YHousing
A million more homes, and a market that works for the families trying to live in them.
The Million-Home Moonshot
America doesn't have a housing shortage because we lack land, money, or workers — we have a housing shortage because we've spent decades making it slower, harder, and more expensive to build. It's time for a national moonshot: one million additional homes over the next ten years, on top of whatever the market would have built anyway.
The number sounds enormous until you break it down. One million homes over ten years is 100,000 homes a year, nationally. Spread across fifty states, that's roughly 2,000 additional homes per state, per year. Some states, with more people, more land, and more room to build, will contribute more; others less. But no single state, city, or builder has to do anything heroic. This is a target we hit through a thousand small, achievable wins, not one enormous federal program.
We'll get there the way this country has always built at scale when it needed to: by getting government out of the way. That means faster permitting timelines with hard deadlines, converting unused or underused federal, state, and local land into buildable lots, cutting the paperwork that turns an eighteen-month build into a five-year ordeal, and giving builders the certainty to plan, hire, and pour concrete instead of sitting in a zoning hearing.
Every home built is also a job — for framers, electricians, plumbers, roofers, and truck drivers. Every home occupied is a family paying local property taxes that fund schools and roads. A moonshot on housing is a moonshot on the whole working economy underneath it.
Homes for Americans Under 35
An entire generation came of age being told that homeownership — the single most reliable path to building wealth in America — simply wasn't in the cards for them. That has to change, and it starts with building homes actually designed for how younger Americans live and what they can afford, not the same four-bedroom colonial on a quarter-acre that dominated 1985.
We propose one million additional homes built specifically with buyers under 35 in mind: smaller-footprint single-family homes, starter condominiums, and planned small-home villages that trade square footage nobody needs for a price tag people can actually hit. A studio or one-bedroom in a well-designed small-home community, or a modest condo in a walkable development, can put a mortgage payment within reach of a young teacher, nurse, or tradesperson in a way a sprawling suburban house never will.
None of this requires lowering standards; it requires better design. Efficient floor plans, shared amenities that reduce the cost burden on any one unit, and smart-density planning that fits more good homes on less land all bring per-unit costs down without making anyone live somewhere worse. Done right, this turns a generation that assumed they'd rent forever into homeowners, with all the stability, equity, and pride that comes with it.
A Mutual-Aid Network for Young Homeowners
Owning a home is only the first step; maintaining and improving it is the part nobody budgets for. We propose a mutual-aid network that connects young homeowners so they can help each other build, repair, and improve their homes, and get something real back for their time.
The model is simple: members earn credits by contributing labor, skills, or time to a neighbor's project — framing a deck, fixing a leak, hanging drywall, landscaping a yard — and spend those same credits to bring help onto their own project when they need it. The more you contribute, the more you can draw on later. No cash has to change hands for neighbors to help neighbors.
The effect compounds. Construction and repair costs go down because labor is shared rather than always hired out at market rate. Young people learn real, transferable skills from each other instead of paying a stranger to do something they could learn to do themselves. And instead of one more excuse to stay inside and alone, it gives an entire generation a genuine reason to meet the people three doors down, not through an awkward, forced meetup, but by literally building something side-by-side that benefits everyone involved. Strong neighborhoods are built one shared afternoon of work at a time, and this program turns that into an institution instead of an accident.
Creating Cheaper Houses with Cheaper Lumber
You cannot build a million affordable homes without an abundant, affordable supply of the single material every one of them depends on: lumber. Right now, supply constraints and import dependency keep framing costs, and therefore home prices, higher than they need to be. Fix the lumber supply, and you fix a huge piece of the affordability puzzle before a single nail is driven.
That means treating domestic timber the way we'd treat any strategic industry: investing in mill capacity, cutting the permitting delays that slow domestic harvesting and replanting, and building the workforce pipeline to support it from forest to framing site. Done responsibly, this is also a genuine jobs program in its own right — loggers and foresters, sawmill and lumberyard workers, reforestation crews replanting what's harvested, truckers hauling material to job sites, and the construction crews turning that lumber into finished homes. Every link in that chain is a job that doesn't require a four-year degree and can't be shipped overseas, and many of those jobs sit in rural communities that have been hit hardest by decades of losses.
Lower lumber costs flow straight through to lower framing costs, lower framing costs flow through to lower home prices, and lower home prices are what actually put a starter home within reach of a young family instead of just talking about it.
Few industries have been more unfairly maligned than modern, responsibly managed forestry. Trees grow back, and managed harvesting actually keeps forests healthier: it reduces the density that fuels catastrophic wildfires, helps control the spread of disease, and, done right, helps preserve habitat for the species that depend on these forests, including threatened ones. Managed correctly, this is a win for workers, a win for homeowners who need lower lumber prices, and a win for the forests and the animals that live in them.
Planned Communities and Creative Financing
Not every affordability problem is solved by government policy; some of it comes down to smarter ways of paying for a home in the first place. Planned communities, built and financed as a group rather than lot by lot, let buyers share the cost of roads, utilities, and shared amenities across an entire development instead of each family absorbing that overhead alone. That alone can meaningfully lower the effective price of an individual home.
We should also open the door to every legitimate creative financing tool available: community land trusts that separate the cost of the land from the cost of the home, shared-equity arrangements that let a buyer own what they can afford now and buy out the rest over time, cooperative and group mortgages that spread risk and lower borrowing costs, and employer-assisted housing programs that let workers build equity through their job. None of these are exotic ideas; they've worked in communities across the country. They deserve to be part of the standard toolkit, not a niche option only available to buyers who happen to stumble onto them.
Ban on Foreign Home Purchases
American housing should exist to house Americans first. Right now, a house that a young family in Ohio or Arizona is trying to save up for can just as easily be bought in cash by a foreign investor who will never live in it, bidding up the price and taking it permanently off the market for the people who actually need a place to live.
This is not a radical position, and it is not discrimination; it's standard housing policy across a huge share of the world. Canada has banned most non-citizens and non-permanent residents from buying residential property outright since 2023, and has extended that ban through 2027, specifically to stop housing from being treated as a speculative financial asset instead of a place for families to live. Australia restricts foreign purchases of existing homes. Denmark limits foreign buyers to properties that will actually serve as their primary residence. Several U.S. states have already begun restricting land and property purchases by nationals of specific foreign-adversary nations near military installations and farmland, recognizing that unrestricted foreign ownership carries both economic and security costs. Roughly half the countries in the world, many of them not majority-white nations, which should put to rest any claim that this is about ethnicity rather than economics, protect their own citizens' access to housing this way.
We should do the same, nationally and consistently: bar foreign nationals who are not permanent residents from purchasing U.S. residential property, with sensible exceptions for those building genuine lives here. Foreign capital has plenty of other places to go, and it will be just fine. Young Americans have exactly one housing market, and it should work for them first.
Resident-Owned Small Home Parks
Manufactured and mobile home parks are one of the last remaining sources of genuinely affordable homeownership in America, which is exactly why speculators have started buying them up. Once a private equity buyer owns the land under hundreds of homes, residents who can't afford to simply pick up and move their house are at the mercy of whatever lot-rent increase the new owner decides to impose, with essentially no recourse.
The fix is to give residents the option to own the ground under their own community. Resident-owned small home parks, where the homeowners collectively control the land through a cooperative or trust, keep lot fees and HOA costs set by the people who actually live there, not by an out-of-state investor optimizing for returns. We should make conversion to resident ownership easier and cheaper: right-of-first-refusal laws that let residents match an outside offer when a park goes up for sale, low-cost financing to help resident cooperatives buy the land under their own homes, and technical assistance so residents aren't out-negotiated by professional buyers.
This is one of the most direct, lowest-cost ways to lock in affordability for the residents who already live there, permanently. It's exactly the kind of on-the-ground idea this platform wants more of. [
Policies for Stable Communities
We advocate for pragmatic, state-level mandates and community-focused solutions that address both supply and affordability, ensuring dignity for all.
Expand Affordable Supply
State-level mandates to increase housing density and remove restrictive zoning, focusing on honest pricing and rapid construction for working families.
Protect Neighborhoods
Implement anti-speculation rules and honest pricing mechanisms to prevent predatory practices and ensure residential neighborhoods remain stable for long-term residents.
Help Build This Agenda
Your input on local needs and effective solutions is critical. Join us in shaping policies that truly serve working Americans.