It's true that people with a 3% mortgage do not want to move now if they don't absolutely have to and this is impacting supply. however...
> This is a policy decision that Congress and the President actively make to not free up mortgages and make them all assumable and portable.
I don't think they have the power to do this (and I'm not sure I want them to have that kind of power). You want the President and/or congress to tear up all existing mortgage agreements? That's a massive amount of power you want to hand over to the government.Maybe they could mandate that mortgages going forward be assumable with some legislation, but it would take a while for that to have an effect.
> I don't know of any other country that has this combination of factors.
As I understand it, in a lot of other countries (like the UK) mortgages are essentially ARMs - the rates adjust with prevailing interest rates.
People keep saying this. (I'm sorry, my negative reaction is definitely not your fault, I've just heard this a lot) It's getting really annoying :)
If I could buy a house for what it cost in 2005 in my city I would gladly buy one at 7%. But housing is now 2.5x the cost. A 500k house at its peak in 2005 is now around 1.5M.
> Yes, prices are still way too high. This is largely due to the dearth of home building during the 2008-2014 period (great recession and aftermath). We need a lot more units built and quickly. Neither party is addressing the supply problem. Also, it's not an exclusively US problem - it's a problem in most of the developed economies of the world.
I don't agree that this is the cause. We haven't been building enough housing for a long time.
The problem is that the US has a crazy system. Mortgages are not assumable. Nor are they portable. And they're locked in for 30 years. I don't know of any other country that has this combination of factors. That just leaves people feeling trapped and unable to move whenever rates go up.
This is a policy decision that Congress and the President actively make to not free up mortgages and make them all assumable and portable. That would relax the housing market. If we're going to wait for building to catch up to fix the situation, well, it won't.