Housing Doesn’t Have to Be Zero-Sum

The Wall Street Journal today declared, “To Make Homes Affordable Again, Someone Has to Lose Out,” a harrowing message for the millions of young(ish) people seeking to buy their first home, or the millions of seniors wondering how they’ll pay their grocery bills in retirement.

Scroll today’s feeds and you see a split-screen. On one side, renters who’ve done everything right, saved, paid steadily rising rents, watched listings thin out, asking for a way in. On the other, owners looking at hard-won equity and asking not to have the floor pulled from under them.

The prescriptions are predictable now: float ideas that increase buying power quickly, longer mortgages, cheaper rates via bigger government purchases of mortgage bonds, bans on “Wall Street landlords,” even letting people raid their 401(k)s for down payments. The trouble is that most of these proposals make the market noisier without fixing the math that determines whether a household can buy and keep a home.

Start with the basic economics. If you cut rates without adding homes, you mostly change the price of the same scarce thing. That isn’t conjecture. AEI’s latest modeling shows that with rates drifting toward the mid-4s and supply still tight, prices would continue rising over the next several years, good optics for a while, but hardly a breakthrough for first-time buyers. The mechanism is straightforward: lower financing costs boost demand faster than builders can respond, and the savings are capitalized into prices.

Nor will headline villains carry the weight of a national fix. Institutional owners buying up single family homes make for sharp copy, but they are a small piece of the single-family market. Independent reviews of purchase activity and holdings show large investors account for a sliver of transactions nationally and own roughly one percent of the stock, with higher concentrations in a few metros. Removing them might change who buys a particular house; it won’t reset national affordability.

The 401(k) idea feels intuitive but runs into the reality of balances. Vanguard’s latest participant data put the median defined-contribution account around the mid-$30,000s at year-end 2023, which is meaningful for some households but far from a universal solution, and it trades tomorrow’s retirement security for today’s purchase. For many renters, the balance simply isn’t there.

When people say “bring back 2019 affordability,” they’re pointing at something concrete. Realtor.com’s math is bracing: to recreate that monthly payment strain, you’d need one of three things, median incomes up roughly 56% (to about $132,000), mortgage rates back near 2.65%, or home prices down about 35%. None is a credible national policy target, and two carry obvious collateral damage. The arithmetic explains the stalemate; it doesn’t absolve us from finding a better path.

We offer that path, through local and state HFAs and any other sponsor who wants to invest in American homeownership.

Homium uses shared appreciation financing to address the two hurdles that matter most, entry capital and monthly stability, without adding new interest or leaning on rate theatrics. Instead of trying to force the price of debt down, we add patient, equity-like capital to the stack. A Homium investment helps a buyer clear the down-payment gap and qualify without creating a second monthly bill. Repayment happens later, from a share of appreciation, so the household’s budget today looks like it does tomorrow: stable, predictable, durable. That alignment matters. When a market is short on homes, spraying cheaper debt into the system can lift price levels. Shared appreciation doesn’t push in that direction because its return depends on long-term value creation, not on today’s closing volume or teaser rates.

The design also respects existing owners and the broader economy. The Journal rightly notes that U.S. households are sitting on roughly $34.4 trillion of home equity, a store of wealth that policymakers are loath to destabilize. A tool that requires a national price reset to “work” is politically fragile. A tool that improves household cash flow and access, one buyer at a time, without targeting price declines is durable. That’s the point of sharing upside rather than multiplying debt.

There is a second benefit that rarely shows up in the daily discourse: recyclability and sustainability of investment. When a Homium-supported owner sells or refinances, a portion of the appreciated value returns to the pool and supports the next family. Public dollars or mission-driven capital deployed this way compound impact across cohorts rather than evaporating as one-time subsidies. That’s attractive to funders who want measurable affordability per dollar and to communities that want stable ladders into ownership instead of boom-and-bust surges tied to interest-rate cycles.

None of this argues against supply reform. We need more homes, and we should keep pressing on zoning modernization, approvals, and small-builder finance. But supply is local and slow; the gains arrive in seasons, not news cycles. In the interim, our financing choices should avoid bidding up the scarce listings we already have. The Journal is right to warn that “more buying power” without more houses often moves the wrong needle. Shared appreciation redirects the effort to the family’s balance sheet, where it lowers risk rather than inflating price.

So if the choice on your feed looks like this, pick between juicing demand, banning a small slice of buyers, or dipping into retirement, there’s a better option. Use a capital form that helps people buy and stay without adding a new monthly payment, and that pays investors only when the household and neighborhood prosper. That is what Homium is built to do. It is not a headline and it won’t resolve every friction in a week; it is a practical way to convert today’s frustration into tomorrow’s closings, while respecting the equity that millions already hold and the budgets that millions more are trying to manage.

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