This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 16 episode of “Velshi.”
There’s new messaging you might have noticed coming from the White House recently. Right around the time of the Democrats’ clean sweep in the Nov. 4 elections, Donald Trump suddenly seemed to discover a new word: “affordability.”
For Trump, affordability appears to be just another buzzword to toss into a post, embrace half-heartedly and discard as quickly. But for everyday Americans, affordability — particularly housing affordability — is a very real, very urgent and worsening problem in the United States.
Years of runaway costs, turbocharged by a rogue Wall Street and a distorted housing market, have priced working families out of the American dream entirely.
The Trump administration has put forward its own plan to fix this problem, a 50-year mortgage, meaning the average first-time homebuyer, who is 41 years old, will still be making mortgage payments in their 90s.
Like a car lease, your monthly bill dips, but the total cost explodes. On a median-priced home, a 50-year mortgage adds roughly $400,000 in extra interest compared with a standard 30-year loan.
For everyday Americans, affordability — particularly housing affordability — is a very real, very urgent and worsening problem in the United States.
However, the problem is not the length of the loan, it’s the broken system behind skyrocketing home prices, a broken system Trump and Republicans seem to have no genuine interest in fixing. It’s a system in which major institutional investors and private equity firms buy up starter homes by the thousands and turn them into permanent rentals or flip them in a rising market; a system in which a handful of giant homebuilders now control many local housing markets, hoard land, dictate supply, essentially set home prices and steer buyers into inflated mortgage plans.
It’s also a system that governments at every level silently enable. This system is turning homeownership, that foundational engine of generational wealth, into a luxury good.
None of this is new. Experts and critics of the system have been sounding the alarm for years. Back in 2022, the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing with the blunt title “Where Have All the Houses Gone?”
Experts told lawmakers that families that needed mortgages were being outbid by private equity landlords with all-cash offers, and that they were jacking up rents, piling on junk fees, neglecting repairs and fueling eviction rates that local officials called destabilizing.
By 2024, it had gotten so bad that Rep. Pat Ryan, D-N.Y., demanded a Federal Trade Commission investigation. Ryan warned that private equity firms could control 40% of the single-family rental home market by 2030. (That’s non-apartments, or standalone homes that people rent to live in.)
So how did we get here?
Many of today’s biggest affordability problems trace back to the deregulation policies of the 1980s and ’90s.
As antitrust analyst Matt Stoller explained, two major parts of the housing system, new home construction and the resale market of existing homes, have been fundamentally reshaped over the past four decades.
For most of the 20th century, housing finance was boring by design. Savings and Loans associations (S and Ls for short) were created in the 1930s to stop Depression-era foreclosures and had a simple mission: take local deposits, issue local mortgages and lend to local builders.
Then came the 1980s. Deregulation let S and Ls wander into super high-risk investments like junk bonds and speculative commercial real estate. Those bets went bad, and hundreds of S and Ls failed.
Instead of rebuilding the stable, local system that worked for decades, Washington did the opposite: It opened the doors for Wall Street to take over.
The Resolution Trust Corporation, established by the first Bush administration to clean up the collapse, only served to orchestrate the large-scale entry of Wall Street firms into the real estate development sector for the first time in American history.
It effectively staged a massive fire sale. Private equity firms and Wall Street giants scooped up loans, land, foreclosed homes and even construction equipment from more than 750 failed S and Ls.
Susan Hudson-Wilson, a leading real estate industry analyst at the time, described what the RTC did as “the greatest and most unfair transfer of wealth that has ever taken place in this country — perhaps the whole world … Great wealth was literally stolen from people and transferred to a group of cash-rich ‘tide-riders.’”
While Wall Street walked away with cheap assets, small builders lost their lifelines. Regulators pressured community banks to pull back from real estate lending, cutting off the local credit lines that local builders had relied on for generations.
Suddenly, the builders who had put up America’s neighborhoods for generations had only one place left to get financing: big banks. Small firms were starved of capital, but big builders thrived. Their advantage wasn’t that they built better homes, they just had better access to money. As they raised cash by issuing stocks and bonds, institutional investors and private equity funds became deeply embedded not simply in the lending of money to families to buy homes but in the business model of homebuilding itself. By the late 1990s, the pressure intensified. Wall Street demanded constant quarterly growth, and the only way big builders could meet those expectations was through endless mergers and acquisitions. The goal was market domination. Bill Pulte, founder of PulteGroup, said the quiet part loud in 2001. “We want to be General Motors in 1950 with 62% market share and let the next guy down do 30%.” In other words, he wanted a near-monopoly — and he wanted everyone else fighting over scraps. In a twist of history, his grandson — who is also named Bill Pulte and is heir to the family’s homebuilding fortune — now runs Trump’s Federal Housing Finance Agency, along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Instead of rebuilding the stable, local system that worked for decades, Washington did the opposite: It opened the doors for Wall Street to take over. Those agencies back almost half the mortgages in the country, The Wall Street Journal reports. According to the Journal, Pulte, whom some refer to as “Little Trump,” is best known for “digging up opposition research on the president’s foes, ousting legal and ethics watchdogs … and lashing out at companies in the housing world.” Here’s the kicker: The heir to the Pulte housing fortune is the same official championing Trump’s 50-year mortgage plan for Americans. It all comes full circle. That’s how we moved from a world where local lenders backed local builders to a world where a handful of national giants set the terms of housing supply — and home prices — across the entire country. That’s the real affordability crisis: Housing in America is no longer designed for people, it’s designed for portfolios. Any serious fix would require unwinding decades of consolidation that turned shelter, the most basic human need, into one of the most profitable asset classes on earth. So Trump can talk about affordability. He can promise half-century mortgages that double what Americans pay for a place to live. But the real fight, the fight that decides whether an entire generation will ever be able to afford a home, involves the federal government taking on corporate consolidation, private equity speculation and policy choices that favor monopolies over families. The truth is that housing in America isn’t just unaffordable as a result of low supply and high demand — housing in America is unaffordable by design. Until we confront the systems that have made it so, no 50-year mortgage gimmick, no overnight pivot to “affordability,” will change the math for millions of Americans who are simply trying to find their place in the American dream. Amel Ahmed and Allison Detzel contributed.
Ali Velshi is the host of “Velshi,” which airs Saturdays and Sundays on MSNBC. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award for Business & Consumer Reporting for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special on the near collapse of the American auto industry. His work on disabled workers and Chicago’s red-light camera scandal in 2016 earned him two News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations, adding to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism coverage.
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