Young People Can't Buy a House Here Anymore

What the issue is

Ask anyone under thirty-five in this district about buying a house and you'll hear the same three things: the down payment is out of reach, the interest rate makes the monthly payment impossible, and nobody ever explained how to get their credit into shape.

"Many young people have not had the experience or knowledge of how to develop and build their credit." — Kevin Martin

Meanwhile the growth around here has been badly lopsided. North and northeast of Atlanta has boomed. The south and southwest haven't kept pace — and those are the areas with land, lower costs, and real room to grow.

What Congress actually controls

More of this than most people realize.

Federal policy sets the terms of nearly every mortgage in the country. The federal government backs, guarantees, or insures the majority of home loans, and federal rules determine who qualifies, what a lender may offer, and on what terms. Federal law also governs how credit gets reported and scored in the first place.

The federal government is also one of the largest landowners in the country, and Congress decides what happens to that land.

And federal borrowing feeds directly into the interest rate environment that sets your monthly payment — which ties this issue straight back to the budget.

What needs to change

Open federal land for people to build on. This country has done this before, in the 1800s, when the federal government made land available to people willing to go build something on it. There is federal land sitting unused today. Congress can decide to make it available for housing, with incentives for individuals rather than only large developers. More supply is the most direct way to bring prices down.

Look seriously at mortgage terms. Congress, working with Treasury and the Federal Reserve, sets the framework for what home financing can look like. If a thirty-year note no longer puts a house within reach of a young family, the question of what other structures could work deserves a real hearing rather than a shrug.

Keep lending standards honest. We watched what happened in the 2000s when people were approved for loans they could never carry, got locked into adjustable rates, and lost their homes when those rates moved. Federal underwriting rules are what allowed that. Making credit easier is not the same as making housing affordable, and Congress should not repeat it.

Get federal mandates out of what schools teach. Personal finance used to be taught in high school. It largely isn't anymore, in part because so much classroom time is now committed to federally driven requirements. Kevin's view is that this is another argument for pulling federal mandates back and letting local districts teach what young people actually need.

"This is a strong point to get back out of the federal government, the federal mandates on what should be taught into schools, to getting back to the practicality of what we need to teach in schools." — Kevin Martin

Why it matters

Homeownership is still how most families in this country build anything to pass on. Lock a generation out of it and you have young people who can't start, and who eventually leave for somewhere they can.

That is already happening here. Kids who grow up in this district finish school and go somewhere they can afford to begin. A young person who grew up here should be able to buy a house here.