Affordability's all the rage, yet there's no bigger—or misunderstood—component than housing. A basic review of America's housing market now, and what it has gone through, shows that the "economy's biggest problem" is really a political one.

The gist of America's housing complaint is that mortgage rates and prices are too high and supply is too low. In a word, housing is "unaffordable" for many young Americans, to the point that it appears unattainable to many of the next generation.

The dream of homeownership strikes a fundamental chord for Americans. America was born as a nation of settlers. Unsurprisingly, we enshrined homeownership in our tax code by making home mortgage interest payments deductible—one of the biggest tax "breaks" for average Americans.

These factors make a family's home its treasure and often its biggest asset.

So, a threat to homeownership goes beyond an economic issue to a societal one.

Breaking down today's affordability, let's first look at interest rates, the most focal and moving housing metric. Over the last five years, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage average jumped from 2.73 percent on February 11, 2021, to a 7.79 percent peak on October 26, 2023. By January 1, 2025, it had fallen to 6.96 percent; on February 5, 2026, it stood at 6.11 percent.

While it has fallen almost 1.70 percentage points from its 2023 peak, it is still almost 3.5 percentage........

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