The thing strangling American homeownership isn’t rent control, or a capital gains threshold, or too much red tape. It’s that the industry charged with solving the problem profits from the scarcity — and it would like you very much to keep your eyes on the rent cap while it keeps the price right where it needs it.
Kevin Brown, the 2026 president of the National Association of REALTORS®, makes the case in We Must Help More People Buy a Home. It’s Key to the American Dream at Fox News. Inventory is collapsing, he says. Mortgage rates are up. First-time buyers are forty years old for the first time. The answer is the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act — plus getting the government off the back of the market, particularly by killing rent control and raising the capital gains exclusion on home sales. He wraps it all in his father’s story of overcoming redlining to build intergenerational wealth. The American Dream needs saving, and his trade group is here to save it.
I’ll concede the true half. Redlining was a deliberate government crime, and Brown’s family history is real. The current market is brutal for first-time buyers. Inventory has fallen from 1.65 million available homes to 1.18 million while the population grew by twenty million. Mortgage rates above six percent have priced out millions of families who could have afforded a home at three and a half. The median first-time buyer is forty. That is not an anecdote; it is a generational catastrophe, and anyone who cares about housing should be furious about it.
But look at who is selling you the diagnosis, and what he stands to gain from the cure.
The president of the National Association of Realtors is a REALTOR — a real estate agent. His trade association spends millions of dollars a year fighting rent control, opposing tenant protections, and lobbying for tax breaks that raise selling prices. Every home sale produces a commission. That commission is a percentage of the sale price. Higher prices mean bigger checks — for the agents, for the mortgage originators, for the appraisers, for the title companies, for the local governments collecting property tax. A home that sells for four hundred thousand pays twice the fees of a home that sells for two hundred thousand. Now ask yourself: does this trade group want more homes, or higher prices?
Brown’s policy menu tells you the answer. He goes after two things that would put downward pressure on housing costs — rent control and the capital gains tax on sellers. He never mentions three forces that are doing far more damage.
First: financialization. Private-equity firms, corporate landlords, and real estate investment trusts have pulled hundreds of thousands of single-family homes out of the ownership market and converted them into rental stock. Blackstone’s Invitation Homes was at one point the largest single-family landlord in the country, built on a model of buying starter homes with cash — beating out your children’s mortgage application with a wire transfer — and renting them back to the very families who could have bought them. When a fund buys a three-bedroom ranch in a first-time-buyer neighborhood and turns it into a rental, it has not added a home to the supply. It has removed one from the ownership market and moved it into the extraction market. The rent that family now pays goes not to a local homeowner who might build a porch but to a corporate balance sheet in New York. This is rentierism with a lockbox, and it is operating at a scale Brown does not mention — because mentioning it would indict his own industry’s biggest new clients.
Second: short-term rentals. Airbnb and its competitors have pulled hundreds of thousands of units out of the long-term rental and ownership markets in tourist-heavy cities. Every home that becomes a nightly rental is a home that a nurse, a teacher, or a mechanic cannot buy or rent at a family rate. The effect is identical to investor purchasing: scarce housing redirected toward higher-return extraction.
Third, and most damning for Brown’s own trade group: the single-family zoning that keeps new apartments out of established neighborhoods — the zoning that guarantees scarcity and therefore guarantees high prices — is a policy architecture that real estate interests have benefited from and defended city by city, suburb by suburb, HOA meeting by HOA meeting. NAR has not exactly been leading the charge to dismantle it. When Brown says “there is no quick fix,” he is describing a bottleneck his own industry has every incentive to preserve.
And there is something hiding in the piece that makes the whole argument self-defeating. Brown’s entire case rests on homeownership as intergenerational wealth-building. Homeowners, he says, have forty times the net worth of renters. But that wealth comes from appreciation. Appreciation comes from scarcity. And scarcity is exactly what locks first-time buyers out. The author is arguing, in the same column, that housing should be both a wealth-building asset class and affordable for the next generation. Pick two. You cannot have both a floor under prices — to protect the equity of existing homeowners — and a ceiling under prices — to let new buyers in. The trade group chose the floor. The forty-year-old first-time buyer is living with the ceiling.
His proposal to raise the capital gains exclusion is explicitly designed to unlock existing inventory by reducing the tax penalty on selling. But reducing the penalty on selling only matters if someone can afford to buy. And the reason people cannot afford to buy is that the price is too high — which is the same reason the seller’s capital gain is too large. The problem Brown identifies and the problem he refuses to name are the same problem: the price. And the price is high because everyone in the transaction ecosystem — including the president of the National Association of Realtors — benefits from the price being high. The most profitable use of a house in the current market is not to sell it to a person. It is to hold it, rent it, and watch its value appreciate. And the owners who might sell are sitting on three-percent mortgages they locked in during the pandemic. Why trade that for a six-percent loan?
Does every family need to own a home to be secure? The answer, from every country that does this better, is no. Germany has one of the lowest homeownership rates in the developed world — roughly fifty percent — and also has some of the most secure tenants on earth. Germany regulates rent increases and guarantees long-term leases not through the kind of rent control Americans argue about, but through a legal framework that treats tenancy as a durable right. The Germans did not choose between rent control and no rent control. They chose to treat housing as infrastructure, not as a casino. The American Dream, as currently defined, is a thirty-year mortgage on a house whose price is bid up by an investor who never sets foot inside. That is not a dream. It is a product being sold by the people who take a cut.
So what does a serious housing policy look like — one that starts from the human need, not from the commission?
Build social housing that is publicly owned and permanently affordable. Vienna has done it for a century. Roughly sixty percent of Vienna’s residents live in subsidized or municipally owned housing, and the city routinely ranks among the most livable on earth. You do not need to go to Austria. Montgomery County, Maryland has run an inclusionary zoning program since 1974 that has produced more than fourteen thousand affordable units — homes that families own, at prices families can pay, because the county required developers to set aside a percentage of every new project. The program has survived for fifty years, which suggests the model can outlast its skeptics.
Fund community land trusts that take land permanently off the speculation market while letting families build equity in the structure on top. The Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont has been doing this for over forty years — the largest community land trust in the country. Homes stay affordable across generations because the land, which is where most of the appreciation happens, belongs to the commons, not to a bidder. The trade-off is real: land trusts require upfront capital and can only scale so fast. But what they build, they hold.
Pass strong rent stabilization that gives tenants the right to stay. Tax land value, not improvements, so speculators pay for the scarcity they create rather than passing the cost to the renter. Upzone: allow denser construction — duplexes, accessory dwelling units, small apartment buildings — on the vast majority of urban land currently zoned for nothing but a single-family detached home. That requires no new federal program. It requires local politicians willing to disappoint existing homeowners who want their scarcity to keep compounding. Do it anyway.
And name the rentiers. If an institutional investor owns more than fifty rental properties, tax the portfolio like the financial instrument it is. If a short-term rental operator pulls a home off the market, charge the difference between the nightly rate and the monthly rate as an occupancy tax directed to the affordable housing fund. The legal challenges will come. Build the coalition to survive them.
Brown ends his column with the line that the keys are within reach. They are not. They are held by the people who profit from your not reaching them, and they would like you to believe the obstacle is a rent cap in Boston rather than a business model built on making sure you never get inside. A home is a place to live. It is not a retirement account. We can build a system that treats it that way — but the NAR will not build it, because the NAR makes money on the system we have. Zoning boards, state legislators, and antitrust regulators hold the keys the NAR says are within reach. The question is whether voters will demand they use them — and whether you notice that every fix the real estate industry proposes keeps the price right where they need it.