re: Bessent: Trump may declare national housing emergency

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Yes, but reducing the number of people on Section 8 is not going to make an average middle-class home a lot more affordable. Two totally different markets.

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Section 8 destroys communities. Once a school has had its demographics flipped by section 8 housing developments, all the feeder neighborhoods for that school essentially start to die. The houses in those neighborhoods are eliminated as viable places to live if you have kids. Eventually the neighborhood becomes ghetto as the residents age out or move.

So those houses, though technically a part of the housing pool...arent viable places to live for taxpaying citizens

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I've been told that the problem is that the average square footage of a starter home has doubled or tripled in the last 50 years and every young family has to have a two-care garage, vaulted ceilings and big arse kitchen with a center island.

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That doesn’t necessarily anything to do with demand for cheap housing because that could also be adequately explained by the type of person who can afford a new home mostly coming from people who can afford more from a starter home.

The same sort of size creep has happened in automobiles and I suspect it has to do with rising costs also. If you’re spending Accord money on a Civic, you’d like to have the Accord space you got when they used to cost as much as a Civic does now. And that is certainly what we have seen happen. Compact vehicles in the US have gotten more expensive and grown with that higher expense because the size class really doesn’t make a ton of difference in the overall cost but helps the value proposition to buyers who can afford it.

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Trump may declare national housing emergency

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“I’m from the government and I’m here to help”



More socialism from Trump. Not what I voted for

But it’s not an emergency.

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I have never understood why people want the value of their house to go up if they live in a place where there is property tax. And most places have that.

Why would I want to pay more taxes to the gov't because the house that pays me nothing.

But if I sell is the argument. OK sell a high priced house and buy a high priced house to replace it. Net zero.

Sell a high priced house, buy an even higher nicer high priced house.... Net lose with the added benefit of paying more taxes.

I wish houses were 1/5 of the what they cost now. Now our kids can get a decent house. And I could sell mine and buy a better one for not much more.

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People ignore the FACT that it rarely works out for a quickly appreciating housing market to generate actual useable wealth for them unless they move into an old folks home—and then they're using the revenue fro the house to pay for the OFH—or they sell and move to a completely different market (like moving from San Fransisco to Tuscaloosa, Alabama).

Because of exactly what you just said. You have to live somewhere. If houses are appreciating everywhere around where you are then those boats are rising just like yours is.

Actually, people ignore all kinds of things relevant to the housing discussion because they've been brainwashed to think that no one else in the history of the country has ever lived through times where houses relative to income were expensive or that they've ever appreciated quickly before. Somehow they compare what's going on now with the 90s...ALWAYS with the 90s, ignoring that the 90s was the outlier.

The market has always waxed and waned. That's one thing.

But driving up the price with tariffs is another. Declaring a "national housing emergency" to artificially suppress the artificially caused effects of the tariffs is another thing still.

We have historical models of what happens when you try to centrally plan/control the economy. They didn't work out well.

One of the major issues is how the tax code treats the sale of your home. Eliminating cap gains (in most instances) creates a huge windfall, which has created the societal meme of "buying up" with that windfall. If you do this a few times with luck in appreciation timing, you can out-pace most investments offered to normal people.

Remove the favorable cap gains treatment and this goes away and we return to thinking of homes as homes and not investments.

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We dont need historical models, we see it right now.

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If years of artificially low interest rates and adding 14 trillion to the money supply isnt central planning of an economy, I dont know what is.

Like no shite, housing prices have gone up

It Trump wants it - I’m for it. He hasn’t made a single wrong move this term. He can do what ever he wants. He knows what it will take to continue the golden age