarter acre, and I'm going to get
married and I'm going to have children. So those steps
I think are really blocked for people who want to
have upward mobility and live in the most expensive cities.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
I'm very curshed when we see the declining birth rates
for Americans to what extent do you think that is
a function of the inability to buy a home and
have a sense that you could actually have a secure future.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
It has to matter. I don't think we have a
good number that we can put on it yet. I
know some really smart researchers who are working on this question.
But we know, for example, that the price of cars
is a barrier to having a third child because it's
expensive to get a car that fits three kids. Houses
a lot more than a car, and kids tick up
a lot of space in a house. I got five
kids myself, so I know a thing or two about this.
(07:42):
And if you can't get a place with a couple
of bedrooms, nobody's going to have kids living in a
one bedroom apartment. We need three bedroom, four bedroom places
of all kinds. And that's why I'm excited about townhouses.
I think those are the house type that's the cheapest,
that's the entry level for that tenty six year old
who's like I found the person I want to spend
(08:02):
my life with. I want to have children, but I
need a bedroom for the kids to live it. I
just it can't not matter. It has to matter.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
In your analysis, how central do you think this idea
of being able to own property to the whole fabric
of what has been historically America.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Yeah, it's very important because, like I said, my conception
of what it means to have the American dream of
being middle class, it's not being a lord, not being
a peasant. It's having control of yourself. And to do
that you need to have some control of the property
that you live on. Renting is great. I have nothing
against renters. There's an important time of your life for moving,
(08:43):
trying out a new place, trying out a new job.
I never want to sound like I'm putting a slur
on that, because the other aspect of the American dream
is mobility, right, It's that ability to pick up move
across the country. People used to do that when they
couldn't even send a letter home reliably. And now bizarrely,
we're moving, as best we can tell, less than Americans
have ever moved. And it's easier than it's ever been.
(09:06):
Load your possessions of the car, drive across the country.
It's safe and easy compared to what our forebears went through.
And yet we don't do it. And a big part
of that is that the places with opportunity are too expensive.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
There is a large part of that just sheer price
that people just can't afford to do it.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
There's a young lady I've known since she was a
twelve year old. She's babysat my kids. She's now spreading
her wings, moving out of her own her parents' home,
and she wants to be an actress. And you can
think of all the generations of talented young women who've
moved out to Los Angeles and tried to make it
in Hollywood and the odds aren't great, but gosh, that's
such an American story, and that's what she wanted to do.
(09:45):
And she looked at it, she gave it a serious look,
and she said, you know, I can't even get an
apartment anywhere near Hollywood, and it's not worth pursuing my
dream there. I'm going to go to a secondary city.
Atlanta has kind of a second or third tier film industry,
and I'm going to try to break in through during
commercials or smaller TV shows in Atlanta. And I just
(10:07):
it's so sad that someone with a big dream, an
unlikely dream, she wants to make it to the big leagues,
and instead she's gonna settle for hoping to make it
in the minors because she can't afford a single room
to rent in a great American city.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
You've pointed out from your work that part of the
response has been a tremendous increase in state legislative efforts
to increase housing supply. I mean the numbers that you've reported,
where you go from like ten housing supply goes past
them the last six months of twenty two to one
hundred and four housing supply bills passed in the last
(11:03):
six months. What's happening at the state.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Level, and that's the good news is that we aren't
the only people who understand this, and I think state
legislators in the last two maybe three election cycles, they've
had a new plank in their platforms, our Democrats and Republicans.
They are telling their voters, I'm going to do something
about the cost of living, about the cost of housing,
(11:26):
about home ownership. They didn't used to say that, right,
This was just not part of the job of being
a state rep and now it is because that's the
biggest problem in their constituents' lives. And so once they've
told their voters, I'm going to do something. Then they
come to people like me and they say, hey, Salim,
what do I do? How do I untie this? Knot
(11:47):
bring home ownership back into the realm of possibilities, open
up the rentals that someone like my former babysitter could take.
We've given them good advice to lots of other folks. Researchers,
advocates are out there giving them good advice. And I
think it's actually really important to note there are bad ideas, right.
There are ideas like, well, let's just ban Wall Street
(12:08):
investments in housing. Well, those are small potatoes. You wouldn't
do much of anything anyway. Or let's use rent control,
let's just stop the rent. So zar On Mondomi wants
to do this in New York City. Well that's counterproductive.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Explain why it's counterproductive.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Rent control at best stops your rent from going up. Well,
it's really high to begin with, so at best you
get a declining product. Right, Your apartment kind of gets
worse and worse over time. So there's still apartments in
New York City. They're really rent controlled ones. They don't
even have hot water because then they got rent control
in the forties, they didn't have hot water and it's
(12:40):
never been worth the landlord's money to put in hot
water and get back a few bucks a month. And
so you want to extend this system to every apartment
in New York City. Again, at best, you're freezing the rents.
That's not good enough. If you go to a place
where they're actually building a lot of housing and they
say we're gonna let it rep We're going to let
developers come in here, make money, build towers, build townhouses,
(13:03):
build subdivisions, then guess what The rent goes down. That's
the story in Denver, that's the story in Austin. The
rent is actually falling. Even in Montgomery County, Maryland, where
I live. It's been a place that has embraced growth
and the result is on average, rents fall over time,
they don't rise. And so we can do better than
rent control. The market actually can beat rent control. So
(13:26):
instead you do rent control, you get a falling quality
and stagnating prices instead of rising quality and falling prices,
which is what you can get from a market.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Why is it so hard to explain that in a
place like New.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
York Because they've poisoned the well for so long, They've
made it so hard to build for so long, they've
completely forgotten what a functional market looks like. So when
they're thinking about, oh, well, if I don't have the
government on my side beating up on my landlord, then
my landlord is going to like put me over a barrel.
(13:58):
And that's true because they haven't let anyone compete with
their landlord. But if they said, hey, your landlord could
try to get you over a barrel. But hey, there's
a new building opening up a block away, and the
condos there are twenty five percent cheaper than your apartment,
so you can go buy a condo. Because we let
people build a ton of new ones and they're trying
to get them off their hands. And that's what happens
when you let a market work, is you will have
(14:21):
producers competing on price, and you'll get lower rents and
lower prices and rising quality instead of the opposite.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
But as I understand it, in New York, there is
currently no possibility of passing that kind of positive reform.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Mayor Eric Adams he had a number of issues and
is the reason he's losing his seed, but he looked
like he was going to make some serious steps towards
allowing more housing. He had a City of Yes agenda,
which was mostly positive. It wasn't about rent control. And
there's a balant initiative actually that should go before the voters,
which would remove the prerogative of city councilors to unilattery
(15:00):
kill any project in their district. And guess what, the
city council is trying to keep the voters from having
the chance of voting on this ballot measure. So that's
a big fight. We'll see how it plays out. But
there's at least a chance that the voters of New
York City will be able to take this into their
own hands and it at least makes some steps towards
allowing more construction.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
How much is the not in my backyard attitude slow
down everything that raised costs? I was very struck. In
nineteen ninety six, we did a Republican National Convention in
San Diego, and I've been working with Jimmy Carter on
Habitat for Humanity, so we decided we would build a
Habitat for Humanity in San Diego. And the cost of
(15:44):
the permits was greater than the total cost of building
the same house in Georgia. That it was a great
education for me because here we are, we're trying to
help a poor family earn the right to have a
decent house by helping them build a house. And it's
quite clear that San Diego County had no interest in
(16:05):
affordable housing for poor people.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
That's right. One of my friends helps run Habitat for
Humunity in Austin, Texas, and at a certain point he
just gave up on buying land. It had become so
expensive and they don't have fees like that in Texas.
But the land crisis because land that you were allowed
to build on had become so scarce and so much demand,
he could not make it make sense for his organization
(16:30):
for a couple of years, and so instead he worked
with me and others to bring good ideas to the
Texas state legislature. So one of the things they did
is they capped fees. Another thing is they said, in
the big Texas cities, you have to allow small lot sizes.
You can't say every home needs a quarter acre. You've
got to be able to go down to three thousand
square feet, which is like a large townhouse lot or
(16:52):
a small lot for a small habitat type home. That's
going to make sense for habitat Austin and the other
big Techxas cities. If they can find a site that's undeveloped,
they can say, okay, we can put on a half
acre site. Now we can put six or seven homes
instead of one or two, and then all of a sudden,
the math makes sense for them and those kind of
(17:14):
starter homes, even if you're not a charity. So Lenard
one of the biggest homebuilders, they're building tiny homes in
Texas because Texas has passed laws state and local to
say we want to have entry level home ownership. We
understand this is not most people's dream to own a
little house on a postage stamp the size of an apartment. Sure,
but maybe that's where your dream starts. You start building equity,
(17:37):
you get control, and eventually you can build an addition
on that tiny house.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
From that standpoint, what is that dear to the fear
of people in existing houses that their home value will
go down.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
We've made people to promises in this country and they're incompatible.
One is that their home price will always go up,
and the other is that their children will be able
to afford to buy a house. And there's some middle
ground where you have a stable asset and you're able
to sell your home for a little bit more than
you bought it to account for inflation. But your children,
with their incomes can still buy homes, and that bargain's
(18:10):
broken down. It's obviously broken in one direction. And so
I think people like you and I who own our homes,
we have to accept that it's not going to be
a hedge fund. It might be stable. It's a stable
store of value, it's a place to live, it will
continue to be a good place. The reality is building
a few more homes in your neighborhood does not tank
your home price. And accepting that something maybe not literally
(18:33):
in your backyard, but across the street or three blocks away,
in what you've kind of thought of as open space
but was actually just somebody's land, and that person wants
to subdivide their land and put a townhouse development, and
saying if we don't build this kind of thing, my
children will never be able to afford a home in
this community, and accepting that and saying supply and demand
are going to keep prices moderate, and that's okay. Moderate
(18:57):
growth is okay. I don't need my house to be
a hedge Fund.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
So few tracked these reforms, and it looks like on
the surface, the Texas may be the most reform oriented
state legislature.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
It was their first time, their first real like steping
into the rodeo and making some big things happen, and
it passed I think seven eight nine bills this year,
really impressive ones. But there's other states that have been
working on this for a long time. California, to its credit,
they were in the deepest hole and they've been trying
to climb their way out of it for the longest.
(19:28):
There's still in a hole you don't want to be
where California is, But I give them credit for trying
to work in the right direction. Montana and Washington State, though,
are actually my champions.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
What made the difference? Why did those two coalesce and
suddenly become very reform oriented.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
So in Montana, right, it's a red state, but they
have included the Democrats and reform efforts. And a big
part of that was especially after COVID And actually I
just was chatting with Senator Danny Zolnikoff from Montana. He said, Gosh,
I hate the show Yellowstone. It was the hit show
when everyone was stuck at home during COVID and hated
their condos in California, and so they all moved to Montana.
(20:08):
And it doesn't take a lot of Californians to be
a big number of people in Montana. And they came
with all this home equity that they had from selling
what they owned in California and brought it and they
could just outbid almost any local Montana And so they'll
complain about it. You can complain, but this is a
US constitution. You can't stop people from moving to your state.
What you can do is say, we're going to make
(20:29):
it really easy to build houses, so we can have
brand new homes for the people who loved Yellowstone on
TV and want to move out here, and they could
buy those eight hundred thousand dollars brand new homes, and
let's keep the existing Montana homes at three hundred four hundred,
where at least in Montana has a fighting chance. And
then eventually, if we do enough and maybe people forget
about Yellowstone, then those prices start to come back down
(20:50):
to where they were.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
But Montana is a huge state. You have a lot
of space in Montana for people to still show up.
You do.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
But I think this is interesting. People don't want to
live in the middle of nowhere. They don't even want
to live in a lot of the kind of boring
prairie towns. Right, so you get billings or great falls,
those aren't having the boom that Missoula and Bow's Men,
which are near the mountains are having. Some people want
to live where there's beautiful views of the mountains and
some nice local amenities. They want to have a grocery
(21:20):
store in a hospital reasonably, and they want to be
able to walk some places and not just do the
half hour drive and if they bought a ranch in
the country. And that's true not just in Montana, but nationally.
People want to have walkability and that means building houses
near where other people are. Right. If it was just
a matter of like, well, can we build a few
more homes on some ranches twenty miles from town, that
(21:42):
wouldn't have been an issue. But the demand was for
more homes in town. And that's where you have to
kind of balance these interests and say, hey, for Montana's
to own their homes. If you want your kids to
be able to live in town, and you want to
see your grandkids. You have to build some homes for
ca Californians too, and that's a tough trade off. I
(22:02):
really applaud Montanas for coming together across party lines and
saying we can only build our way out of this.
We cannot complain our way out of it.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Some people have been suggesting that the federal government owned
so much land, for example in Nevada, that you could
literally build entire new cities. I mean, is that plausible,
I mean.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
You could building new cities is a fraud endeavor. It
works once in a while, but usually it fails. So
you were probably in office as part of passing the
Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act. So that's a great
model at bipartisan roots, with your involvement in Harry Reid's
and it should just be expanded nationally. There's no other
big city that's as much federally constrained as Las Vegas.
(22:58):
Like Las Vegas. If you go to the last subdivision
to throw a rock, it lands in federal land all
the way around the city.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
I think the FED zone like ninety something percent of Nevada.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
That's astonishing, right, Nevada needed the most, but other cities
need this too. And there's federal land around some of
the smaller cities in Utah, Idaho, Montana. It's not as much,
it's not as severe, it's not perfect, but it works
south of Nevada, Snipoma, that's what they call it. It works.
And just taking that model national and saying, hey, anywhere
that the FED zone land, you should be able to
(23:31):
sell that land to a private developer who has a
plan to bring water and sewer, turn it into urban
or suburban space, and then the Feds are able to
take that revenue and improve conservation land. That's really special, right,
the places that are beautiful, the national parks where we
need upkeep and amenities. It creates a revenue stream and
is able to improve public land in Nevada. And so
(23:53):
it's really a win win for conservation and home prices.
But I think it could be overstated. There's all this land,
but as I said, in Montana, most people don't want
to live a twenty mile drive from the grocery store,
and so that the amount of demand that you can
siphon off on federal land is moderate.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Yeah, and everything that's going on, do you expect the
pace of reform to accelerate or to slow in twenty six.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
It's a great question. So election years are usually a
little bit down, it might be about the same level
because I think there's a general upward trend. We've seen
every year for the last four or five years, rising interest,
rising numbers of states that are saying this is our
problem too, and our home praises don't seem to be falling.
The thing that would really take the wind out of it,
(24:37):
as if home praises collapse, if we had a big
recession and everybody shifted their focus from cost of living
to unemployment, for instance. But aside from the election, of
the election issue, we'll take some people away. People don't
want to take big risks. They're spending more of their
time out on the campaign trail. I think we'll be
at least moderately up in twenty six, and I think
we'll see states in the middle of the country. Right.
(24:58):
We talk to people in Michigan and I these are
not booming coastal economies, but they still feel the pinch,
and so they are leaning and saying we need some
of these same solutions. And we didn't think we needed
to economize, but we need to make sure that you
can build a backyard cottage in Des Moines, or that
you can have a hud code manufactured home installed anywhere
(25:18):
in Michigan, because sometimes the price of construction is just
too great.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
The struggle between the classic stick built housing and the
capacity of factory built housing has been a real tension point,
and as it always seemed to me that the potential
for dramatically better factory built homes that frankly were indistinguishable
from the classic is there, and there's something we probably
(25:43):
should use a lot more of.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Yes, there are a few reforms moving right now so
to make hud code factory built homes a little bit
more like stick built ones. Part of it is that
moving the work indoors doesn't save you that much, right.
It helps a little bit in cold climates, but then
you have the cost of shipping, so there hasn't been
huge savings without a lot of automation. So there are
some entrepreneurs who're trying to make factory built much more
(26:09):
productive by using advanced manufacturing techniques, the kinds of things
that the administration is kind of trying to bring back
to the US. Technically, we'll see how that works. You've
still got to deliver this product, which is very large
and cumbersome to a home site. The stick built will
always have the advantage that you can move the lumber
as lumber instead of moving in as a house.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
If the wave of reforms a you monitor and you encourage,
if they continue save for the next ten or fifteen years,
what do you think housing in America will look like
fifteen years from now?
Speaker 2 (26:41):
I love that question, so I think if you're in
Texas or Arizona, you won't notice at all, because essentially
what they're doing there is trying to protect what they've
had for decades, and they're trying to fight back against
recent increases in regulation. When I talk to people in Arizona,
they're just trying to get back to twenty nineteen. If
you're in Massachusetts or Maryland, certainly in California, it could
(27:05):
be a totally radical shift. You could be seeing completely
new types of housing innovations. You could be seeing kinds
of neighborhoods literally have not been built since the fifties.
You can be seeing a lot more tall apartment buildings
because there's so much demand for space that if you
take your renters and spread them out, they're just going
(27:25):
to take up a lot of space, and you say, well,
when we've got mass transit systems and major cities with
hundreds of thousands of jobs and in narrow space, we
need to build thirty story buildings by those transit stations.
So you might see completely different looks in some of
those places because they need so much change. They have
been sitting it out for fifty years, and it's going
(27:47):
to be a lot of catch up for them.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Do you think that from a young person's standpoint, they'll
have a better opportunity the generation that grows up, say
fifteen years from now, we'll have a better opportunity to
buy house.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
One hundred percent very sad if it was not the case.
You know, if I meet somebody just in general conversation,
if they are younger than me, they almost always agree
with me on policy. That's like, doesn't matter whether they're
lefty or righty, whether they're from the middle of the
country the coasts. They just instinctively say, oh, we need
to build more housing. None of my friends can afford
(28:20):
a home. And if I meet somebody who's my parents' age,
unless they have kids who are in this process, they
might have tuned out. They might be like well, things
are fine. My property taxes are a little too high.
That's my only complaint, and they can be a little
checked out and they can sometimes miss it. I'm really
encouraged when I do meet someone in that generation. Action
met someone at the playground last night. I was a
(28:40):
grandfather of some playmates in my children, and he gets it.
It was in Oakland, California, and he gets it. He said,
we need your stuff in Oakland because nobody can afford
a house.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
So I want to thank you for joining me. This
is a really important question about the whole future of
the country, because if we lose a generation, they no
longer who believes the American dreams possible. Then it's ironically,
on our two hundred and fiftieth anniversary as a country,
we're really putting the whole country at risk. Your policy brief,
(29:10):
Framing Futures pro Housing Legislation goes Vertical in twenty twenty five,
is available now for citizens across the country who are
interested in helping solve this problem. You can go to
Mercadis dot org and I think you'll find that this
brief really gives you some ideas for your state and
your legislature and Selim. I want to thank you for joining.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Me now, mister speaker, It's been a privilege. I really
look forward to continuous conversation with a lot of other
people too.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
Thank you to my guest, Selim Firth. You can get
a link to his policy brief framing futures pro housing
legislation goes vertical in twenty twenty five on our show
page at newtsworld dot com. Newtworld is produced by Getting Wish.
We sixty an iHeartMedia are executive producers Guardnzie Sloan. Our
researcher is Rachel Peterson. The art work for this show
(30:00):
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
at Gingrish for sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I
hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us
with five stars and give us a review so others
can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of
Newtsworld can sign up for my three freeweekly columns at
gingrishwo sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This
(30:24):
is Nutsworld.
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