The Patriot Post® · Housing Policy, Trump vs. Mamdani Style

Just because socialists don’t like the proven principle of supply-side economics doesn’t mean they can ignore it and magically arrive at the collectivist utopia they tout. Money doesn’t grow on trees, but even if it did, someone would need to be employed to pick it.

When it comes to one of the leading economic issues of our day — the high cost of housing — New York City’s new socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s choices for his administrative team demonstrate that he is committed to a Marxist ethic come hell or high water.

The most glaring example of this is Mamdani’s choice for his housing czar, or so-called “tenant advocate,” Cea Weaver. Since Weaver has come into the spotlight, so has her Marxist ideology, which, unsurprisingly, mirrors Mandani’s and epitomizes DEI-based logic. Weaver’s social media history exposes her anti-white racist views, in keeping with DEI logic — views such as wanting to “impoverish the white middle class” and claiming that “homeownership is racist” because of structural racism.

Elsewhere, she explains, “I think the reality is, is that for centuries, we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good. And we are going to — and transitioning to — treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently, and it will mean that families, especially white families, but some [families of color], who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to properties than the one that we currently have.”

In short, Weaver is advocating communism. Yet when confronted with how her odious and fundamentally anti-American views contrast with her mother’s $1.6 million Nashville home, she broke down in tears and fled. Despite this, Mamdani is sticking with her; as he previously stated, “I get most of my knowledge on housing from Cea, so if you get it from me, it’s just not coming from the source.”

Mamdani’s solution to New York City’s housing affordability crisis is to wield the heavy hand of government not only through imposing rent controls but through seeking to seize and collectivize private property.

Interestingly, Donald Trump has also weighed in on the housing affordability crisis, and he, too, has offered a solution that includes the heavy hand of government. However, in President Trump’s case, that hand is not against more Americans owning a home; it’s just the opposite. Trump aims to make it easier for more Americans to afford and own their own homes by preventing investment corporations from buying up single-family homes.

Thanks to high inflation under Joe Biden, home affordability has become more difficult, Trump explained, so “I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and I will be calling on Congress to codify it.”

In principle, ensuring that working-class Americans are better able to afford homes by preventing corporations from buying up available homes, which effectively shrinks the supply and drives up the cost, is not a terrible idea. How exactly Trump can do this legally is not so clear. That is likely why he has called on Congress to act, and indeed, such economic populism could be a good campaign issue.

However, the idea also comes from the populist Left. A skeptical Senator Elizabeth Warren huffed, “I’ve been advocating for years to limit Wall Street from buying up America’s homes.”

According to the Government Accountability Office, institutional investors collectively owned more than 300,000 single-family homes in 2015, and that number has jumped significantly over the last decade. The GAO noted that in 2022, in Atlanta, Charlotte, and Jacksonville, Florida, roughly 15% of the single-family housing market was owned by institutional investors.

But will preventing investor groups from purchasing homes really solve the problem? Not when the bigger reason for housing market stagnation is high interest rates. People who own their homes and are paying low-interest mortgages are loath to sell, even at good prices. They don’t want to take on a mortgage interest rate that, in many cases, would be double their current rate.

So, while Trump’s call for preventing corporations from buying up single-family homes will play well on the campaign trail, it will likely have a negligible impact on making homes more affordable.

Trump should lean into supply-side economics, pushing deregulation in order to increase the construction of homes and, therefore, the availability of homes. (Tariffs don’t help construction, by the way.) Fundamentally, it’s also about getting inflation back down, so interest rates fall even further.

What is President Trump’s solution for interest rates? “I am instructing my Representatives to BUY $200 BILLION DOLLARS IN MORTGAGE BONDS,” he posted on Truth Social. “This will drive Mortgage Rates DOWN, monthly payments DOWN, and make the cost of owning a home more affordable. It is one of my many steps in restoring Affordability, something that the Biden Administration absolutely destroyed. We are bringing back the AMERICAN DREAM that was destroyed by the last Administration. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

We’ll see if that works.