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The Easiest Way To Make Homes More Affordable

Chapter 25 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 24 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 23 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 22 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 21 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 20 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 19 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 18 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 17 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 16 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 15 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 14 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 13 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 12 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 11 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 10 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 9 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 8 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 7 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

76 Secrets of U.S. Home Ownership

Chapter 6 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 5 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 4 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 2 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

Chapter 1 of "The Great Housing Hijack"

49 Ways to Increase U.S. Home Ownership, Household Wealth, and Economic Growth

Interview on The Educated Homebuyer Podcast

76 Secrets of U.S. Home Ownership - Conclusion

More Solutions - More Ways to Increase Home Ownership, Household Wealth, and Financial Stability

Solution #3 - Greatly Expand Non-Profit, Limited-Profit, Cooperative and Government-Owned Social Housing

The Mechanics of Changing American Mortgages

Solution #2 - Redesign U.S. Mortgages to Maximize Home Ownership Instead of Home Sales

Solution #1 - One Tax Code for Single-Family Homes and Condos – Eliminate All Landlord-Only Tax Breaks

3 Solutions - U.S. Home Ownership

Secret #76 - A Huge Property Tax Loophole for Land Speculators

Secret #75 – Many YIMBYs are Really NIMBYs

Secret #74 – 6-Months of Inventory of Houses for Sale is a Lot More Than It Used to Be

Secret #73 – Did the Internet Make the Real Estate Market LESS Rational!

Secret #72 – Most Developers Today Don’t Want to Build Inexpensive Houses

Secret #71 – Congress Almost Prevented 500,000 Foreclosures but the Financial Industry Stopped Them

Secret #70 - What You Can Do to Increase Home Ownership

Secret #69 – NAR Considers Landlord-Ownership to be "Home Ownership"

Secret #68 – 26% of Realtors™ Own Residential Properties for Investment

Secret #67 – The Largest Lobbying Organization in the U.S. is The National Association of Realtors (NAR)

Secret #66 – The Housing Wealth Effect is a Double-Edged, Lopsided Sword

Secret #65 – The Fed Happily Destabilizes Family Wealth to Stabilize Wall Street

Secret #64 – The Fed’s Mandate is Stable Prices… EXCEPT House Prices

Secret #63 – How to Easily Increase Home Ownership for FREE!

Secret #62 – Tax Breaks for Landlords Increase Homelessness

Secret #61 – Landlords Bought More Single-Family Houses from 2008 to 2012 than All New Single-Family Houses Built

Secret #60 – The Landlord Next Door Gets a Lot of Tax Breaks You Don’t

Secret #59 – We Have 2 Completely Different Tax Codes for Single-Family Houses – 1 for Live-in Owners and 1 for Landlord Owners – Which Distorts the Market for Single-Family Houses

Secret #58 – From 2018 to 2021, Interest Rates Fell So Much We Could Have Converted From 30-Year Mortgages to 20-Year Mortgages Without Increasing Monthly Mortgage Payments

Secret #57 – With the Exact Same Monthly Principal and Interest Mortgage Payment – In December 2020 You Could Borrow 31% More Money to Buy a House than You Could in November 2018

Secret #56 – About 80% of House Price Appreciation from 1990 through 2020 was Due to Falling Mortgage Interest Rates

Secret #55 – 17% of ALL U.S. Home Owners with Mortgages Were Still Underwater 5 Years AFTER The End of The Great Recession

Secret #54 – The Great Real Estate Bubble Was Amazingly Symmetric – Prices Often Fell Like They Rose

Secret #53 – 1 Secret Reason for the 2000s Real Estate Bubble

Secret #52 – Housing Bubbles are Common Historically

Secret #51 – High House Prices Don’t Help Current Home Owners Much Unless They're Last-Home Sellers

Secret #50 – Housing Bubbles Hurt Older Home Owners, Too

Secret #49 – The VA Has a Lot More Zero Down Payment Mortgages Than FHA But the VA Has FEWER Foreclosures!

Secret #48 – Appraisal Creep

Secret #47 – A Big Reason the Mortgage Industry Always Pushes for Higher-Foreclosure Mortgages

Secret #46 – Since Our Mortgage System is Nationalized, Shouldn’t We Get a Better Deal?

Secret #45 – The U.S. Mortgage Industry is Largely Nationalized

Secret #44 – Lower-Only Adjustable-Rate Mortgages (LO-ARMs) Would Stabilize Home Ownership and the Economy

Secret #43 – Portable Mortgages Would Prevent Today’s Mortgage Lock-in Effect

Secret #42 – Mortgages are Only 20 Years Long in Many Countries

Secret #41 – Mortgages That Would Have Been Considered Predatory in Earlier Times Were Considered as Wholesome as Mom and Apple Pie in 2006

Secret #40 – Real, Inflation-Adjusted, Fannie & Freddie Loan Limits are 2 to 3 Times Higher Than in 1980

Secret #39 – The Real Reason for “Affordable” Higher-Foreclosure Mortgages

Secret #38 – The “Affordable” Mortgage Cycle

Secret #37 – Fallacy of Geographic Composition – Foreclosures

Secret #36 – Fallacy of Composition – Foreclosures

Secret #35 – When House Prices Go Up, Foreclosures Go Down

Secret #34 - The Mortgage Interest Tax Deduction Increases House Prices which Lowers Home Ownership

Secret #33 – Easier Mortgages Easily Turn Into Higher House Prices

Secret #32 – “Affordable” Mortgages are Affordable for the Government

Secret #31 – All Those Decades of “Affordable” Mortgages Didn’t Increase Home Ownership

Secret #30 – Mortgages Are Phenomenally Riskier Today Than When the U.S. Home Ownership Rate Increased the Fastest

Secret #29 – For Mortgages, “Affordable” is Code for “Higher-Foreclosure”

Secret #28 – Past Redlining Has Often Been Used to Justify Government Policies that Encourage Selling “Affordable” (Higher-Foreclosure) Mortgages to People of Color

Secret #27 – Famously Liberal Minneapolis is the Worst City in the U.S. When Comparing the Black Home Ownership Rate to the White Home Ownership Rate

Secret #26 – The Black Home Ownership Rate Is NOT Getting Any Closer to the White Home Ownership Rate!

Secret #25 – The Black Home Ownership Rate is Higher Today in the South than in the North

Secret #24 – The Same 1968 FHA Program that Devastated Many Black Inner Cities Caused a Boom in New Home Construction in the White Suburbs

Secret #23 – The 1968 Fair Housing Act had Very Weak Enforcement

Secret #22 – The National Association of Realtors Opposed the 1968 Fair Housing Act

Secret #21 – Redlining was a National Policy to Segregate the North

Secret #20 – From 1940 to 1970 the Black Home Ownership Rate Increased More in the South than the North

Secret #19 – Worse Than Redlining

Secret #18 – FHA was Extremely Racist

Secret #17 - U.S. Housing Policies Almost Moved Toward Vienna or Singapore in the 1960s

Secret #16 – Economic Fundamentals Explain Less Than Half of House Price Changes

Secret #15 – More Reasons Why House Prices Can Increase Surprisingly Fast

Secret #14 – Higher House Prices Can INCREASE Current Demand

Secret #13 – The Desire to Own the House You Live In is Extremely Price Inelastic

Secret #12 – Houses are Also an Investment Good

Secret #11 – The Supply of Houses Grows More Slowly than the Supply of Gold

Secret #10 – The Economics of Houses are Different

Secret #9 – The Fast and Slow Economic Fundamentals of House Prices

Secret #8 - House Economics in One Sentence, “House Prices are Determined by the Amount of Money Chasing Houses.”

Secret #7 – For the Money the Fed Spent Buying Mortgage-Backed Securities from 2009 to 2015, We Could Have Bought ALL Houses Foreclosed On from 2006 to 2013

Secret #6 – U.S. Home Ownership Fell More During the Great Recession than During the Great Depression

Secret #5 – The Home Ownership Boom After World War 2 was Due, in Part, to New Houses Becoming a Lot Smaller

Secret #4 – The U.S. Home Ownership Rate Increased the Fastest When Mortgages Were 20 Years Long and Down Payments Were 20%

Secret #3 – For Black Home Ownership, “Affordable” Housing Policies Have Been Worse Than Jim Crow

Secret #2 – The Real Reason House Prices Skyrocketed After Covid

Secret #1 - Despite Our Extremely High Mortgage Debt, the U.S. has a Below Average Home Ownership Rate

76 Secrets – U.S. Home Ownership – 3 Solutions

Real U.S. House Prices UP 4% in 2023