The long range plan
“From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.”
George Orwell, 1984
Notes to reader: The long range plan of the governing and ruling authorities is to upend the established order of private property ownership. Why? In particular, renters rarely ever establish any true sense of household formation normalcy and stability.
Statistically speaking, renters rarely ever build wealth and establish themselves in communities. Thus, a whole class of disenfranchised renters is created, which lack the true stability too pose any bona fide threat to the governing authorities.
Although most reading these words will discard much of what I am saying, the process is well underway and has been ongoing for many decades. Nothing is left to chance and most of the process is already complete.
The real reason housing is unaffordable
There is only one reason why housing is becoming less affordable every year. The federal government continues to escalate its deficit spending, which greatly increases M2 supply and which, greatly increases the amount of debt servicing.
Prices continue to increase as the collective economy is under ever-growing pressure to service outstanding debts as well as grow.
Unfortunately for the wage earners, the federal government has a vested interest to underreport true price inflation. This results in a continual and compounding divergence between reported price growth and true price growth.
While officially reported real wages and salaries and real price sensitive economic data are over estimated by the government data agencies, the “real” real data are always lower.
Over a short time frame this divergence is minimal, but when we scale out to 20 years and longer, the differences in the reported versus the actual price inflation numbers are immense.
Yes, this is the one and only reason why housing is unaffordable. The more government intervention we have, the less affordable house prices become.
By definition and function, Government intervention and spending restricts supply, while raising demand.
It’s not just the government programs and zoning laws that restricts supply. We must also consider how demand is stimulated just by the continual increases in the money supply as well as the home purchasing incentive programs, IRC tax code incentives, and the subsidization of the mortgage markets. This is advanced Macroeconomic and Microeconomic theory, and only an objective person can see this.
The ultimate objective
The governing authorities are not ignorant to this dynamic. By creating the very housing market problems they claim to address, the collective oligarchy running the governments creates the framework necessary to provide their solution. The answer is to establish “social housing” for a growing portion of the population.
The governments, working through public and private trusts, will effectively become the landlords, while the banks finance the endeavors and private corporations manage the developments. For instance, this system would work similarly to what was established during Nikita khrushchev’s regime in the Soviet Union. It will also work in a similar fashion to the housing market in Berlin, Germany. Germans have a problem in the post World War II environment, homeownership percentages are low.
Here in the States, the social Democrat politicians know exactly what they are doing. New York Mayor, Mamdani, for instance has publicly declared that New York City should engage in programs to develop social housing. This type of housing is not the typical voucher housing project, rather it is designed to house workers and the city would effectively manage it.
But in order for these socialists to make their goals a reality, they must dismantle the established order. Thus, the silly concepts of rent freezes in a high inflationary environment are not misguided. Rather, it helps their long-range plan. First, the landlords must be foreclosed upon. Next, the public private trusts snatch up the properties at a huge discount.
My advice to my readers is to do whatever it takes to own our own domiciles.
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Harvard’s housing report has a darker message than affordability—the middle-class home was always a historical accident
A new Harvard study documents a housing market in crisis. But its real argument is more unsettling: the era when an ordinary American could expect to own a home may have been the exception—not the rule.
For half a century, Harvard has been writing versions of the same warning. In 1977, researchers at what was then the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies observed that only the most affluent families in the United States would be able to own their houses if housing trends from the time continued. In 1970, nearly half of all families could afford a median-priced home. By 1975, only 27% could. The study’s authors warned that an average home could cost $78,000 by the 1980s—a number they offered as a sign of alarm. The median price of a new single-family home in 2025 was $417,400.
Nobody listened, and then—briefly, strangely—the warning became wrong. The early 1980s brought punishing interest rates, but the decade that followed delivered falling rates, rising wages, and a housing market that stayed, if not generous, at least navigable for the broad middle class. For a generation, the crisis that Harvard’s researchers had spotted seemed to resolve itself.
But it didn’t.
The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies’ 2026 State of the Nation’s Housing report is a meticulous account of just how thoroughly that dynamic has returned—and how much worse it may be than it appears. “Across the U.S., persistent affordability challenges and rising economic uncertainty are hurting housing markets,” the authors stated, citing weakening labor markets and plummeting immigration dampening household growth and mobility as sales of existing homes sit at three-decade lows.
It is true that rents have fallen somewhat, but there’s a structural problem: the drivers of demand are weakening. The slowdown in household growth reflects, the Harvard center concludes, “reduced household formation among young adults amid a weakened job market, burdensome student debt and low consumer sentiment.”
The Harvard authors do not say this, but the implication is that what America experienced in the postwar decades—when homeownership surged 20 percentage points in a single generation, when being middle class reliably meant eventually owning a home—was not a natural feature of a capitalist economy. It was the product of a specific, unrepeatable, and heavily subsidized set of historical conditions. And now those conditions are gone.
The window and what created it
The GI Bill sent veterans to the suburbs. Federal mortgage guarantees lowered the barrier to entry for millions of first-time buyers. Highway construction made cheap land available. And strong union density compressed wages upward, so that a factory worker’s income reliably grew faster than a house’s price—until about 1973, just before the Harvard warning about the future trajectory of the national housing market.
“In the past, if you were middle class, it was almost assumed you would become a homeowner,” Ali Wolf, chief economist of the building consultancy Zonda, told Realtor.com in 2024. “Today, the aspiration is still there, but it is a lot more difficult. You have to be wealthy or lucky.”
What changed was not any single policy or market failure, but that the scaffolding holding up the postwar homeownership society came down piece by piece. Union density declined. Real wage growth for non-college workers was largely stagnant for decades until the short-lived “Great Resignation” of 2021—which happened smack dab in the middle of the Pandemic Housing Boom, as home prices surged 54% in a compressed and almost hallucinatory run-up from 2020 to 2022, turning the residual gap between incomes and prices into a chasm.
The 2026 Harvard report documents what that chasm now looks like from ground level. The median existing single-family home in 2025 sold for nearly 5x the median household income—versus a ratio of 3.2x averaged throughout the 1990s. Monthly mortgage payments on that median-priced home, at roughly $2,420 assuming a modest down payment and a 30-year fixed rate, were nearly double what they were at the end of 2020. Just 16% of renter households earned the $120,800 minimum required to afford that home, Harvard calculates. And listings affordable to households earning $75,000 or less, per the National Association of Realtors and Realtor.com, fell from 49% of the national inventory in 2019 to just 23% in March 2026.
The inheritance economy
What makes the current moment distinct from prior affordability crunches—the early 1980s, say, or the aftermath of the 2008 crash—is not just severity but structure. Homeownership is increasingly behaving less like something earned and more like something inherited.
Aggregate homeowner equity reached $34 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 88% and what Harvard dubbed an “astounding” $16 trillion since 2019. The average homeowner held about $295,000 in home equity. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that children of homeowner parents who extracted equity accumulated roughly one-third more housing wealth by age 30 than children of renters. A May 2026 NBER study using data on more than 3.4 million families found that “housing capital is substantially more persistent across generations than earnings”—and that less than half of that persistence can be explained by what children earn.
The Harvard report supplies the market-level evidence to match. The median first-time buyer is now 40 years old and NAR finds that first-time buyers accounted for just 21% of all purchases — an all-time low. The homeownership rate for households under 35 has fallen to 37%, down from 39% in 2022. The Black-white homeownership gap, at 28.7 percentage points, now exceeds the gap recorded in 1995. So many indicators are near 30-year lows that taken together, they suggest more of a return to the 1990s than the 1970s. The subsequent expansion of homeownership in the early 2000s—which eventually triggered the Great Recession—has been all but unwound.
The labor market that no longer bridges the gap
Postwar workers could often compensate for a lack of inherited capital with rising wages. That mechanism is largely broken.
The United States added 116,000 jobs in 2025—the smallest annual gain in a non-recession year since 2003. The economy has become “low-hire, low-fire”: stable at the top, constrained at the bottom, with diminished churn that limits the income mobility young workers need to accelerate savings. Student loan delinquency rates surged from under 1% in late 2024 to 10% by the end of 2025 after pandemic-era payment relief ended.
Household growth slowed for the third consecutive year, to 1.1 million in 2025 from an annual average of 2.0 million in 2020 and 2021. Many young adults are not forming households at all. The share of Americans who moved in the prior year fell to a record low of 11.2%.
Immigration, historically the most reliable source of renter household growth, has been cut drastically. Net international migration fell from 2.7 million in 2024 to 1.3 million in 2025. The Census Bureau projects a further drop to 321,000 in 2026—roughly a third of the annual average from 2001 to 2019. Harvard is direct about the consequences: the impact of declining immigration on household growth will be “substantial and increasingly evident over time.”
The federal government exits the field
If the postwar housing window was created by policy, its closing is also partly a policy choice. And the 2026 Harvard report is unusually frank about the direction that policy is moving.
Federal rental assistance reaches only about one in four very low-income renter households, leaving 13.8 million income-eligible households unassisted, including nearly 9 million with worst-case housing needs. Public housing budgets have been cut. HUD has proposed eliminating existing disparate-impact language—the rule that considered facially neutral policies unlawful when they produced discriminatory housing outcomes. Fair housing staff have been deeply cut. Major discrimination cases have been dropped.
On homelessness, the administration has moved away from Housing First models toward treatment prerequisites for housing access. Homelessness reached a record 770,000 people on a single night in January 2024, up 33 percent since the start of the pandemic. FEMA attempted to cancel its two largest hazard-mitigation programs in 2025, shifting disaster recovery burdens to states and localities that cannot absorb them.
“Only the federal government has the scale of resources needed to meaningfully reduce the shortage of housing affordable to those with the lowest incomes,” Harvard writes. That government is currently moving in the opposite direction.
A partial window, closing on everyone
There is a necessary complication in the “historical accident” thesis—one that strengthens rather than weakens the argument.
The postwar homeownership surge was not universally accessible. FHA loans explicitly redlined Black neighborhoods. The GI Bill was administered in ways that largely excluded Black veterans from its housing benefits. Restrictive covenants kept communities segregated. The middle-class homeownership society that is now reverting was always a partial society—one that opened its door to many white working-class families while leaving others in the entry hall.
But the reversion is no longer limited to those who were historically excluded. Cost burdens are rising fastest among middle-income households earning between $45,000 and $75,000. A college-educated 30-year-old without parental equity support faces a market that is, in structural terms, the most hostile to first-time buyers in recorded history. The window is closing on nearly everyone except those already inside.
The housing market is evolving, has evolved into a mechanism for compounding wealth upward and foreclosing it downward, over decades, across generations. A labor market too weak to bridge income to asset accumulation is not a headwind to the housing market — it is a structural feature of an economy that has made housing the primary dividing line between the asset-owning and the wage-dependent.
The postwar window is not closing. It has closed. The question Harvard’s 2026 report raises — without quite asking it — is whether America is prepared to acknowledge what replaces it: a housing market sorted not by income, but by inheritance.
Link to original article;
The BIS is warning about exuberance in the A.I. field. Quote, Disappointment in returns could trigger a sudden pullback in financing and turn the capex boom into a protracted investment bust, with potential knock-on effects on financial conditions,” the BIS said, before observing that “a major equity-market correction could have larger macroeconomic consequences today than in the past.
Stone, do you have any thoughts on this?
Isaiah 3:12 As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths.
Four women on the Supreme Court. What could possibly go wrong?
In a previous post you mentioned using your money to help wypipo.
One way would be to buy some land, and create a work camp. Homeless or down and out people could volunteer there to live clean, do hard farm and construction labor to sweat out the poison, and gain skills. Exercise makes you happy too. It would have the benefits of prison, without the downsides. (Some people get a life reset from prison and go on to start successful businesses, etc. Some don’t).
Unfortunately the govt makes that illegal (minmum wage, discrimination laws, various housing mandates), and the FBI would probably show up, especially if you started handing out bibles.
Then you have the problem of throwing out the bad apples and freeloaders. I wonder if it could work at all these days. Perhaps if you only recruited from churches it might. I don’t know. Maybe it’s impossible now, although monasteries seem to make it work. They vet candidates thoroughly though and have the power to throw people out if they don’t toe the line.
When I first heard about the social concepts like UBI 20 to 25 years ago, I thought it would be so far out in the future as to be fanciful. Today, UBI seems almost plausible and I actually see increased calls for it. Given the current context and range of political thought, it seems almost reasonable now.
Western society has been gradually morphing into the Wall-E scenario. Conservatives today bear virtually no resemblance to the conservatives of 50 years ago. Conservatives today seem to be more like a bunch of self-indulged, bloated, and tattooed misfits. Even the baby boomer conservatives are not right. That’s not just in the United states, that’s in all the Western nations, including the Commonwealth.
1 Timothy 3 But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days.
2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy,
3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good,
4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—
5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
This is where we are right now!
You and I will long be dead by the time this winds up.
Perhaps, although I’m of the opinion that this will be wrapped up in the not to distant future! Unless of course your referring to the persecution that will be coming our way. Gird your loins, as you say!
We may all be dead before the end times events start and long before Jesus Christ shows up again. This could happen tomorrow July 4 or maybe 1000 years from now. Only our Heavenly Father knows.
The countdown clocks on my front page are just for public consumption. The real countdown clock will end on the day of my death.
I recently added another subscriber, because he was intrigued by the wormwood countdown clock. I think that makes three subscribers now. That means my subscriber base has increased by 50%. That’s a high growth rate.
I’m just kidding.
I actually still only have one subscriber.
I can remember when you said your goal was to make subscribers angry and loose them all. Are you saying you’ve reached your goal?
Since I appeal to no particular bias, I can’t build a particular crowd. I say enough to anger each and every person, especially women, children, and non-caucasians. I’ve also alienated all Catholics and organized Protestants. Also, all those who are not biblically oriented are gone as well. I don’t think there’s anyone left. Except my one last subscriber. Everybody gets offended now. I don’t know of one particular type of person that does not get offended anymore. They all do and they all struggle and suffer from unreconciled biases.
Well, while I don’t necessarily agree with all of your views,( and who does agree with all someone’s views) I appreciate the exchange of ideas. For whom ever is still stopping by, we better get real good at eschatology! Scripture has ample warning and signs for those with eyes to see! The proverbial clock is ticking!
One set disappoints the other offsets
FHFA House Price Index (MoM) (Apr)
Act: -0.1% Cons: 0.2% Prev: 0.2%
FHFA House Price Index (YoY) (Apr)
Act: 2.0% Prev: 1.8%
FHFA House Price Index (Apr)
Act: 441.4 Prev: 441.8
S&P/CS HPI Composite – 20 s.a. (MoM) (Apr)
Act: 0.0% Prev: -0.2%
S&P/CS HPI Composite – 20 n.s.a. (YoY) (Apr)
Act: 1.1% Cons: 0.9% Prev: 0.9%
S&P/CS HPI Composite – 20 n.s.a. (MoM) (Apr)
Act: 1.0% Prev: 1.1%
Caution on the optimism…. the Talmudic Edomites take their value through the property taxes. An “average” US$2m home in CA is bearing $25,000 in property taxes per annum and rising… As AI wipes out ever increasing jobs in the years ahead, this burden will simply be unbearable for many.
I would assume that over time many of the teachers, government administrative employees, and police officers in New York City will conduct their lives like Winston Smith and live in places like Victory Gardens and fraternize at the Victory Cafe, drinking their Victory gin. Many would have jobs similar to Smith. Virtually all students now in public and private schools are learning the Soviet doctrine. It will eventually be all that they know.
It actually would be a preferable existence to many people. They would conduct their lives in the most basic of routines and everything would be mapped out for them. They would be born, raised, employed, and die and never think once about how things could be different.
Walking Zombies or should we say the walking dead!
No, not really. It’s just that’s all they know. They’ve learned it from their parents and they’ve learned it from their media and teachers. That’s just the way it is.
Your too kind! I’m concerned the human spirit is being systematically extinguished.
I’m trying to stay away from the fundamental attribution error.
Just passing on a trading experience. I have alot of gains above where I want my income to be. So I needed some losses . I purposefully played a mind game with myself and bought a position not necessarily a risky one but one I would not have done with my previous mindset. That position is now up 25 percent in a week . I guess the lesson is do what feels the most uncomfortable
Yes. It is an interesting phenomenon. Most traders lose and it’s because they end up doing the opposite of what they should do over and over again. If someone asks me for some trading advice I usually tell them to turn the charts upside down before trading and then act on it like they would normally do.
That sounds like a lot of money, but it’s not. The capitalization rates on my single family houses are quite exceptional. I will assume that over the next 20 years it will become increasingly difficult for people like me to ply my trade as the profits would be too large for the governments to ignore.
Don’t get caught in your bias. The amount of cash that continues to roll in for me increases at a rate that is about double what I thought of a decade ago. The mortgages I took out over the past three or four years have become increasingly less significant to my bottom line, and two of them are at 7.5% interest.
For SFR investors, it’s all about cash flow and I don’t get caught up in the specifics. The big picture is absolutely amazing.
In fact, the cash flow per property is increasing at such a decent rate that I was able to sell one of my properties this year and pocket the cash after taxes. I just closed on it a couple weeks ago. I can probably sell one property per year for the next few years and maintain my cash flow.
The only reason why I’m contemplating selling is because I’m 60. At my age, it’s okay to have fewer properties. This results in fewer hanging chads, so to speak. But for you younger folk, it’s a great sector if you know what you’re doing. These are great times to be a single family detached house investor.
Very good article on housing. As I understand it, prior to WW2 most people rented. When the war was over and the USA was the last man standing, a huge housing boom followed. The 1950’s was a good time to be an American. Of course, the war in Korea, which my dad was in, and the red scare was going on at the time. Another negative was the Brown vs the board of education decision!
MSTR board has authorized the selling of large amounts of Bitcoin and shares to fund common share and preferred share repurchases. The company’s press release indicates that they would monetize as much as $1.25 billion.
My concern is that there are other companies out there who instituted these Bitcoin and crypto treasury programs. They will probably have to go to the same route to stay solvent.
Another problem with MSTR concerns the legality of its functions. While the firm may boast about its 2.5 billion dollars or 3.8 billion solvency War chest, the company may be sued anyway and be forced to change its ways.
I’m still sitting on the sidelines waiting.
I guess instead of buying at $120,000, MSTR is selling Bitcoin at $60,000. Instead of issuing shares at $300, it’s issuing shares at $85.
I hope MSTR goes away and investors just hold bitcoin. Most investors would do a much better job anyway.