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housing

5 essays in the Forum tagged "housing".

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Watching the Cracks

The Tax-Plus-Insurance Wedge: How Non-Mortgage Carrying Costs Became the Marginal Variable in American Housing

For three decades, U.S. housing affordability was discussed primarily in terms of price and mortgage rate. In 2026, the marginal variable that determines whether a household can afford to stay in their home — or whether a prospective buyer can afford to enter the market — is no longer the mortgage payment. It is the wedge of non-mortgage carrying costs: property tax, insurance, and HOA fees. The wedge has grown wider than the headline mortgage payment in many metros, it has compounded faster than wages for five consecutive years, and it operates as a Fekete-an extraction that the household cannot directly negotiate. This essay maps the wedge, identifies its political-economy drivers, and reads its trajectory through the New Austrian framework.

MengerFeketeproperty taxhomeowners insuranceHOA feescarrying costsProposition 13Save Our HomesCitizens InsuranceSurfsidehousing
Watching the Cracks

Lakeland, Florida: How One Sun Belt Metro Became the Saleability Collapse Case Study

In 2024, Polk County had the highest foreclosure rate in the United States — one filing for every 172 housing units, more than double the national rate. The metro that produced this distinction grew 16.8% in five years, sits in the geographic center of the Florida insurance crisis, and now hosts a parallel community of 2008-survivors-turned-foreclosure-specialists. The framework's reading is direct: Lakeland is what happens when a low-saleability asset class is built at scale on a substrate that subsequently fails. The pattern is reproducible. Other Sun Belt metros are 12-24 months behind.

LakelandPolk CountyFloridaMengerFeketeforeclosureinsurance crisishousingsaleabilitycase study
Watching the Cracks

The Metro Saleability Map: Where the Framework's Housing Prediction Is Being Validated

Article 7 of this series argued that housing's saleability is structurally low and that the rare conditions under which buying still makes sense reduce to a narrow case: supply-constrained markets, 10+ year holding horizon, intent to occupy, with manageable property tax and climate exposure. This essay tests that argument against current metro-level data — 40 metros, four observable indicators, one US map. The geographic split is real, sharp, and worsening. The framework's prediction is being validated in real time.

MengerFeketehousingsaleabilityproperty taxforeclosuresmetrosgeographic heterogeneitySun Belt
Housing Trilogy

The Boomer Trade: A One-Time Monetary Windfall and Why It Cannot Be Replicated

Between 1971 and 2021, the American homeowner cohort participated in a 50-year monetary regime characterized by a closed gold window, sustained inflation, and a 16-percentage-point fall in interest rates. The wealth transfer this produced — from younger workers to housing asset holders, mediated by the dollar's debasement — was the largest peacetime intergenerational redistribution in U.S. history. It cannot be repeated. The post-2021 cohort is being asked to pay out the windfall at terms the underlying economic reality cannot support.

FeketeMengerintergenerationalboomershousingCantillon effect1971monetary regimeFederal Reserve

Housing as Anti-Money: A Menger-Fekete Audit of the American Mortgage in 2026

The asset class with the worst Mengerian saleability characteristics on earth has been culturally positioned as the central wealth-building instrument of American life. Audited rigorously through the New Austrian framework, the modern American home is closer to anti-money than to money, and the mortgage that funds it is a 90-year experiment in inducing households to behave as miniature bond issuers in a perpetually inflating currency.

MengerFeketehousingmortgagereal estatesaleabilityCantillon effectFederal ReserveFHAmonetary theory