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Affordability Trap

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Ali Velshi Explains Why Housing Affordability is So Bad

The MS NOW host and Citizen board member delves into the deregulation that made a handful of firms rich and destroyed housing affordability for the overwhelming majority of Americans

Listen

Ali Velshi Explains Why Housing Affordability is So Bad

The MS NOW host and Citizen board member delves into the deregulation that made a handful of firms rich and destroyed housing affordability for the overwhelming majority of Americans

BY Ali Velshi

Nov. 17, 2025

Print

Donald Trump has discovered a new word…”the affordability,” as he puts it. Unfortunately, it isn’t just another buzzword for social media posts. Affordability is very real, urgent, and worsening problem for Americans. In the pyramid of the American dream, home ownership is at the very top. It’s the clearest path to generational wealth. But, as Ali Velshi warns, that pyramid has crumbled in the wake of runaway costs for food and nearly everything else, a rogue Wall Street, and a distorted housing market that has priced working families out of the American dream.

Trump proposed a 50 year mortgage as a solution to the housing affordability crisis. That’s right, a half century home loan where the average first-time buyer will be making payments into their 90s. On a median priced home, the 50-year mortgage would add roughly $400,000 in extra interest compared to our current standard 30 year loan.

Velshi makes it clear that the problem is not the terms of mortgages — it’s the broken system that neither Trump nor his Republican Party have any interest in fixing. It’s a system where major institutional investors and private equity firms outbid families to buy up starter homes to flip or turn into permanent rentals, and higher and higher rental prices place future homeownership out of reach.

It’s a system where giant home builders control local housing markets, hoard land, dictate supply and control prices, making housing affordability impossible in pursuit of raking in huge profits. This system is turning home ownership into a luxury good.

This is not new: back in 2022, Congress was holding hearings on private equity and housing affordability. You can trace this broken system back to the deregulation of the 1980s and 90s, which allowed turning homes into investment vehicles and big banks to swallow up local lenders.

Local, low risk capital once kept communities going. We have moved from a world where local lenders backed local builders and gave out local loans, into a world where a handful of national giants set the terms of housing supply and home prices across the entire country. That is the real affordability crisis.

LISTEN: WHY AFFORDABILITY IS A CRISIS

 

 

WATCH: DEREGULATION AND HOUSING AFFORDABILITY

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