The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:00:00 · Scott Galloway, Scott Galloway, Kyla Scanlon
[00:00:00] S0: Support for the show comes from Yahoo Scout. It can be tough to get trustworthy answers online. That's why Yahoo Scout is an AI powered answer engine designed to cut through endless searching to give you the information you need exactly when you need it, backed by actual resources. As I've said before, Yahoo's personal finance page has been my starting page on the Internet for a good thirty years. I have been using Scout for a while now. I like the interface. It just feels bit friendlier and easier. Also, I find the answers, quite frankly, just easier to sort through and better organize. And if you're a young adult just starting your career, Yahoo Scout can help you compare job offers, find the right city for your industry, and figure out how to manage your finances. Go to scout.com to start exploring today. [00:00:47] S1: Welcome to a bonus episode of the Prop G Pod. We're now bringing you an extra conversations episode on Tuesdays, more time with the people who help us think differently about work, life, and what matters. Today, we're joined by two guests, Kyla Scanlon, economic commentator and author of In This Economy, and Aziz Sundarji, author of The Home Economic Substack. We discussed with Kyla and Aziz why The US isn't building enough homes, how housing costs shape relationships and family formation, plus which policies would actually help. With that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Aziz, Synergy, and Kyla Scanlon. Aziz and Kyla, where does this podcast find you? [00:01:27] S2: Oh, I'm in Los Angeles, California right now.
00:01:27 · Kyla Scanlon, Scott Galloway, Aziz Sunderji
[00:01:27] S2: Oh, I'm in Los Angeles, California right now. [00:01:30] S1: Oh, Kyla, you're on the sand. I have no right to complain. You're at 06:37 for you as well. [00:01:36] S2: Yes. Sure is. Bright and early. [00:01:38] S1: Are you a morning person? [00:01:40] S2: In theory, yeah. Yeah. But I had a late flight last night, so I'm, you know, a little challenged today with the timing, but that's all good. [00:01:47] S1: How about you, Aziz? Where are you? [00:01:49] S3: Yeah. I'm in Midtown Manhattan in my office. I've got nothing to complain about. [00:01:53] S1: It's it's mid morning here. All right, let's bust right into it. Housing prices are at record highs and that is great news for anyone who already owns a home and terrible news for anyone trying to buy one. Kyla, you wrote in the Times this summer that owners need prices to rise to fund retirement while buyers need them to fall. And Aziz, you wrote last month that the real divide on housing runs between owners and renters, more than between Democrats and Republicans. That's interesting. So some data. The median first time buyer is now 40. That's an all time high. The share of first time homebuyers dropped to a record low of just 21%. So four in five people buying a home have already owned one. So how would you both assess the current housing market? If owners need prices to rise and buyers need them to fall, whose side should policy be on? Kyla, let's start with you.
00:02:43 · Kyla Scanlon
[00:02:43] S2: I mean, I think it's sort of the big question because forever, home policy has definitely favored... Or policy in general has definitely favored homeowners. And as a renter, it can feel pretty difficult, you know, homeowners able to write things off on their taxes. And with renting, it feels like you are just throwing money away to a certain extent because you're not building towards equity, you're not building towards ownership. And so I think it's not necessarily that policy has to favor one over the other. I think just more equal policy would be good, like giving renters a little bit more space for tax breaks, allowing maybe a rent to own type model where people can start building equity earlier on would be super helpful. So I don't think it's like favoring one over the other or just making it
00:03:26 · Aziz Sunderji
[00:03:26] S3: a bit more equal. Aziz? Yeah. I think it's a tricky problem to solve for politicians because there's there's kind of a symmetry in housing markets. You have two thirds of households owning, and they certainly don't want lower prices. Like, Kyle has written about this in The New York Times, for example, that your home is is a nest egg for many people. It's their major source of wealth. And it's it's very tricky. Like, you've heard president Trump say that he doesn't want lower home prices. He wants higher home prices. And this has happened around the world. Politicians, when they're kind of nailed down on this topic, do you want higher or lower home prices? They kind of... They panic because there's no good answer. And to be honest, I don't think I have a good answer either. My view is that, look, it's gonna take time for people to stop using... Stop relying on their homes as their main source of wealth. We need need need to put in place policies that allow them to do that. And in the meantime, we can help folks who need help getting on the property ladder and also the renters. I think renters are really struggling in this country and we can certainly do a lot more for them too.
00:04:28 · Scott Galloway
[00:04:28] S1: I'm surprised that the two of you, given your age, are so balanced. I see this as policy that's done nothing but transfer wealth from your generation to my generation. And that one of the biggest errors we made was taking housing permitting out of the hands of bureaucrats and putting it into homeowners who obviously have a vested interest in seeing supply remain quite frankly undersupplied. Permitting costs have gone up. And the result is young people can't start in some ways this major step to starting their life. They become, they feel bad about America. They start getting angry at everything and everybody. And I think even people who own homes, would think, see this. And that it's, you know, we have built as much housing or enough housing for, you know, two thirds of America to own a home, including the 20,000,000 black Americans that own a home. And then we just stopped doing it for a lot of reasons. But it feels as if this has gotten to a point where it is a real social ill and that if mom and dad's home goes down by 10% and also, you know, the homes that would be built would be, you know, kind of on the more modest end. I'm not sure that's gonna really have that big an impact on mom and dad's home. And then a lot of this is interest rates, but it's like the perfect storm for young people to not be able to kind of launch if you will. It to me, it feels like an enormous failure on the part of our leadership. Instead of drill baby drill, it should be build baby build, you know, five to 7,000,000 homes, tax credits, know, Yimbi laws. But hasn't my generation at the end of the day just sucked your generation dry of all capital and opportunity? I'm not quite as elegant and balanced as the two of you.
00:06:17 · Kyla Scanlon
[00:06:17] S2: That's easy. I'll answer that first.