There is a mother in Houston named Rachel Wiggins who bid on twenty homes. She lost every single one of them. Not to other families. Not to couples scraping together a down payment. She lost to Wall Street investment firms that skipped inspections, paid all cash, and turned those houses into rental properties. Twenty bids. Twenty losses. The American Dream, auctioned off to a hedge fund.
Her story should make your blood boil. It should also make you ask a question that nobody in Washington wanted to answer for years: how did we get here?
We got here because our government spent trillions of dollars it did not have, and working families are paying the price. The COVID-era stimulus packages flooded the economy with cash. Trillions printed, trillions borrowed, trillions spent.
Politicians stood at podiums and told you it was compassion. What it actually was was the largest wealth transfer in modern American history, and it transferred wealth, in many cases, to the friends of the politicians signing the checks.
The money inflated everything. Groceries. Gas. Lumber. And most devastatingly, housing.
The median home price in America has surged past what an entire generation of young people can afford. Millennials and Gen Z watched their purchasing power evaporate in real time while Washington printed money and called it progress.
Interest rates climbed to cool the inflation caused by reckless spending, and suddenly, a starter home that cost $250,000 in 2019 costs $380,000, with a mortgage rate that doubled the monthly payment.
Young couples who did everything right, who saved and budgeted and waited, found themselves priced out of the very life their parents lived. The math stopped working.
And into that vacuum stepped the corporations. BlackRock. Invitation Homes. Wall Street giants with billions in capital who could absorb inflated prices that families could not. They bought entire neighborhoods.
They turned single-family homes into permanent rental portfolios. They looked at the American Dream and saw a revenue stream. Every home a corporation buys is a home a family cannot. Every neighborhood they absorb is a community hollowed out, stripped of the ownership and rootedness that make a place worth living in.
This is what inflation did. This is what spending without consequence produces. The government created the conditions, and the corporations exploited them.
Which is exactly why President Trump's call for Congress to pass the ROAD to Housing Act matters.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act passed the Senate with 89 votes. Eighty-nine. In a Congress that cannot agree on what day of the week it is, this bill earned near-unanimous support because the crisis is that obvious and the solution is that overdue.
Championed by Senator Tim Scott and passed with broad bipartisan backing, the bill bans large institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes. It cuts the red tape that strangles new housing construction.
It includes roughly 40 provisions designed to increase supply and lower costs. It converts abandoned buildings into housing developments. It is the largest legislative housing package in decades.
And President Trump is pushing the House to pass it now. His Truth Social post put it plainly: this bill would ensure that homes are for people, not corporations. He has already signed an executive order banning large Wall Street firms from buying single-family homes.
Now he wants Congress to make it a permanent law. And they should.
The generation that was told to go to college, work hard, and save for a house deserves a government that stops making it impossible to buy one.
Some will say the market will correct itself. Or that the government should stay out of housing. In principle, I agree.
But the government has already chosen not to stay out of housing. The government spent its way into a crisis, inflated the currency, and then stood back while corporations picked the bones clean.
Once corporations were the only ones who could afford to buy, they chose to exercise that power. You do not get to cause the fire and then lecture people about the dangers of using a hose.
This bill is a long-overdue correction. It says that if Washington's spending binge made housing unaffordable, then Washington has an obligation to tear down the barriers it built.
It says that a family saving for a down payment should not have to compete against a billion-dollar fund armed with cash and algorithms. It says that homeownership, the single greatest engine of middle-class wealth in American history, is worth protecting.
The House should pass this bill. They should pass it because young Americans are watching, and they are tired of being told to wait while the institutions that priced them out of the market continue to feast.
They should pass it because President Trump is right: homes are for families. Neighborhoods are for communities. And the American Dream belongs to the people who build their lives in it, not the corporations that trade it like a stock ticker.
The Senate has spoken with 89 votes. The President has spoken from the bully pulpit. Now it is the House's turn.
Do the right thing. Pass the bill. Give young Americans a fighting chance at the life this country promised them. Oh, and while you're at it, maybe the Senate can pass the SAVE America Act, too. It would go a long way toward showing that both chambers are more than a photo-op.
