The Role of the Baby Boomers

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Now put it another way, if you have a child today, then by the time your child is looking for a place to live , they'd better have like two hundred thousand dollars saved up for a down payment. And for the rest of their lives in all likelihood , they'll be paying off a debt that's completely insurmountable . And this is not a projection from some crackpot looking for attention. It's coming from one of the top housing economists in the nation. Quote, Essentially in about twenty five years, the national median home price will be a million dollars. Laurence Yon, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors said at a conference in Washington DC on Tuesday. It may be hard to envision that, but back in nineteen ninety, the National Median price was ninety thousand dollars. Jung noted that even San Francisco, considered an exorbitantly priced real estate market at the time, had a median price of only two hundred fifty thousand dollars in nineteen ninety. Now, for comparison, as of right now, the national median sales price for existing homes is roughly four hundred thirty thousand dollars, so as high as housing prices are right now, you can expect them to be much higher, more than double in just a couple of decad es. This economist quote used multiple scenarios to project home prices out into the future and says each scenario pointed to roughly the same timeline to hit one million dollars about twenty five years. Now to be clear, although the economists determined that we'd hit one million dollars as part of ordinary appreciation and home prices , inflation is not the only factor here. Inflation alone won't get us to this figure. And there's reason to believe that typical home prices will actually exceed a million dollars by twenty fifty and probably buy a lot. And in a moment, we'll talk about some of those reasons and what we can do about them. But first I want to talk about the story of thirty one year old M aica Longmeyer. This is a true story. I found the details in a small online only paper called The Mizoula Currens . And according to the paper, Micah earns a salary of two hundred thousand dollars a year. That's a high salary by any measure, more than double the median household income in this country . The average lawyer in this country doesn't make two hundred thousand dollars. So you might think Micah's doing pretty well, all things considered. But after looking all over the country for more than two years, Mike and his wife determined that they couldn't afford to buy a home on their own, at least not without taking on a mortgage that they weren't sure they could afford. Yes, even though he's making a salary that puts him in the top ten percent of American inc omes . He was not able to lock down a home despite looking for two years in a variety of markets . In the end, Mike a solution was to pool some money together along with his wife's parents and together they bought a three thousand five hundred square foot six hundred thousand dollars home in Chattanooga, Tennessee for the entire family. Micah now lives with the inlaws. And as he put it, quote, I made two hundred thousand dollars and I wouldn't have been able to buy a house by my self. That's ridiculous. And it is ridiculous. Now you can take issue with the idea that Micah truly couldn't afford a home. Many of you listening to this show probably purchased a home with an income lower than two hundred thousand dollars. You might have even done that recently . And you might think that he could have picked a smaller house in a different area and everything would have been fine . But before I address that objection, I need to make the point that Micah's story is not unusual. Just a couple of days ago, Fitch, one of the big three global credit rating agencies downgraded the U. S. homebuilding sector from neutral to deteriorating because people are not buying homes anymore. Thirty year mortgage rates are over six percent consumer sentiment, meaning how pessimistic people are about their finances is at a record low. Going back to the fifties, even through the two thousand eight financial crisis, the surveys of consumer sentiment were not as dire as they are right now. So while it may be the case that people like Maica could theoretically purchase a home somewhere if they're willing to make more compromises, the fact remains that they are n't doing that. Lots of people aren't doing that . And we need to figure out why . And I'm not cherry picking anecdotes or statistics here. Every possible indicator is sending the same signal. Here's another one. Real estate agents are quitting in droves right now. It's another thing you might not have heard about. This is data from the National Association of Realtors. It shows the number of members in the Realtors Association, the light blue and the number of existing homes for sale, which is the darker line . From twenty twelve to two thousand to twenty twenty two, membership in the association grew every year . And now it's steadily declining. The Association of Realers now has just one point four million members compared to one point six in october twenty twenty two. And as the chart shows, for most of this century, there have been far more homes for sale than real ers. And that's the kind of ratio you want. That's a healthy ratio . That hasn't been the case for several years now. Realers are competing over a very small number of homes. And on top of that, a recent legal settlement means that realers have to disclose their fee upfront, which is leading many home buyers to handle the process themselves, which also isn't helping things for the industry. So to give you an idea of how quickly the housing market has become unaffordable , take a look at this chart from the Wall Street Journal just the other day. They're getting their data from the Internet Continental Exchange Angie and the Labor Department . If you're buying a home now as opposed to twenty nineteen , then on average you're paying twenty two percent more in principle. This is just from twenty nineteen. Again , thirty five percent more in interest , thirty one percent more in property tax, seventy two percent more in insurance , eighty five percent more in home maintenance and one hundred and seventy five percent more in emergency repairs. So your total annual bill is forty percent higher than it would have been just six years ago . It's like It's like catastrophic. If you're the average American, your annual expenditure on housing went from twenty thousand six hundred dollars to twenty eight thousand five hundred dollars. It's almost thirty thousand dollars . And it's worth taking a brief tutor that we also mentioned property taxes. It's worth worth taking a brief tutor to focus in on the property tax figure. Home prices are going up around the country, and so are property taxes . And the fun thing about a property tax, of course, is that you can never pay it off. It's an expense that the government tax on money that you owe them simply because they say so , money you owe them as a penalty for committing the sin of buying property . And there's no endpoint. There's no such thing as a final payment . CBS News reported recently, quote, property taxes across the U. S. are rising faster than inflation with the average homeowner last year paying four thousand four hundred and twenty seven dollars up three point seven percent from twenty twenty four, according to a new analysis from real estate data firm ATOM . By comparison, the Consumer Price Index, a basket of commonly purchased goods and services rose two point seven percent last year. Homeowners in some states have faced considerably larger property tax increases, including an eighteen percent hike in Delaware and a nearly twelve percent jump in Maryland. So it seems like if it seems like there's some sort of conspiracy to deliberately make owning a home as expensive as possible , well you're not crazy for noticing. Now back to the journal report , quote , sales of previously owned homes have held around four million a year since twenty twenty three, the lowest level in decades and down from a pre pandemic norm of between five million and five point five million year according to the National Association of Realtors. That means fewer prospective buyers are accessing home ownership, and many of those who are buying homes are stretching their budgets to do so. Those new homeowners are vulnerable to falling behind on payments. If their incomes drop or they face unexpected jumps in homeownership costs, a buyer with a two thousand five hundred dollars monthly budget and a twenty percent down payment can afford to buy a five hundred seventeen thousand five hundred dollars home at a three percent mortgage rate according to real estate brokerage Redfin. At today's rate around six point five percent, that same buyer can only afford a three hundred eighty four thousand dollars home. Even though rates have climbed, typical home values remain near record highs, according to Zillow, confusing many buyers who have been waiting for prices to fall . And the last part is important. Normally, when interest rates go up , you expect home values to go down. You're paying more for interest over time, so you expect that your upfront cost will be lower. This is normally how things work and you know it makes sense that it would work that way. But in practice, that's not happening anymore. In most markets, there's nothing to offset the high interest rates at all. The homes have higher list prices and higher costs over time. It's a lose, lose. One of the reasons that the conventional wisdom doesn't app ly anymore is that nobody wants to sell their home . And why would they? In many cases, they locked in an extremely low interest rate during the pandemic. And as you've already discussed, they can expect a very large return on their investment in the coming decades . But even after several decades, they won't want to sell because their children will need to live somewhere if they will even pass their house down to their children, which we'll get to in a second , if the median home is going for a million dollars, then many more homes are theoretically going to remain in the family. You've heard me talk about Bowlin branch before and if you've been thinking about upgrading your bedroom, now is a good time with their annual summer event. 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It's a twelve hundred square foot dump, as you can see. The listing calls it a diamond in the rough with immense potential , which is always a good sign , right? When you're spending seven hundred thousand dollars on a home , that's what you want. Immense potential . And we've all come to accept this kind of price disparity because of the principle of supply and demand . So we don't think about it. But here's what you can get for the same price in Detroit, Michigan, which is a far less desirable or expensive housing market than San Francisco. This is the exact same price. So seven hundred thousand dollars in the Midwest gets you basically a castle. It's five thousand three hundred square feet , five bedrooms , a wood paneled library . It's centrally located fifteen minutes to downtown, twenty minutes to the airport , a home that would be at least two million dollars or more in Nashville or New York or Los Angeles , or even in suburban D,etroit. Now seven hundred thousand dollars certainly isn't cheap, but that's not the point. The reality is that real estate markets are hyper local and there are pockets of affordability out there . So you could still buy nice livable hundred fifty thousand dollars homes in many rural areas or small cities like Toledo So what's really going on with housing? This is the first big issue is that everybody wants to live in the same places, which is driving prices in those places up astronomically. San Francisco, New York, and Boston and Nashville are boom towns. Detroit, Fort Wayne, and Gary aren't . Though to be fair, this is starting to change and the Midwest is posting its first net migration gangs in decades driven largely by relatively affordable houses compared to the coast. One factor driving this is jobs. San Francisco is the tech capital of the world . They have a lot more jobs there . But that's still kicking the can down the road. You're not addressing the fundamental issue, which is that something caused cities like Detroit to become so undesirable in the first place. Something caused cities like Detroit to become undesirable investment opportunities for job creators . Yes, the auto industry took a major hit. That's the default explanation for what's happened here . But plenty of industries in San Francisco have died since the nineteen sixties as well. San Francisco used to be a manufacturing powerhouse . There was a major shipbuilding presence in the city . They also refined a lot of chemicals . None of that applies anymore. It's moved across the bay. So in many historical respects, San Francisco and Detroit are more similar than they appear, but over the past half century, one city managed to attract job seekers and investment while the other basically died out. This brings us to the second reason housing is out of control , which is urban crime has made many cities unlivable , which has led millions of people to rule out what should be some of the prime real estate in the country. So this is not as simple, by the way, as some people will say as saying, Oh, well, you just have to move. You know, there are houses that are affordable. You just have to move there. Well, the problem is that in many cases, you don't want to move there because you don't want to get stabbed and you don't want your children to get stabbed while you walk down the street. That's the issue . And if you look at the demographics, the distinction between the two cities is hard to miss. San Francisco is around five percent black. Detroit is closer to eighty percent . And as you'd expect , based on the statistics , this is just the reality, Detroit has three times the violent crime rate of San Francisco . Could that be why no one wants to live there? In school, you're taught that the causation works the other way, that these cities are violent because they've been ab andoned and forsaken by everybody else, but maybe it's the opposite. Maybe these cities have been abandoned and forsaken precisely because they're violent and dysfunctional. And maybe if we address the violence and dysfunction, then virtually overnight, we can have infinite ly more housing stock than we do right now. We can have the houses that are already available, but you could have communities that people want to live in because they're not going to get stabbed while they walk down the street. Now you never hear about cleaning up the streets , maybe going full citizen vigilante on criminals , although ideally it would not be the citizens doing this. It would be the police . But you rarely hear it expressed as a housing policy, but that's exactly what it is. It's the single most straightforward way to address a problem that we all know exists. Now, Detroit is an interesting case study actually on this because since the city's bankruptcy in twenty thirteen , aortium a consortium of billionaires revitalized the downtown, which is now actually a thriving commercial district . And a lot of people don't realize that . They did this in conjunction with the city and state, which started aggressively policing the area and by encouraging downtown businesses to hire private security. And as the downtown and surrounding areas became safer, people started moving back into the city. And if those trends contin ue hundreds of thousands of vacant homes in Detroit could come back online . But despite those successes, no one is supposed to even float the idea of actually fixing the cities of making them places you want to live. Instead, the universal message is that we just have to accept the way they are. Ed Sheeran just went on Theovan's podcast to talk about how London is sketchy dangerous . And instead of suggesting the government fixed the problem, which they could pretty easily , he says the solution is to make sure you're not carrying anything around that criminals might want to steal. Watch . What's the most dangerous place to be around here? Here . I'd say every area of London has literally everywhere area is sketchy. Like I think that you cannot be anywhere . I love that. Yeah, it's not it's not like a segregated city. There's like it's very everybody's scared everybody I mean , the nice areas are sketchy, the bad areas are sketchy, but you just have to not do stupid like if you if you wander around I don't know, like a Louis Vuitton duffle bag and a two hundred grand watch , you are going to get robbed. Like yeah, like but just don't do that. Yeah, don't do it . That's got to be one of the most relatable pieces of advice ever dispensed by a celebrity. When you're walking around London, whatever you do, don't take your two hundred thousand dollars watch, you know, that we all have , and your one hundred fifty thousand dollars Louis Vuitton duffel bag. And just to be safe , leave your two million dollar earrings at home as well . I mean, you got to have some street smarts if you're gonna survive in London . Now, of course, when he's spending time in his twenty seven million dollars man sion in London or driving through the city in an armored SUV or walking around with armed bodyguards, Ed Sheeran probably isn't taking his own advice because he doesn't have to. But for everybody else , for people who can't spend millions of dollars on a home, the message is that you're responsible if you get robbed, assaulted, and murdered. It's not the fault of the criminal because by the way, most people getting robbed in London don't have a two hundred thousand dollars watch. Okay, they have like a fifty dollar watch and they're getting that stolen and possibly stabbed in the process . But you can't blame the criminals . No, they didn't do anything wrong. You're the one who should suffer because you made yourself a target by existing, by having the gall to walk down the streets . You have two options get robbed and shot or I guess stabbed, this is London , or do what everyone else is doing and move far away to a coastal enclave or a pocket of the south of the mountain west. And naturally , if you do what everyone else is doing, then you're going to pay a lot more also. And meanwhile in Chicago, at least thirty six people were shot six fatally in shootings over the weekend . So that's how Chicago rang rang in juneteenth te Father's Day . Here's a news report from one of the first shootings, and we'll play most of it. And tell me if you notice anything here, watch. We begin with breaking news of a mass shooting on Chicago's south side. We just learned twelve people were hurt. A cell Resai is live at UCO Medical Center as officers investigate in Acell. What do we know about the victims? Well, Meghan, we just got an update from Chicago police and they say an additional man has been hurt , refused medical treatment , unknown injuries at this time , but that brings a total of victims to thirteen. We know at least twelve of those victims have gunshot wounds. Take a look at the scene, Meghan. We saw over a hundred evidence markers there this is near Wentworth and ninety fifth Street Police say the shooting happened just after eleven o'clock last night so far they say a red SUV pulled up alongside a large crowd two people inside of that SUV started shooting at the crowd before driving off. We're told multiple victims between the age of seventeen and forty seven old were shot at that scene. We know two of those victims, a woman and a man were first discovered by Chicago police. They had multiple gunshot wounds. The ten other victims Meghan self transported to the hospital. We did hear from street pastor Donovan Price at this scene. He said seeing a shooting like this on a holiday like june teenth is a really a tragedy In my neighborhood where my church is, it's between seven and eleven people possibly shot. It's just it's tragic. At least one of them is in critical condition . It's just it should be celebrating it . Fireworks should not turn into gunshots. Does a disservice to the community and what June Juneteenth is supposed to stand for. Well, actually what happened this weekend is a very good illustration of what Juneteenth represents . Both parties, Democrats and Republicans forced the fake holiday down our throats because George Floyd overdosed. That was the reason they signed the law in the first place. The whole point from the moment they made Juneteenth a holiday was to honor thugs and queer felons like George Floyd and Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin and Jacob Blake and so on. You were supposed to pretend that all these degenerates are really victims of white supremacy and that as a result of all this suppression, black people need their own national anthem and their own independ ence day. They need their own country basically. We were told, well, guess what ? This is what it looks like. And you'll notice that at no point in that two minute news clip did anyone provide a description of the suspects . You get no information whatsoever, and we all know why that is. There's no need for any kind of speculation. They're burying the suspect's description because the suspects of course are all black. All over the country, june celebrations descended into Mayhem and every single time the suspects looked exactly as you would expect. This is from South Carolina's juneteenth festivities watch. Yo Bina Binan off biters out of court. Biters out of court . Biters out of court . Court Oh yeah , oh yeah Well they're just into the juneteenth spirit, I suppose. And here's how the authorities described what happened. It was a very sanitized press conference, but this was the takeaway. Listen seven o'clock during the june event main concert was getting ready to start and several fights broke out. Our officers immediately responded to a number of locations within the park , but the disruption kind of took on a life of its own and out of out of an abundance of caution. We made the decision to evacuate the park . Out of an abundance of caution, we made the decision to evacuate the park transl ation , it wasn't one or two people fighting each other, it was hundreds of black people, mostly teenagers , young black males engaging in an all out riot for no discernible reason , which is something we're all now seeing happening all over the country multiple times a week. It's not isolated. It's not a one off . It's the default state of affairs . At this point, if thousands of black teens aren't fighting in the street, that's an abnormal situation that merits investigation . For good measure, this was the scene in Baltimore over the weekend . Afram, which is apparently one of the biggest African American festivals on the East Coast was marking its fiftieth anniversary as part of the juneteenth celebrations . And here's what that family friendly event looked like. Pull up in a black loat, your plaques are bogus, so I strip them off the wall waiting for my cuta corner pocket eight balls. You racking them up on big paper like pancakes staggering them up. In fact, I'm slapping them up. Cadillac is a truck. I can't lose with twenty two . That was Huh. I wonder why nobody wants to live in these in those places, why the houses remain vacant. Two days later, appropriately enough, it was Father's Day, and we all know that none of the teens in these videos had a father in the household to celebrate with I think we can guess that very few of them were, you know, sitting around the living room on Father's Day morning while their dad opened a gift bag with some socks inside. I think that scene probably did not play out very of Baltimore . And a lot of them are probably already parents themselves, if we're being honest , it's not simply a matter of law and order to bring an end to displays like this, although that's obviously a very important part of it . It's also about restoring sanity to the housing market . You know, nobody wants to live within fifty miles of this kind of chaos. All of the homes are therefore useless. And as a result, the homes that are in safe areas become simply too expensive The moment we haul all these criminals to prison and never let them out , we'll see a drastic reduction in housing prices in the entire country. Of course, that's not to say the problem is limited exclusively to black teens and their absent fathers. The second big issue with hous ing that some of the most desirable areas of the country have been made undesirable because of post civil rights movement realities is compounding the first issue that millions of people want to live in the same small number of places. But there's a third factor in all this, which is commonly over looked , which is that illegal immigration is driving demand for new homes . So if it's true that twenty million illegal immigrants or more lived here during the Biden administration, then they had to live somewhere. And in fact, James Carter, a former Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary, wrote an OPED a couple of days ago where he spelled out the extent to which illegal aliens have caused housing prices to increase very considerably over the just the past few years. Quote, for much of the twenty ten's pay in lower skill occupations lagged behind while professional salaries pulled away. As immigration enforcement has increased, that gap has narrowed. Take construction, which relies heavily on immigrant labor. Wages in the sector grew at roughly two point five percent annually between twenty ten and twenty seventeen. Now BLS data shows construction wages growing at three point one percent through the first quarter of twenty twenty six above the sector's pre enforcement baseline, even as broader private sector wage growth cooled to three point four percent. A recent Federal Reserve working paper finds that unauthorized immigration accounted for roughly thirty percent of house price growth and twenty percent of rent growth in the average metro area twenty twenty one and twenty four . So I'll say that last part again because it bears repeating. Illegal aliens caused thirty percent of the increase in housing prices that we've seen in recent years. So at the same time that illegal aliens were competing for American jobs, they were causing a massive spike in housing costs across the board . Now I had to double check the statistic because even with the knowledge that Joe Biden's administration imported tens of millions of illegal aliens and broke the country , it still seems really shockingly high . And indeed , this is from a recent paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, quote, We find that during the boom period, an increase in unauthorized immigrant worker flow equal to one percent of a local area's initial employment increased local housing prices by two point two percent and increased local rents by one point four percent. The impact on rents is slightly smaller for single family units and slightly larger for multifamily units. They backed the envelope cal,culations suggest that unauthorized immigrant worker flows can explain about thirty percent of the total growth in house prices and twenty percent of total growth in rents over the boom period for the average local market . This is one of the reasons why it's getting harder and harder to live in a country that resembles the one that Gen X or Millennials grew up in the Nevermind baby boomers, the degree to which foreigners have reshaped this country and all of the West is truly staggering to comprehend Take a moment now to look at all three factors leading to the rise in housing costs that we've addressed . First, that we that people only want to live in a few places. Second, urban crime makes many prime locations unlivable . Third, immigration has the dual issue of causing more pressure on our strapped housing market while also reducing the number of desirable areas to live . Now what you have between these three factors is a perfect storm basically, but they're not all . A fourth reason for skyrocketing housing costs is terrible public policy, which obviously dovetails with the other three we've talked about. Government regulations and codes are making it more expensive to build new housing supply, particularly in places like Coastal California. Places that have developed huge amounts of housing in the past decade like Austin, Texas have seen rent stabilizer even decline. Anti growth places like Boston and San Francisco, where it's basically impossible to build anything have seen prices skyrocket . The US population in nineteen ninety was about two hundred fifty million people. Today it's about three hundred fifty million people . It's a forty percent increase. In nineteen ninety, San Francisco had three hundred twenty eight thousand housing units . Today it has only four hundred fifteen thousand , which is a twenty five percent increase The rise of NIMBI's in places like San Francisco and the counties around it are making it impossible to deal with the demand surge from a constantly growing population. At this point, you're probably thinking , what about places where you can places where there isn't urban crime in places without a lot of immigration? Why are places like Northern Michigan or Stove Vermont or Coastal Maine getting so expensive . Well, this is related to the previous points. People want to live in places that resemble nineteen fifties America . You know, go to Vermont or Coastal Maine or Northern Michigan and you can find that. And there's a huge trend to people fleeing diversity, the wonders of diversity to those areas. But there's also a fifth and very important overlooked reason for rising homeownership costs, and that is inflation . The government has doubled the amount of money that was in circulation during COVID, meaning the value of the dollar is declining, which in turn inflates the dollar cost of homes. This is one of the consequences of being forty trillion dollars in debt. Our leaders will seek to inflate away the currency as a roundabout way of reducing the country's financial obligations. Inflation is a hidden tax that's behind so many of the price increases we've detailed at the beginning of the episode. A dollar in decline means home pr ices rising, even if the inherent value isn't rising with it. It makes repair and replacement costs higher, which drives increases in insurance costs. It also makes it more expensive to provide city services, which makes your tax doll ars go up . A lot of the rise in housing prices is really just a decline in the dollar, which is why it's a bigger and bigger issue that young people can't afford homes. One of the best defenses against inflation is long term debt backed up by an asset that rises with inflation. And these five explanations for rising housing costs go a long way in explaining why we're in the situation that we're in, and unless they change . Predictions that the average house will be a million dollars by twenty fifty are likely underestimating the situation, probably by a lot . Now the problem is that solving these problems is not politically practical. And for that, we can thank the most selfish generation in American history, which is the baby boomers. Now, boomers today control over forty percent of the national real estate wealth and about a quarter of them own a second home or a vacation property. One Northwestern mutual survey found that less than a quarter planned to leave an inheritance to future generations. The Charles Schwab survey of high net worth Americ ans found that for nearly half of baby boomers , their priority, their top priority is to quote enjoy my money for myself while I'm still alive. Now it's impossible to overstate just how historically bizarre , not to mention evil , that attitude is . Because for all of human history, the thing that animated older generations was a desire to pass down a legacy to their children and their grandchildren . And that's still the norm, by the way, outside of boomers. The same survey, interestingly enough, found that wealthy millennials were less likely to list enjoying my money for myself as their priority. They had a greater desire to see their own kids inherit their wealth. They wanted to see it. They wanted to be there to see their kids benefit from the wealth and legacy. So the boom ers are in this way kind of an aberration . You know, their general disinterest, of course, this does not apply to all of them, but the general statistical disinterest in passing wealth and legacy to their children is unique . And it's therefore helping to cause unique problems that their children and grandchildren have to deal with. Now it's not useful or helpful to like sit around stewing in resentment against other generations that there's no real benefit in that, you know, because even if it's true that you're getting kind of screwed by previous generations , okay, well once that's been established, you got to go live your life. But the fact is economically , the boomers did have it considerably easier than their children have and when they started entering the housing market in the late nineteen sixties, the dollar was still pegged to the gold standard. The immigration laws that transformed the country had only just passed and so had not yet transformed the country . The cities were mostly still livable, but in steep swift decline because of laws supported by boom . And it was easy to build new housing in suburbs which were hardly regulated. Boomer Nimes hadn't made it impossible to build in coastal California yet. Owning a home was the American dream and it was an attainable one . Now that they've secured their dominant position in the American real estate market, boomers generally have done everything possible to make sure housing stays unaffordable . Doing anything that might reduce the value of their housing is politically untenable . Something Donald Trump has said out loud, watch . Existing housing, people that own their homes , we're going to keep them wealthy. We're going to keep those prices up . So if you're a young person who wants a home , just know that there's a reason it's so bad out there. It's because the number of desirable places is rapidly declining . Lots of primary real estate is taken up by the worst and most violent people in the country. The government is deliberately destroying the value of the dollar while also importing millions of people and making it impossible to build anything new . So that's what's going on . And now as a result , the choice is binary and unavoidable . We can either do om future generations to a market that consists entirely of the one million dollar homes they can't afford , or we can make the decision as unthinkable as it may be to somebody like Ed Sheeran to become a lot less tolerant . That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening to you tomorrow. Have a great day. God speed Last month we judged Martin Luther King Jr. not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character . American school kids spend a lot of time hearing about MLK and Rosa Parks. Have you noticed no one ever asks what Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery are like today ? The legacy of the civil rights movement wasn't a racially harmonious utopia . It's hollowed out urban cores, hundreds of thousands of dead Americans, raped grandmothers, ethnic cleansing entire neighborhoods. This month we survey firsthand accounts of the historic wave of nonviolent crime, riots unleashed on this country by the civil rights movement which caused more enduring damage on America's greatest cities than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who were the winners? And who were the losers? What's the truth about redline white, flight affirmative action ? Don't want to miss the second part of our special on the civil rights movement, The Looting of America and Deli Wire Plus.