Look no further than the Democrats to understand America’s “house crisis.” From the personal of dubious loan applications, to the local of rent control, to the national of high mortgage rates and regulatory costs, Democrats’ fingerprints cover them all.
It is rich indeed that Democrats — the self-professed party of the little guy — are indeed rich. So rich that they can have multiple houses and have more than one be their primary residence. This is the gist of the allegations against Lisa Cook (Democrat appointed by President Biden to the Federal Reserve), Letitia James (Democrat attorney general of New York), and Adam Schiff (Democrat Senator from California). (RELATED: They Don’t Really Want To Stand Behind Lisa Cook, Do They?)
Democrats’ faults in housing hardly stop with their prominent members’ headlines.
Each is alleged to have taken mortgages while claiming more than one home as a primary residence. Such a claim gets a lower mortgage rate; the problem is that it’s also fraud if true. And it’s a big problem because mortgage fraud was also a root cause of the Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. And it’s an even bigger problem for someone overseeing the nation’s money supply (Cook), enforcing laws (James), and making the nation’s laws (Schiff) — people who should know better and do better. Unless you’re a nomad, it’s not that hard to know where you’re living.
Democrats’ faults in housing hardly stop with their prominent members’ headlines. At the local level, rent control is a prime driver of limiting the availability of housing. Rent control is a windfall for the “haves” already in housing, but a high headwind for “have-nots” seeking it (another “Robin Hood-in-reverse” Democrat irony). The reason is simple: If you limit rent increases, you reduce the incentive to build more housing. Of course, limiting supply means demand will soon outstrip it in high-demand housing markets — New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., all Democrat strongholds with rent control.
Six states (Oregon, California, New York, New Jersey, Maine, and Maryland) and the District of Columbia have either statewide rent control or numerous counties and cities with rent control laws in effect. All are blue states, and all, except Maine, overwhelmingly so.
Democrats strike again at the national level. Mortgage rates are a prime factor in determining buyers’ all-in costs for a home purchase. Mortgage rates are determined by interest rates, and interest rates depend to a great degree on inflation expectations. Democrats have been the party of spending-fueled inflation.
The Biden administration took advantage of the COVID pandemic to skyrocket federal spending. Then Democrats kept it there — for four full years. According to Congressional Budget Office figures, between fiscal years 2021 and 2024, the Biden administration spent $8.2 trillion over FY 2019’s pre-pandemic level. In the process, they ran $7.5 trillion in total deficits, which averaged just over 7.5 percent of GDP.
The Biden administration’s hyper-spending helped fuel historic inflation, with inflation’s surge overlapping their four years in office. When Joe Biden took office in January 2021, inflation (measured by the Consumer Price Index) was 1.4 percent; by March it had almost doubled to 2.6 percent, and by 2021’s end it was 4.7 percent. In 2022, inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June — a 40-year high. By the time Biden left office in January 2025, it was still 3 percent. Inflation remains a concern and a major reason mortgage rates (30-year fixed rate mortgages) remain so high, having risen from 2.77 percent in January 2021, peaking at 7.44 percent in November 2023, and still remaining at 6.6 percent today.
Also driving housing costs at the national level are regulatory burdens. Democrats are the party of regulation. According to an NAHB 2021 study, regulation accounted for $93,870 of a new home price — almost a quarter of the cost of an average new home then ($394,300).
During the Biden administration’s four years, Democrats outdid themselves when it came to imposing a costly regulatory burden on Americans. Even as it was headed for the White House exit, Clyde Wayne Crews of CEI tabulated that Biden’s administration issued “243 rules across the 7,641 pages published in the Federal Register during these fleeting first weeks of 2025 before his departure.” The American Action Forum calculated that the total Biden burden from regulation over four years amounted to $1.8 trillion.
Democrats are forever decrying crises they create. America’s “housing crisis” is only the latest example. Daniel Huff and Paige Bronitsky hypothesize that in the case of housing, the reason Democrats want this one is to leverage it for DEI requirements: “Democrats have brought DEI quotas to every institution in America. Your neighborhood is next.”
Whatever the crisis and whatever the Democrats’ reason, as always, the solution is simple: Get government out of the way and let the private sector work. Of course, Democrats’ answer is always the opposite: Have the government do it, so we can socially engineer through it. America doesn’t have a “housing crisis” but a much bigger Democrat crisis.
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READ MORE from J.T. Young:
At the Bottom of the Left’s Barrel
America’s Elite: A Nobility in Exile
J.T. Young is the author of the recent book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left, from RealClear Publishing, and has over three decades’ experience working in Congress, the Department of Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, and representing a Fortune 20 company.