To Solve Affordability We Must End Scarcity

To do so Democrats will need new ideas and new leaders.

Monday the New York Times editorial board put out a piece saying America needs to build four million more houses. They opened with a graphic. In 1950, a median American household could buy a median house with two and a half years of income. Today it takes almost five years. The Times treated that ratio as the headline number.

They got it wrong - it’s four times as bad. They don’t get it, because they don’t live in reality. They live in bubbles protected from reality by their wealth and privileged networks.

In 1950, a household was almost always one person earning. Today’s household is almost always two. The median home is not twice as expensive as it was in 1950. On a per-worker basis, it takes four times as much human labor to buy the same house. We doubled the workforce inside the household and the cost still outran us.

That’s the actual story, and it isn’t unique to housing. It takes more of our lives to afford less of what we need across every major sector. Housing. Health care. Child care. Education. Infrastructure. The things that make a country strong and self-sufficient have been stripped away by the people who took the work, and sold back to us at a markup.

The Abundance crowd thinks the answer is faster permitting. YIMBYs think it’s upzoning. The Trump administration thinks it’s tariffs and handouts to the trillion-dollar firms that broke the supply chain in the first place. None of these solutions meet the moment. None of them even name real culprits. Decades ago our business and political leaders decided we no longer needed to build the things we and the world use. We’d farm it out to poorer countries and sit at the head of the table forever, just because we deserved it. They were wrong. We’re way behind. And the tools we have are old, sold off, or rusting.

This piece is about housing. I happen to be a licensed general contractor and have remodeled homes. That said, this worldview applies to a much bigger slice of our economy.

Here’s what it takes to build a house. Lumber. Copper wire. Romex. Breaker boxes and panels. Nails. Shingles. HVAC units. Windows. Pipes. Drywall. Somebody who knows how to wire it, plumb it, and swing a hammer. Roads. Water lines. Sewer capacity. A power grid that can carry the load. Schools for the kids who’ll live there.

Almost none of that comes from here anymore. We import about a third of our softwood lumber, mostly from Canada. The U.S. imports around half of the refined copper it consumes, with roughly 65 percent coming from Chile alone. Much of the electrical supply chain — panels, breakers, transformers — now runs through Asia. The transformer story is the one to sit with: roughly 80 percent of large power transformers used in the U.S. are imported, and Wood Mackenzie’s Q2 2025 survey puts the average lead time at 128 weeks — nearly two and a half years — with some specialty orders stretching to four years. Before the pandemic those same transformers shipped in 7 to 14 months. Power transformer prices are up 77 percent since 2019. Roughly 25 to 30 percent of our construction workers are foreign-born, and the Associated Builders and Contractors estimate the industry needs to attract 349,000 net new workers in 2026 and another 456,000 in 2027, just to stay even.

These are not policy abstractions. These are the inputs. If you don’t have them, you cannot build the houses. The country has been hollowed out by people who profited from the hollowing, and the bill is coming due all at once.

The Times held up Austin as proof that supply works. Austin added 120,000 housing units from 2015 to 2024 and rents fell 16 to 22 percent from their 2022 peak. But Austin had cattle-ranch land at $5,000 an acre — San Francisco’s core runs $20 to $40 million an acre — a trades workforce that grew with the boom, and Municipal Utility Districts that bond-financed infrastructure onto future residents. Austin did not make growth cheap. It moved the cost off the developer’s books and onto the backs of future residents. Socialize the cost. Privatize the upside. I see a version of this firsthand in East Tennessee. Country roads that weren’t built for this many people. Schools that weren’t built for this many kids. Water systems under strain. You can call it affordability but what it really is are subsidies for the developers and inadequate infrastructure for the citizens.

Affordability is not a regulatory problem. It’s a production problem. The Abundance answer is that markets respond to scarcity by adding capacity. The COVID lumber spike showed they don’t. Prices ran from $400 per thousand board feet to over $1,500 by May 2021. The classical story says producers reopen mills, build new ones, expand supply. None of that happened at scale. Mills shuttered after the Great Recession did not reopen. The producers pocketed the margin, ran the buybacks, and went back to bed. Lumber came back down only because demand cooled, not because supply caught up. Capacity today is what it was twenty years ago.

You have to bring prices down, not wait for the market to add capacity at the price it likes. The way we have actually brought prices down on things that mattered has never once been through deregulation. It has always been a mission. The Arsenal of Democracy. The New Deal. The Space Race. Oak Ridge. The Manhattan Project. The TVA dam system. Rural electrification. During World War II, the Defense Plant Corporation financed over 2,300 industrial facilities worth $9.2 billion, roughly two-thirds of all new private industrial capacity added before and during the war. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation worked as a public bank, funding what private capital wouldn’t. We trained millions of nurses and welders and electricians as capacity build-outs, not funding rounds.

Then we killed it. Successive administrations sold it off and called it efficiency. CEOs offshored the factories and called it shareholder value. Wall Street bought the husks and called it growth. None of this happened by accident. It happened on purpose, by people we can name, in service of a class of beneficiaries who are still cashing the checks.

A handful of people are arguing for getting it back. Saikat Chakrabarti, running in California’s 11th, has published the cleanest version in a document called Mission for America. It calls for restoring the Reconstruction Finance Corporation as a public bank to finance the build-out we need. He’s also calling for public ownership of AI. Most of the Democratic field, including most of the progressive bench, is not yet there. One person winning a seat doesn’t change a party. A team of candidates does. That team doesn’t exist yet. It needs to.

Everything I’ve said so far would be true if AI didn’t exist. AI just sets the deadline.

The CEOs building these systems are now telling us, on the record, that AI will displace large fractions of the workforce, and the wave will not stop at the bottom. These are not critics. These are the people building the displacement machine, notifying us what they intend to do with it. Microsoft’s AI chief Mustafa Suleyman told the Financial Times this year that “most” white-collar tasks “will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.” Jamie Dimon has spent 2026 publicly urging the government to prepare. Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic, told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10 to 20 percent in the next one to five years. AI is coming for the top 20 percent of income earners on a two-to-five-year timeline.

A government that can’t build can’t respond to that. If we lose another massive fraction of the workforce to displacement and the only tool we have is checks, those checks will chase the same scarce housing, the same scarce health care, the same scarce energy. The prices that are already crushing people will go balistic.

You cannot subsidize your way out of scarcity. Pour more money into a market with constrained supply and you don’t get more supply. You get higher prices. Health care subsidies don’t make Americans healthier. They make UnitedHealthcare and Aetna and CVS more and more powerful. Housing subsidies don’t make homes cheaper. They get capitalized into the asset, and Blackstone and Invitation Homes and Pretium take the spread.

We have to make things. And we have to own the things that make the things. Otherwise Wall Street and the commodities markets bleed us dry, taking an exorbitant share for doing next to nothing. Public banking. Public capacity. Public ownership is the base everything else rests on.

What America has in abundance is zeros in the bank accounts of a tiny minority. The things we need are scarce. The richest nation in the history of the world has built its wealth on stock prices, asset prices, and home equity. None of that produces a transformer or trains a nurse or frames a house. The wealth is there on paper but it’s absent in the physical world.

We cannot solve the affordability crisis until we solve the scarcity crisis. Affordability and scarcity are incompatible.

Corbin Trent
AfightWorthHaving.com