Solving America's Problems

Home prices have outrun paychecks for about two decades , and after eight episodes Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley still disagree on whether a regular earner can buy. Jerremy says the deal is gone in big-city cores, but a $315,000 two-bed condo can still work, and Dave says buying is difficult but possible if you skip the agent and talk to the lenders. The Wall Street villain didn't surv...

Jerremy Alexander Newsome says the real barrier is that school teaches us to study, not to search . Dave Conley asks why people with the answer to anything in their pocket still don't learn how housing works. Jerremy tells how he got turned down at a Kroger checkout buying chicken and broccoli, then sat down and asked himself why he was so broke. His advice for buyers: rent while you build a cash...

The Wall Street villain fell apart in every interview: guests put Wall Street banks at around 3% of ownership, and the 50 largest owners combined hold under 11% . Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley say big money stays out of New York and LA because the margins are too thin there. Both lenders they talked to said credit is available, and that easier qualifying would just add bidders and rais...

Home prices have outrun income for about two decades , and Jerremy Alexander Newsome says nobody can dispute that prices left paychecks behind . Dave Conley still thinks a regular earner can buy, and this is where the two of them disagree after eight episodes. Jerremy says a home in downtown Manhattan for $120,000 is gone for good, but a two-bed, two-bath condo for about $315,000 can work for a yo...

The typical first-time buyer is now 40 years old, and foreclosures are climbing again. Ben Allgeyer lost a million dollars in about 18 months and rebuilt by knocking on the doors of homeowners facing foreclosure. He tells Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley that people who bought in 2019 and 2020 have almost no equity , that a short sale hurts credit far less than a foreclosure, and that one...

Institutional funds buy less than 5% of homes, but the belief that Wall Street buys everything still convinces young people they can't afford one. Ben Allgeyer says most real estate agents don't earn their commission, and tells the story of an agent who listed a foreclosure without asking about a $230,000 payoff , costing the owner two weeks he didn't have. His one number for a 25-year-old: two X...

People who bought in 2019 and 2020 are now in foreclosure with almost no equity , and many walk away with $5,000 to $20,000 at most. Ben Allgeyer explains the difference between a foreclosure and a short sale , including one he's negotiating with a $230,000 payoff on a house worth about $130,000. He says one lender's fees added about $60,000 in a year and a half on a $180,000 house. Jerremy Alexan...

A real estate investor lost a million dollars in about 18 months , starting with a partner he brought on way too early. Ben Allgeyer tells Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley why a 28-year-old with a good job and savings still won't buy: fear , fed by a season of political ads during football games. If you don't have a pile of cash beyond the down payment, he says, keep renting. He says the...

Freddie Mac's 30-year average rate rose to 7.4% last week , up from 6.3% a year ago, which Jerremy Alexander Newsome says adds $294 a month on a $400,000 loan. He and Dave Conley start with Russia , which is about to sell America diesel, with a first load that covers less than two hours of the world's demand. Jerremy says SpaceX buying airwaves sent the three biggest phone companies down as much a...

The economy added 29,000 jobs against 90,000 expected , and the Nasdaq is still at all-time highs. Jerremy Alexander Newsome says the 10-year Treasury rose a fifth straight week to 5.277% , pushing the 30-year mortgage to 7.28% , the highest since 2023, and he thinks double-digit mortgage rates could land before the next president's term. Dave Conley calls it demand destruction : the Fed squeezes...

Nashville approved every one of roughly 200 rezoning requests over two years, added about 75,000 housing units in a decade, and is still net less dense than it was 25 years ago. Christopher Serkin uses that to argue looser zoning alone won't deliver affordability, and that homeowners associations would fill the void if zoning vanished. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley press him on Wall St...

For roughly the first 85 to 90 years of zoning, the left and right split on it. Now they agree it's the problem. Christopher Serkin says that convergence makes him nervous, and he calls it the liberal-tarian consensus. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley ask who should decide how fast a neighborhood changes. He says it depends on the market, and that a state overriding local control feels ve...

Housing can't be both affordable and a good investment. Christopher Serkin says that tension is the lesson the country forgot after 2008, when so many recent buyers lost everything. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley ask whether zoning is really the whole story. He says it's one problem among several, and that fixing only zoning could make outcomes worse in many markets. He also argues home...

Nashville approved every one of roughly 200 rezoning requests over two years and added about 75,000 housing units in a decade, and it is still net less dense than it was 25 years ago. Christopher Serkin says that's why he doubts looser zoning alone delivers affordability. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley ask what fills the gap if zoning disappears, and he says homeowners associations woul...

In 1976, homes under 1,400 square feet made up a third of new construction; by 2020, that number was 7%. Gene Eidelman sold $100 million in real estate within three years of arriving as a refugee, then built Azure Printed Homes , which 3D-prints houses from recycled plastic in weeks instead of months. He details the zoning fights blocking affordable manufactured homes, wildfire data showing 2008-c...

Homes built under California's 2008 fire code survived last year's wildfires 80% of the time; homes built before it were destroyed 80% of the time. Gene Eidelman breaks down the cheap fixes behind that gap — double-pane windows, mesh over AC vents, no wooden fences touching the house. He and Jerremy also dig into LA County's homelessness numbers: 75,000 people, with only 18% showing drug addiction...

One Ohio city's zoning code outright bans manufactured homes in a low-income neighborhood — even for a project explicitly meant to be affordable. Gene Eidelman calls it a holdover from 1960s trailer-park stigma that has nothing to do with how these homes actually perform today. He walks through how ADUs, junior ADUs, and new state rules allowing four to eight units per lot are quietly solving Cali...

In 1976, homes under 1,400 square feet made up a third of new construction; by 2020, that number had fallen to 7%. Gene Eidelman arrived in the U.S. as a refugee from the former Soviet Union, got his real estate license within a year, and sold $100 million in property within three years. He's since built thousands of homes and co-founded Azure Printed Homes , which 3D-prints houses from recycled p...

Austin added new housing three times faster than the rest of the country for a decade — rents dropped below the national average, and young families left anyway, in numbers big enough that schools are now closing. Ryan Puzycki, who sits on Austin's zoning board, says outdated codes banned entire housing types — no fourplexes, no missing middle, no SROs. He traces the homelessness crisi...

Houston cut its homeless population by 60 to 70 percent over the past decade — while San Francisco spends roughly five times more per person for worse results. Ryan Puzycki says Houston made it easy to build housing, then used homeless dollars for rapid rehousing instead of expensive permanent supportive housing. He also names Texas's bipartisan Senate Bill 840 as a state model, and argues s...

America once had millions of single-room-occupancy units — the cheapest legal housing in the country — and cities spent decades tearing them down. Ryan Puzycki calls this lost category the "banished bottom," and traces the rise of chronic homelessness to almost the same years those units disappeared. He also argues family flight , not average rent, is the real measure of whether a city...

Austin added new housing three times faster than the rest of the country for a decade, and rents fell below the national average. Young families left anyway — enough that Austin's own schools are now closing for lack of kids. Ryan Puzycki sits on Austin's zoning board and says a decades-old code banned entire housing types, from fourplexes to corner stores mixed with apartments. He also ran...

More than half of homeowners are locked into a rate under 4%, and an estimated 1.7 million home sales never happened because of it. Daniel Sosa has worked mortgages since 2007, when he watched Stockton become the foreclosure epicenter of the country. He tells Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley that 65% of today's homeowners sit below a 4% rate with zero incentive to sell, while 5 million bu...

Dave Conley presses Daniel Sosa on exactly who gets rejected versus approved. Daniel says anybody can eventually qualify for a home — the real question is credit profile and income, and credit-challenged buyers get a step-by-step plan instead of a flat no. He describes taking one client's credit score from 702 to 740 over 30 days to avoid $16,000 in points, and explains how self-employed borrowers...

Jerremy Alexander Newsome challenges Daniel Sosa to steelman the case against his own industry: don't easier loans just inflate prices further? Daniel doesn't dodge it — he says 65% of homeowners today sit below a 4% rate and have zero incentive to sell, while an estimated 5 million buyers wait on a market short roughly 3 million homes. He lays out why a 2008-style crash can't repeat, since 97% of...