Housing

High Country News - In the late 1970s, a group of Western Republican congressmen launched the League for the Advancement of States’ Equal Rights, the legislative arm of the Sagebrush Rebellion. LASER, as they called it, was an industry-backed reaction to increased environmental protections on federal land. The group’s solution: Simply convey those federal lands to the states in which they were located, at which point they could be sold off to the highest bidder.LASER and the Sagebrush Rebellion were hardly the first — or last — attempts to abolish federal land. Similar efforts first emerged in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the Rebellion’s ideological descendants have rekindled the campaign several times in the last four decades. It has failed each time, for the simple reason that most Americans don’t want to hand their land over to counties, oil and gas companies, real estate developers or livestock operations. Apparently, they would much rather the public lands remained in the public’s hands.

But now, the entire nation is facing a housing affordability crisis — one that happens to be most severe in Western states with lots of public land. And so, modern-day Sagebrush Rebels are being joined by other Republicans and even some Western Democrats in yet another push to transfer public lands to private hands, only this time they are marketing it not as an anti-federal land-management fight, but as a way to solve the housing crisis.

 

CNN - The number of US cities where first-time homebuyers are faced with at least a $1 million price tag on the average entry-level home has nearly tripled in the past five years, according to new research. A Thursday report from Zillow indicates that a typical starter home is now worth $1 million or more in 237 cities, up from 84 cities in 2019, underscoring America’s ongoing home affordability crisis...

Skyrocketing home prices, along with elevated mortgage rates, have contributed to a feeling of frustration among most Americans about the housing market. A majority of Americans — 76% — say it’s a bad time to buy a house, according to a May survey from Gallup.... It’s a problem, partly, of supply and demand: There is a shortage of homes for sale compared to demand, which has driven up prices.

Home prices jumped during the pandemic as more Americans, many of whom were newly remote workers, rushed to find homes offering extra space. Then, the Federal Reserve’s war on inflation caused mortgage rates to surge. In 2024, prospective homebuyers face an unpleasant combination of high prices and high borrowing costs.