There is no Boomer–Zoomer war. There is a war between the people who own houses and the people who need one, and the investor is winning. In “Is There a Boomer–Zoomer War?”, Caroline Downey of National Review argues that Washington built a gerontocracy, Boomers hoard homes and untouchable entitlements, and the young are left waiting on a $124 trillion inheritance that never arrives. Her remedy is less government: cut “fraud-prone” food stamps and Medicaid, strip away red tape, and let the market fix what the market built.
Let me concede what is true. The welfare state does tilt old. By Downey’s own figures, the average general-election voter is 52 and the average primary voter is 59. Medicare and Social Security take a larger share of the federal budget. NIMBYism is real, and the older homeowner on the neighborhood board is often the person blocking the apartment building. Easy money and the government’s expanded role in mortgage finance helped inflate home prices. Those are real facts.
None of them proves the story she wants.
Watch the slide. The column takes a genuine grievance and marches it past the real culprit until it reaches a convenient one. Who actually outbids the 28-year-old for the starter home? Not necessarily the 72-year-old with the garden. Downey’s own anecdote admits that the old people she worries about often do not want to sell. They want to die in the houses where they raised their children.
That is not automatically greed. It is the instruction manual.
Somewhere in the last fifty years, we privatized old age. We told everyone to buy a house, watch it appreciate, and treat the appreciation as a pension. An elderly owner with no children is not hoarding a house because she has discovered a sinister new pleasure in vacancy. She is holding the only retirement plan the country gave her. The house is her pension account.
A house that doubles in value in a decade is a wonderful investment and a terrible place to live. The price is no longer set mainly by lumber and labor. It is set by how much the next leveraged buyer can borrow against the same rising asset. Every dollar of appreciation is another dollar the next first-time buyer must borrow to enter the door.
You are not bidding against the Boomers. You are bidding against the balance sheet.
After the last housing crash, millions of families lost their homes. Investors moved in, buying foreclosed houses by the thousands, holding some vacant, and renting others at a markup. The Fed’s long cheap-money era gave capital the means to buy. The homes became an asset class. A house used to be where a family lived. Now it is an asset with a yield.
The pattern appeared wherever the foreclosure pipeline ran: family loses the house, investor buys it at a discount, and the neighborhood becomes a landlord’s portfolio. The investor does not need to hate young people. The spreadsheet does the work.
And the $124 trillion inheritance? That is not a housing policy. It is a waiting game dressed as destiny. Much of the wealth is parked in homes that appreciate faster than wages, while the young are told to wait for the old to die. The largest inheritances compound inside already comfortable families. Waiting for your landlord to die is not an inheritance plan. It is a resignation letter.
Then comes the tell. The column proposes cutting food stamps and Medicaid so the young will feel “less cheated,” while Social Security and Medicare receive the careful treatment reserved for sacred objects. But food assistance and Medicaid feed and treat the young and poor. The expanded Child Tax Credit — the one recent American program that actually pulled children out of poverty — cut child poverty by 46 percent in 2021, from 9.7 percent to 5.2 percent, lifting 2.9 million children. Congress allowed the expansion to lapse, and child poverty rose again.
The children did not steal the retirement system. They were the ones left under it.
And “minimal red tape” translates to: build whatever pencils out. What pencils out most easily is luxury housing for investors, because the profit per square foot sits at the top of the market. Deregulation is not a policy for first-time buyers. It is a policy for first-time yield.
Less government is not a program. It is a mood.
The supply point deserves better than Downey gives it. Exclusionary zoning is government — one of the most powerful acts of state power in American life, quietly rationing the country’s most valuable land for a century. It is the government rule that says density is a threat and the single-family lot is sacred. The NIMBYism is real, but the mechanism is the zoning code. That is the “less government” Downey never asks us to stop.
The real question is not whether there are too many rules. It is which side the rules serve: the family or the portfolio.
The fear of “socialism” is doing its usual little job. It stops the reader from asking which thing is broken. Young people are not asking for the gulag. They are asking for a roof that does not cost a decade of wages and a doctor who does not bankrupt them. That is not an -ism. That is plumbing.
So what do we build instead?
A community land trust takes land off the speculation market permanently. Families own the homes on top of it and build real equity, but no investor can flip the foundation beneath them. The house is theirs. The speculation is not. They are harder to grow here because America used the home as its retirement account for a century. Hard is not impossible.
Housing cooperatives can do the same thing building by building: one member, one vote, no outside landlord. The ownership is private. The market remains. The person living there has a voice in the thing that governs the roof over her head.
Social housing can be built and owned together, like the public library or the firehouse. Tax land rather than buildings, so the value created by roads, schools, neighbors, and public investment does not become a private jackpot. Rezone exclusionary neighborhoods. Tax vacant units. Build directly when the market refuses to build anything a nurse can afford.
We already know how to hold property in common. Rural electric cooperatives wired rural America when investor-owned utilities would not. Credit unions now serve roughly 145 million Americans. The library is still there, quietly proving that “everybody pays in, everybody can use it” is not a foreign ideology. It is an American habit with good lighting.
And a welfare state that reaches mostly the old should not be torn down. It should be finished. Build the child allowance, paid leave, childcare, housing, and healthcare. Give every generation the floor, not only the generation that votes most reliably.
The $20 burrito is not the scary part. The scary part is a rich country telling its young people, with a straight face, that the only way they will ever own a home is to wait for the neighbors to die.
The Boomers did not write that rule alone. The market wrote it, and the government signed it. Both can be rewritten.
Write them so the next house goes to the family.