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Freddie Smith came back on for our second minisode and we spent the whole hour on one question. Can the housing market actually be fixed?

We started with the grieving process. Freddie made the point that if inflation and home prices had taken fifteen years to get where they are, we would have slowly adjusted. Still been getting screwed, just in smaller pieces. Instead it happened all at once between 2022 and 2026, and that speed is what made it so devastating. He also pointed out something I have noticed too. In 2023 his comment sections were split. In 2026 almost everyone agrees the system is broken. That shift matters.

Then we got into solutions, and Freddie made it clear he does not think a single policy saves us. His big one is eliminating federal income tax on the first $100,000 of everyone’s income and making up the difference at the top. His argument is that for someone making ten million a year, groceries and gas and health care are effectively free, while for someone making 100K that same tax burden is the difference between a down payment and nothing.

I brought up mine, which is charging investors a fee at closing on any property they buy to profit from, capping single family ownership at twenty homes, and requiring purchases to be made under a Social Security number instead of a shell company. If we had charged a 3.5% fee on long term investor purchases over just the last three years, we would have had enough to put 4.2 million first time buyers in homes with $15,000 in down payment assistance.

We also walked through why builders are not building. Regulatory costs on an average new home have jumped more than 40% in five years. On a $420,000 build you are roughly $131,000 in before a single shingle is ordered, up from $96,000 in 2023. Profit margins do not really work until you get past 2,450 square feet, which is exactly why nobody is building the small starter homes Gen Z would actually buy.

I pulled up the August monthly Treasury statement live. Individual income tax for fiscal year 2026 came in at $2.5 trillion. Corporate income tax came in at $295 billion. Sit with that ratio for a second.

And we closed on what comes next. Death and divorce. I have clients right now who are divorced and still living together because neither one can qualify for a mortgage alone. Then the boomer die off somewhere around 2032 to 2038, a birth rate that is not recovering, and net negative immigration. Freddie thinks the market just stays frozen as long as rates sit here, and his advice is pay down debt, stack cash, and wait.

Go follow Freddie Smith on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, and grab his book Generation F’d, out now at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

Minisode two. Next week we have two surprise guests.

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