Housing Crisis Solution or Bait and Switch? Trump's Single-Family Ban | Between The Lies Podcast 021

Housing prices are too damn high. You can try Mamdani's approach, or you can try Trump's. Time will tell who's right. My guess is neither.

 

Welcome to another episode where Rob Brayton from Perfect Spiral Capital and I try to figure out what unforeseen and cataclysmic effects might come from Trump's latest housing market intervention. This week's headline: banning institutional investors like BlackRock from buying single-family homes.

 

Sounds great on the surface, right? Get the big bad corporations out of residential neighborhoods and maybe regular people can actually afford houses again. Except nothing is ever that simple when you're dealing with decades of monetary manipulation.

 

What We Cover:

• Trump's proposal to ban institutional investors from single-family home purchases
• Why easy money and lower interest rates might make housing worse, not better
• How BlackRock props up home prices by always being willing to pay asking price
• The 15-minute city agenda and shifting investment from suburbs to urban multifamily dwellings
• Why homes became wealth storage vehicles instead of just places to live
• Japanese and South African housing models where homes depreciate like cars
• The $9.3 trillion increase in money supply since 2016 and what it means for housing
• How to position yourself to buy when others can't

Key Insights: Rob breaks down the core contradiction in Trump's approach. If you ban institutional investors from buying homes while simultaneously pushing for lower interest rates, you might temporarily slow the market. But cheap money historically drives asset prices through the roof. So what happens when everyone suddenly has access to 3% mortgages again? The exact opposite of affordability.

 

Here's something most people don't think about: homes require constant upkeep. They're naturally depreciating assets. The fact that we treat them as appreciating investments should be a massive red flag that money itself is the problem. In Japan, homes depreciate like cars because building is easy and cheap. In South Africa, same thing. They're roofs over your head, not generational wealth vehicles.

 

The money supply expanded by $9.3 trillion since 2016. That's why everything costs so much. Every dollar from 2016 is now worth a fraction of what it was. Housing prices didn't really go up - your dollar just became worthless.

 

The conversation gets interesting when we discuss what this means for investment capital. If BlackRock and other institutional investors can't buy single-family homes, where does that money go? Maybe into urban multifamily developments. Maybe into the 15-minute city build-out that's been planned for years.

 

The Bigger Picture: Rob nailed it when he pointed out that homes were never intended to be stores of value. Strip out inflation and the actual increase in home value since 1912 was about 1%. It's the currency debasement that creates the illusion of appreciation.

 

But here's the positive angle: if institutional investors actually do get shut out of residential markets, that creates opportunity for individuals and small landlords. The question is whether you're positioned to take advantage when prices correct.

 

Ready to build capital that's available when opportunities appear? Visit PerfectSpiralCapital.com/podcast for the free toolkit on controlling your financial future.

 

Websites Referenced:

• PerfectSpiralCapital.com/podcast