You can’t make houses more affordable by giving people checks.

Imagine that you’re at an auction for houses. There are ten houses for sale, and twenty people at the auction. At the end of the auction ten people walk away houseless. At the next auction, there are again ten houses and twenty buyers, so the government gives everyone $2k housing coupons. What happens? The coupons just jack up the bidding. Now the sellers get government subsidies, but there are still ten people without houses.

Unfortunately America doesn’t have a housing policy, we have an investment policy. “Owning a home is the way to build equity; the value of your house should rise dramatically and increase your net wealth!”

The problem with this is you can’t have housing be an investment vehicle which forever rises AND have cheap houses! We can’t have houses be a massive investment vehicle and also have cheap housing.

Personally, I would redesign the tax code to change this, and either remove the capital gains exemption on selling homes, or extend that same amount to other assets like stock.

Either way, we can go back to the auction model: just build more houses! Primarily by removing all the NIMBY restrictions designed to restrict supply and drive up costs.