Everyone has an explanation for the housing market problem plaguing our country.
Just this past week, the Senator from Ohio (JD Vance) said, "You've got housing totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes." I guess they're not just eating our cats and dogs, but they're stealing our jobs AND our housing as well.
And while everyone is talking about the problem, I haven't seen anyone come up with a solution.
I know of at least ten deals where housing could be built that would start to solve the problem by supplying housing to hard-working people, but the developers can't raise the capital to get these projects off the ground. VC funds and investors only seem interested in an investment if it's a unicorn with the promise of a 100X ROI.
This past week, Open AI raised 6.5 Billion Dollars almost overnight for a company with a paper valuation of $157 Billion. This company will need and use a lot of real estate and an unfathomable amount of energy. The only things living inside this real estate will be the machines we are building to automate our lives.
We're very good at raising cash for intangible tech assets but have difficulty raising money to build tangible assets that would house the communities for the people in the workforce at these unicorns. Building nice, affordable homes just isn't sexy for the private sector, and it's clear that unless there's enough juice in the deal, the people who control the purse strings aren't going to loosen them because they have some higher moral ground to help their communities.
So, if it doesn't make sense for the private sector, our bipartisan government should step up.
It would be relatively easy for the government to make money by building, financing, and selling homes to hard-working people from all walks of life for around $400k (the average cost of a house in the US). We have the land.
So, instead of sitting in the peanut gallery, slinging slurs, and pointing fingers, our elected officials might want to step up and recognize this opportunity as a great investment with a return more significant than ChatGPT.
Let's do this.
-Shaun