Dylan Bain: It is time to reject the domestication of a manufacture society and reclaim the human wisdom that lives within our hearts. Welcome to The Human Revolution. I’m your host, Dylan Bain.

Welcome to the show, ladies and gentlemen. Today’s show is coming to you via a listener request. I had a listener reach out to me on Instagram and say, Hey, Dylan, I would really appreciate it if you would talk about the housing crisis. So I’m going to do that today. And just to kind of bring this into context, I don’t think I’m out of balance in saying that in the United States and Canada, we’re facing a horrendous shortage of housing with prices, both for single family homes and for rentals, just spiraling out of control.

And everybody and their brother has an opinion as to why this is or what we should do about it. My role here today is to help bring some clarity to a few things. Obviously, as with everything, I have an opinion. My goal here is to really not push that opinion. Instead, I want to inform you as to what the actual state of play is on the ground in these countries.

So basically the housing crisis, if you look at the United States, housing prices have gotten out of control, they’re starting to hockey stick. If we’re actually looking at housing prices in the United States as a function of time, they are increasing at a rate that is greater than inflation. And during the COVID 19 pandemic, it really did get just kind of out of hand.

There was a huge influx of people moving into rural communities and out of cities and urban centers, which is basically exactly what you’d expect, but the rise of remote work really threw gasoline on that fire. Couple that with low interest rates meant that people could afford more homes, which since 2008 has been one of the things that’s actually driven up home prices.

This makes sense. If you’re the Federal Reserve in under Brendan Bernanke back in 2008, You’re looking at and saying the housing market’s locking up. Everybody’s losing their home. What do we do? Let’s lower interest rates because that’ll put more and more money in the economy. But that also lowered mortgage interest rates, which meant that before we could only qualify for 150,000-dollar home, you now could qualify for a 300,000-dollar home.

And who wouldn’t want more space? And so what we’ve seen since 2008 in this low interest rate environment has been a steady escalation of home prices that’s outstripping inflation as people continue to buy up and buy more house than they otherwise normally could afford under a normal interest rate environment.

The state of play here in June of 2024, it’s important for us to just kind of keep things in historical context. If you look back since the 1930s, in which we did the Federal Housing Administration and the 30 year fixed mortgage became a uniquely American institution. If you look back since the 1930s, in which we did the Federal Housing Administration and the 30 year fixed mortgage became a uniquely American institution, mortgage rates have averaged about seven and a half percent. So we’re in normal days. The abnormality was all the years from 2008 up until present. And so we’ve started to normalize, but because of the escalation of home prices, now people have found those interest rates, pricing them out of homes. So if you bought prior to the COVID 19 pandemic, you’re in a pretty good spot.

You bought it at a pretty good time in the market, right before it exploded during the pandemic. You also are sitting on an interest rate that is 3 percent or better. And this has created a distortion in the market because people now wanting to buy that same home at that same price that someone before the pandemic would have bought it for is now going to have to pay significantly more.

For example, in my own situation, I bought a house in March of 2020, right before COVID 19 hit. That was purely dumb luck on my part, but I was able to lock in a really good interest rate, which meant that my all in mortgage payments around 2,100 dollars. Hey, that’s pretty great. So if I were to buy that same house at that same price today, my mortgage payment would be at least 1,000 dollars more a month.

12, 000 dollars over the course of a year is nothing to sniff at. And so that would be a strain on my family. And I wouldn’t feel really good about how things are going. On top of it, since the COVID 19 pandemic, rental prices have gotten absolutely insane. If you stop and think about it, before the COVID 19 pandemic, You could have bought the house.

I just said, yeah, I have a nice house in the suburbans, just outside of Denver, Colorado. It’s three bedroom, two bath. It’s got a detached garage. It’s great. And if I were to go rent a studio in Denver right now, I’d be paying more for that studio apartment than I am for my house. Things have gotten out of whack.

And so the question becomes, why? Because on this show, we’re all about looking at the human element. And shelter is a human need. It’s the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s right there. It’s a survival need. So when that’s threatened for us, When we are not secure in our housing, the rest of our world tends to fall apart because you can’t build up to a sense of security or to a sense of relationship or esteem or self actualization if that bottom tier of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the survival needs, the food, the water, the shelter, the warmth, if those aren’t taken care of, the rest of it almost doesn’t matter. And so this housing crisis is, in my opinion, an existential threat to millions of Americans and Canadians. And so why? What is going on here?

For my money, ladies and gentlemen, the housing crisis is caused by two things, an issue of supply, which is broken into three parts, and algorithms, and I’m going to get to both parts here. When we talk about the supply of housing, this is the thing that people love to bang on about. "Oh, we, we, we’ve under built homes. We just don’t have enough," is correct as it’s not because supply is, for the sake of simplicity for a podcast I’m trying to keep under 25 minutes, supply is going to come down to basically three things: builders, investors, and zoning. Now, yes, there’s a bunch of other stuff that goes into the supply of housing, but those three are the biggest three in my mind.

And they’re the biggest impact and they’re the things that have significantly changed over the last several years that are actually driving what we see right now. So starting with building, everybody likes to bang on about how we need to build more houses, "build, baby, build." That’s what we’re saying. And it is true is since 2008, the United States has faced a significant housing shortage due to under building homes.

Some estimates have listed this number as short 4 million homes. That’s 4 million individual single family residences that could be purchased as starter homes by families. And the shortfall was driven starting in 2008 because of a rise in construction costs and the entire housing market falling apart.

Tons of people left the trades at that particular point, creating labor shortages, and there’s an increase of demand in housing during the pandemic that actually drove up a whole bunch of other prices. But the other thing that people don’t talk about is that there have been some environmental changes.

Number one, in order to build homes, you need to have land. And depending on where you, where you live, you can kind of look out your house, your window and go, "yeah, there’s not a whole lot of really vacant land." And the vacant land that is out there is of course being stamped up by investors. And for every bit, every new division, every new subdivision we put in, Requires infrastructure and roads and farmland that we’re no longer going to be able to grow food on.

In my hometown of Kenosha, Wisconsin, every time I go back, I am dismayed by the more and more of our acreage of prime farming real estate is giving itself over to development. There’s a trade off here, and I’m going to get to that when I talk about zoning, but part of the reason that we’re under building homes is because we’re starting to run out of cheap and available land, and we’re starting to have to ask questions of, "well, how much more land do I want to send to housing that’s going to jack up food prices as that supply starts to dwindle?" Because let’s face it, in this inflationary environment, that’s part of it too, but we’ve also had a ton of beetle kill. One of the things that’s interesting when living out the west is that you’ll see a lot of dead trees because of different invasive species.

Well, during it, coinciding with the COVID 19 pandemic was a ton of kill off in trees that were used to make two by fours. This is why two by fours suddenly became outrageously expensive in 2020. On the one hand, the supply of two by fours went down because of beetle kill, and the demand went through the roof as everybody started remodeling their homes.

Well, as home builders then started moving over into remodeling, they weren’t building any additional units. This is a big part of the problem, but of the three I’ve listed, it’s actually the smallest. And this is where I’m going to deviate from the narrative you’re hearing on both sides of the political spectrum of build, baby, build.

Our building isn’t really what’s driving the housing crisis and driving the prices up, because at the end of the day, it’s not the building, it’s the what we’re building that’s actually going to count. We’ll get to that when we get to zoning. Before I go there, though, I want to talk about the number two issue in Supply, and that is Investor Activity.

And I know there are many people who are going to find me on Instagram after this, and they’re going to tell me that I’m just completely wrong. Well, I’m sorry, but all the data really just doesn’t support anyone else. Let’s take two, a case study in two years, 2018 and 2023. In 2018, investors accounted for just over 10 percent of all single family home purchases in the United States.

That means about one out of every 10 homes sold in the United States in 2008 were bought by investors. Investors fall into three categories, large investors that own more than a hundred homes. This would be your black stone, not black rock, black stone, and other large companies that are buying up these single family homes.

Then there’s medium investors that are somewhere between 11 and a hundred homes and then small mom and pop operations, which are 10 homes or fewer. And the thing to understand is that the large investors are actually the smallest player in this game. The small investors, the mom and pop shops, the people who are going to different podcasts and saying the only way to build generational wealth is through real estate, these are the people who are driving most of the investing.

And like I said, in 2018, they were about 10%. And they have had an impact on home prices. Let’s be really clear what happens when a investor, large or otherwise, comes in and buys a single family residence. They will tell you that they’re providing a needed service into the economy, and they’re not. They’re serving as a middleman.

They’re not providing housing. The housing is provided by a builder. They’re not providing anything special other than just owning the asset, the scarce asset that is protected by zoning. Again, we’ll get back to zoning and you can kind of see that I’m building up to a big reveal with zoning, that’s protected by the government, protected by all the zoning rules and regulations and things like that.

And because of the restrictions around zoning and all the ways in which we build homes, their investment is being artificially pumped by that government control. They are a middleman who have put themselves between families and homes in order to extract wealth from the family in the process, under the threat of eviction.

That is what they’re doing. Now, to be entirely clear, I’m not going to sit here and say that there isn’t a place for rentals. There absolutely is. What I would say though is that it started to get out of hand because like I said, in 2018, it was about 10%. Fast forward to 2023, where it’s almost 30 percent and this is heavily regionally dependent.

If you take California, for example, in 2023, 25%, one out of every four home purchases in the state went to an investor. Florida, Georgia, Texas, and Arizona, Nevada, all six of those states had an investor activity above 20%. You have New York at 19, North Carolina, Illinois, both at 18 and Ohio at 17 percent of all single family home residents being purchased by investors.

This is where we’re starting to see things go crazy because what you have, you have now seen large investors and mega large investors come into the market because small investors in 2018 were 60 percent of all investor activity. They’re now less than 50. And what’s driving that is these larger investors.

The major difference between a smaller investor and a larger investor is a smaller investor is probably going to have to use leverage, whereas a larger investor is just going to pay cash. And because they’re purchasing the cash flow and they’re purchasing what they view as a store of value, they are willing to overpay for the property.

They are, have access to way more data. They’re playing the game on easy. Whereas the small investors are having to kind of feel things out. They just simply not playing on the same level. And so as that has happened, you’ve now seen increased competition. And to be clear, ladies and gentlemen, the rate of investor activity from 2000 to 2018 was still around 10%.

That’s about what we’ve seen historically in the market for most of the history since the FHA, okay. What we’re seeing now though, is a complete abnormality and just understand that a 1 percent shift in demand, that’s the people buying the homes, will have a very large impact on home prices. What we’ve seen is that the investor activity has tripled.

That’s huge. And so there’s some serious questions because when we talk about supply, let’s go the next layer down to zoning. Zoning is probably the number one largest reason that we have a housing crisis. And let me explain. When you buy a home, you’re not buying the house, you’re buying the land. In suburban America and in Canada as well, there is a zoning regulation.

We use something called exclusionary zoning in the United States. This is zoned for commercial, it’s zoned for industrial or it’s zoned for residential. And that’s the only thing that can be there. So if I wanted to open up a shop at my house, say out of my, you know, convert my garage into a bodega or whatever, I can’t do it because now I’m running a commercial activity and in a real estate area.

And so now we’ve already restricted this because if I want it zoned for mixed use, where I want to have shops below and then apartments above, I have to go to the city council and get special permission for that, which is why we don’t see them a whole lot. Those types of structures don’t really exist in the United States and Canada because they’re illegal.

And more to the point, in my lot in Denver, Colorado, I’ve got this lot. It’s a quarter acre. We have a housing crisis going on. I bought the house in March of 2020. I could help solve this problem. Why don’t I just scrape and replace my lot? I’ll put up six skinny homes that are four stories tall. We have flat tops.

I got a great view of the front range. You know, there’ll be patios. I can sell them off. now, instead of one home on my property, I’ll have six and it’ll be great. Except I can’t do that because zoning laws say that I can only have one domicile on the property. And it has to be the domicile that was registered with the city when it was built in 1983, which means even if I wanted to scrape and replace, I can’t put a house that has any more floors on it.

I can’t put a house that has any more square footage on it. It has to be set back. I have a minimum lot size. And so all of these rules and regulations are distorting the market, because the other thing I could do with my home, because it’s a split level, is I could convert it from a single family residence to a duplex, thus doubling the housing, but again, that is illegal in my community.

And it’s illegal in the majority of the communities in the United States and Canada. What this means on a supply and demand level is that there is clearly a demand for an increase in housing, but because of the government rules and regulations, I am prevented from responding to that demand. I can’t put an accessory dwelling unit, an ADU on my property.

I can’t convert it into apartments. I can’t convert it into a duplex. I can’t scrape and replace it and put more housing on here. And people will say, well, we don’t have the infrastructure for that. Okay, I would beg to differ, because that’s what we would all have to start doing, and then maybe as we increase the density, we’re going to have to start having conversations about whether or not the car is really a thing, which I’ve talked about ad nauseum, and I’m just going to put off to the side for a second.

But that should give us pause because now we’re looking at it and saying, "wait, hold on a second. Dylan just said that investor activity has tripled since 2018." And those investors are stamping up necessary scarce resources, but the scarcity is manufactured by the zoning laws that are protecting these investors investments, because all of these zoning laws, going back to the 1950s, when we first started with exclusionary zoning, were designed with the idea of helping curate the neighborhoods from day one. The minimum setback and lot sizes were designed to create distance between the homes to jack up the prices, which made developers significantly more money, but also price certain people and undesirable people, and I use that loosely, out of the properties. And this isn’t conspiracy theory because they literally wrote it down and stated why they were doing it. You can go read this, it’s not really up for debate. The problem is, is we’ve continued the practice. And what we’ve done in the United States is because of these zoning laws, we started to see that real estate would appreciate higher than inflation.

It wasn’t doing that because there was a supply and demand issue per se, it was doing that because supply was restricted prior to the 50s and 60s when these zoning laws came in. When housing demand would go up, people would do exactly what I’m saying. If you go again, going back to my hometown in Kenosha, Wisconsin, you can find a ton of duplexes.

You can go on Zillow and take a look at them. And when you do, you’ll clearly see that this was a single family home. And somebody went, "Hey, housing’s hot right now and converted into a duplex." They’re all over Milwaukee and Cleveland, Columbus, toledo and Ann Arbor, Lansing, like they’re all over the Midwest and in New York and New Jersey and all those other places.

If you go and you look at a house in development that was done prior to the seventies, I’m certain you’re going to find a bunch of duplexes and they’re all going to, they’re not going to be separate addresses. It’s going to be the house number and then A or B. When you see that, that’s typically what’s happened.

It was a single family residence that they converted into a duplex. They’re responding to market incentives. That’s interesting. Wait, hold on. We’re responding to market incentives. It’s almost like having restrictive zoning policies is creating a market distortion. So if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to solve the housing crisis, change zoning.

Get rid of the minimum lot sizes. Get rid of the minimum setbacks. Get rid of all the arbitrary restrictions. But of course we don’t want to do that because what, you know, people will say, "well, what about the character of my neighborhood? Oh, well, what about my investment." People, when they say that, are basically giving up the game.

They do not want affordable housing because affordable housing will inherently mean that home values would have to fall. If we solve the supply problem, the investors are going to lose out because the value of their investment is going to fall. The average home owner who is viewed housing, not as a home, but as an investment, erroneously, and the only reason it was ever an investment was because of these zoning laws.

Well, they’re going to lose out too. And the builders aren’t going to be able to continue to put in subdivision. So they’re going to lose out. So when you really look at this and you say, "we want to solve the housing crisis," you got to get comfortable with basically taking a chainsaw to a bunch of people’s investments, telling a bunch of investors, "no, you cannot sit there and snap up a bunch of scarce government protected, artificially inflated, Resources to line your own pockets. We put that into place for single families, not for investors." Or we need to go the other way and just say, "all right, let’s have a market solution. Get rid of the government Fiat, get rid of the zoning laws and let us respond to the market." Those are our options. To really solve the housing crisis, we have to make some really uncomfortable decisions.

And I will promise you people are not going to like it. My folks are in this boat, but this boat, I’m a homeowner. I’m in this boat too. If we were able to do that, property values would plummet. The quote unquote character of my neighborhood would change and it would change dramatically very quickly in Lakewood, Colorado and Boulder and Golden.

People figured this out. And if you drive through those communities, you’ll see where they bought up houses, they bulldozed a lot, and they put up a bunch of new housing. It’s amazing. And then, all three of those municipalities outlawed it. They had quote unquote, smart growth initiatives where we can only increase housing supply by 3%.

Again, they’re creating a market distortion that’s driving these prices bonkers. It’s not interest rates. We are at a historical norm right now. It is an issue of what we’re building, because let’s go back to one thing I mentioned about exclusionary zoning. There’s another thing you could do called hierarchical zoning.

So where you put in industrial, commercial, and residential, and in the industrial, you can build anything below it. I can put shops in industrial. I can put housing in industrial. I can do any of that stuff. If you want to put housing next to an industrial plant, you’re welcome to do so. And then in commercial, you can put housing in commercial and things that are zone residential.

No, that’s just going to be residential. We’re not going to tell you what those residences have to look like. And what that would do, ladies and gentlemen, would completely change the equation. And we would be able to bring back in structures that historically for all of human history have always been here, which are shops and walkable communities at the bottom and apartments and living spaces above. These types of structures not only have the added benefit of solving the housing crisis. But they also pay enough taxes to pay for their infrastructures, which no single family resident in the United States or Canada pays enough in property taxes to cover their infrastructure expense. What they do cover is the expense of running the municipality.

But like here in Colorado, in the community that I live, we had to put in a new sewage plant. We weren’t bringing enough taxes to do it. So instead what we had to do was we had to float a bond. We with debt, this is why so many cities are drowning in debt because they’re not collected enough from property taxes to actually be able to pay for their infrastructure costs.

So if we build baby build and we just build more of the same, we are just creating a bigger and bigger financial time bomb. It’s not the building. It’s the, what are we building? We have chosen the United States and Canada to use the least efficient Most expensive way to design housing and transportation in those two countries.

And it was great because each one of those developments has a 20 to 25 year time horizon before it turns into that financial bomb, which if you stop and think about it, when we started this in the fifties and sixties, this is why we had so much tax revenue for things like schools. This is why we had thriving, booming communities.

And suddenly we ended up with urban decay in the late seventies and eighties. That’s because the infrastructure bill was coming due. And this has been happening over and over and over. Go to any type of midsize city in the Midwest and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about, where there’s entire areas where you can tell we’re once vibrant communities but are now completely in disrepair and people say, "well, that’s just bad city." No, it’s that they don’t have the money because they never collect the taxes to pay for the infrastructure in the first place. We are seeing the effects of this. And so when we look at how do we solve the supply, we got to start having more of these conversations about what is the actual human thing that is important here, because the suburbs are not serving the humans.

We find ourselves in boxes of isolations. Having a suburban home is horrendously expensive. Don’t even get me started on having the car and why is it that the automotive and oil industries have their products mandated to have to be accommodated by my home? You see where this goes. So when we’re talking about the supply, you gotta be thinking in those three realms.

Builders, investors, and zoning. And zoning is the most important. Because zoning means we don’t have to give up more farming land if we change the zoning to allow us to create more density. And this is how humans have been doing it for 10, 000 years. This is how Chicago grew up. This is how every major city in the world developed is that as more people came in, we created more density.

We created more shops. We created more thriving communities. We changed that in the 1950s and sixties. That was a change and it has kicked off a trajectory that has brought us here today. It’s not nearly as simple as build, baby, build, because what we’re building, where we’re building it, and how we’re building it, and who’s buying it, are all things that have to be considered in the solution.

Now if you’re listening to this and you’re like, damn Dylan, that’s a lot. Let’s get to number two. Algorithms. Number two is algorithms. One of the things that was interesting when I first started in the financial industry was 2017, I walk in to my very first day of orientation. The partner at the large public accounting firm that I was at is up there.

He’s banging on about this new thing called data analytics. And I thought that was really neat. So I raised my hand and I ended up on the very first data analytics project that the company had ever done. And it was cool because we could take all this data in and we could tell all sorts of stuff from sales, churn profitability, the only limiting factor on the insights we could pull out of this was our own creativity and how to use the system to get that insight.

It was incredible. And it was all the rage in 2017, just bonkers. Yeah, forget oil. Data started to become the lifeblood of the economy. All these free apps on our cell phones. No, we, we download crap on this all the time and they’re collecting data. Why? Because they’re selling it to data brokers. They know everything about you.

They know where you’ve been. They know what you eaten. You, you go to the grocery store and you’re like, I got a discount card, I put on my phone number. What, why did they give you the discount? Cause they’re paying you for your data. Yeah. And therefore they know now exactly how sticky your demand is as they jack prices.

Hey, look at food inflation. Is this a coincidence that they’ve spent all this time building this massive database and being able to run experiments between their different stores that are in relatively the same area to see if the, you know, number of cans of beans you buy goes down if they jack the price by 10 cents? It’s not because it’s exactly what they’re doing.

Because once one company starts doing it, they all start doing it. Oh, and by the way, they’re all buying from the same data broker. So they’re all playing with the same data, which means they all arrive at the same conclusion, which means they all jack prices at the same time, even if they don’t, they’re not officially colluding.

This is one of the major drivers behind inflation right now, because they now have have the amount of data and the computing power and the technology and the people to be able to figure out how Exactly how high they can jack prices before you break in a world in which we view a corporation’s sole job is to maximize shareholder value.

They are morally and ethically obligated to do just that. And the only one that will stop them would be some form of regulation. Sorry to say. "But Dylan, I’m not talking about beans. I’m talking about housing. What do you think they did with rent prices?" See, remember what I said earlier. In 2018, 10 percent of all single family home purchases were done by small investors who accounted for 60 percent of all of those purchases.

Fast forward to 2023, they’re down to less than 50%, but this is going to be important here in a second, because what you have is a bunch of, of small players. There’s no way they could possibly collude. There’s just a ton of them, but each one of them wants to maximize their return on their investment. So they turn to a company that will help them determine what is a fair market value for rents and they read the contract and they look at the contract and the contract says that they have to buy this contract, use whatever price is recommended by the company, and they can only rent the number of units the company tells them they’re allowed to rent, but they are going to promise they’re going to maximize their rents.

In fact, one of these companies is called Rent Maximizer. And so what ends up happening is all these small mom and pop operations, all these medium investors, even the large ones start submitting all their data into this program. And the program then spits back out what they’re going to charge and how many units they’re going to rent.

And so like a large rental complexes, particularly if you go to downtown Denver, you can see this, at night, a bunch of them are dark. Well, that’s not a coincidence. It’s because that whole floor no one rented on. Why? Because their contract said you’re only allowed to rent what, you know, two thirds of the units in this building, but their other rents are now way higher.

"You say, but Dylan, why would you want to do that? "Well, they, first off they can write off those meals vacancies against taxes, but they also create scarcity. And so what’s happening is all of these smaller investors are able to collude now unofficially because they’re relying on the software program. Kind of mind bending, isn’t it?

But there it is. And this is applied at the same time to all these investors buying single family residences. It’s applied to studios in downtown Vancouver. It’s applied to apartments in small town, Midwest United States, because they have the data. And so as they’re maximizing this, they’re taking it right to the edge, right to where you can break.

And they can do run experiments because remember the investors had to sign over their ability to make independent decisions to the company for a fee, of course, but those algorithms have now determined the sweet spot where the rent is so high it really hurts, but not high enough to get you to do anything about it.

And that’s where they want to be. That’s where all minimum I want to be. And we might say that that’s smart business. Yeah. But that’s what’s producing the other half of this housing crisis. Yeah, we have a supply issue. We beat that one to the ground. We also have a new technology that’s come in and has changed how we interact with this resource.

This new technology is what’s driving a lot of things that we are seeing that we don’t like. "How many cows are killed that’s going to affect beef prices. What are eggs going to cost? How high can I jack the price of beans before you stop buying them?" And we just recently had some people come out and say, well, I mean, target starting to slash their prices.

Yeah. It’s because the data is they’ve, they finally have hit that point and their data has adjusted. So when we start asking the question of how do we solve the housing crisis, we already talked about, we have to have a really stout conversation of whether or not we’re going to tell people, yeah, housing should have never been an investment and we’re done using the power of local and state governments to protect your investment and keep the number going up.

We’re going to allow the market to actually come in by removing zoning laws, and now we have an actual free market solution to our housing crisis, or we want to keep all of that government fiat, but now we’re going to keep it for the people that it was designed for, which are single families. And at the same time, we now have to start having the conversation around the market has changed, can people actually be market participants when there is a gigantic supercomputer with more data than you could ever possibly wrap your head around making decisions about how to squeeze each and every one of us for every single spare penny we have. And that’s going to apply to a lot more than just housing.

Where does that leave us? It leaves us with a lot of interesting questions. And not a lot of very interesting or comfortable solutions, because if you live in suburban America, you’re there for a reason. You want to see your home value go up. It’s how we feel better about things. It’s typically our biggest investments as middle income Americans.

And now I’m coming and telling you that the center can’t hold. Something’s going to break, and when it does, it’s going to be real ugly. Well, you can always have a managed decline, or we can have a horrific collapse. And I hate to say this, but as a student of history, humans almost always choose the horrific collapse because they don’t want to do the really uncomfortable thing they know they need to do.

So when we’re talking about this, when you’re looking at the housing crisis, it’s important for us to start asking these questions and having these conversations and get real clear on what we’re comfortable with and what we’re not. Do we want a world in which we’re constantly trying to build our way out of an unsolvable unbuilt, outable a problem? Do we wanna continue to see more and more farmland gobbled up in a futile effort to try to just out build the problems that came with suburban America? Are we willing to stop and look at it and go, "this is insanity. We should rethink this. And we should start with zoning laws, and we should start with investors."

We should start with builders or not. The choice is up to you. But ladies and gentlemen, I would encourage you to spend some time really thinking about this and looking around, really asking yourself, what would it mean to put six more subdivisions in? How much farther are we making commutes? How much more concrete do we need to pour?

How much more infrastructure do we have to put in and who is going to pay for that when the property taxes on those homes is never going to cover the infrastructure cost? So we’re going to leave you right there. With lots of questions, but I hope this has been informative. And if it has been, please share this episode with a friend.

Find me on Instagram at TheDylanBane. Leave me a five star rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. And I’ll see you next week.

Thanks for listening. The conversation doesn’t stop here. You can find me on all the social media platforms at TheDylanBane. And you can sign up to get updates on workshops, events, and more at DillonBain. com.