How We Fix the American Dream

Here is what I would do to fix the housing market...

This may not be a popular opinion, but the reality is really bad right now and some tough decisions need to be made if we’re going to fix it.

The average age of a home buyer used to be 36 in 2004. It is now 57. The median age of a home buyer is now 62.

The average age of a first-time home buyer is now 40. In 1991 it was 28.

This is a crisis that needs fixing. The younger generations won’t be as motivated to help this country if they don’t own any piece of it. That’s just a fact.

Anyone under 35 years old has been sold out by previous generations. In 2008 the market collapsed, and the government bailed out the big banks. All that money was robbed through inflation from the generations that came after.

The government has been pulling levers ever since to prop up the economy and keep home prices and the stock market from falling. They’ve done this mostly by pouring trillions of dollars into the money supply and destroying the value of the dollar.

Affordability has never been worse, and middle America is the one suffering. What has always made America great was the fact that a family could afford a nice house with a yard, 2 cars and a few vacations a year, all while the wife could stay home and raise the kids. That stability built the middle class.

The number one reason Trump was voted back into office is because he ran on the hope of fixing the affordability crisis. Biden didn’t know how to fix it and nobody trusted Kamala to do it either. This was supposed to be Trump’s strength. Sadly, he chose to enrich the wealthy donors and tech behemoths that helped get him elected, all at the expense of the everyday American family.

This decision will be Trump’s and the Republican Party’s downfall. Sixty two percent of people under 30 have a favorable view of socialism in 2025. That number is up from 49 percent in 2020. We’re seeing it in elections like the NYC mayor race. And while socialism isn’t the answer, this form of capitalism is much worse. This is not the capitalism that built the middle class after World War II.

Unfortunately, America is now run by oligarchs with a small handful of men owning 80 percent of the country’s wealth. The last store of wealth for middle class families has always been their primary residence. Corporate America realized this and got greedy, pricing new married couples out of the first-time home buyer market. Only 21 percent of home buyers are first-time buyers in 2025, the lowest percentage on record. They’re creating a new norm of renters instead of homeowners.

The reality is, the people who should care don’t and they aren’t making laws to change this. As a real estate expert of more than 20 years who has sold over 3000 homes, I’m obsessed with finding solutions. Here are a few simple ideas for anyone who actually cares.

1. Corporations and REITs are banned from buying single-family homes.
2. No more foreign ownership of American homes. They need to be owned by U.S. citizens.
3. Raise property taxes on investment homes for individuals and eliminate all property taxes for primary owners.
4. Loosen permitting on new homes and immediately greenlight construction to double new home supply.
5. The government bailed out the banks, so the government can control how these banks lend to first-time buyers.
   • Rates under 3 percent for all first-time buyers.
   • Mortgages are no longer front-loaded with interest. For the first 5 years, 80 percent of the payment goes to principal so they can build equity as they pay it down.
6. We need rates to go up, not down. It’s not a popular take, but combined with everything above, it would drop home prices by 20 percent over the next few years and make them affordable again. It sounds painful in the short term, but a correction is what the market needs. Corrections are supposed to happen when prices get out of control.

What did I miss? What else can be done to help the younger generation?

I’d be greatly affected by these changes. I own over 55 real estate doors. If the value of my housing portfolio fell by 20 percent, that would be a loss of around 4.4 million dollars of equity and personal net worth. But guess what? I’d still be fine.

Somebody needs to stand up for the younger generation. If they don’t own homes, they won’t build wealth. They’ll spend their lives playing catch up, and their American Dream will die.

Share this with someone who might care. Let’s start making a difference before all we have left is indifference.