This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 18th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The President laid out in his State of the Union address a potential subsidy for certain home buyers and home sellers.

But if you think in this seller's housing market the buyers will be absorbing much, if any,

of that subsidy, you are probably mistaken.

Cato's Mark Calabria talks about what would be most effective at boosting the availability

of affordable housing.

Mark, you were in the middle of the pandemic, so to speak, at least as it related to the housing market

and families attempting to have housing, secure housing.

And in terms of the wake of the pandemic and the related sort of too

clever by half laws that were passed in the immediate wake of the pandemic

what were we left with what changed about the housing market between then and now or what was made worse or better?

You know, it's really to interest to reflect upon because, you know, from about February to May of 2020 home sales decreased 30%.

Most of us at the beginning of COVID thought that prices would come down

and that we risked a repeat of 2008.

And of course, you know, some of this I talk about in my book,

Shelter from the Storm, but you know, it all turned out to be very different.

Obviously, because of some policy choices that were made and instead

we got one of the biggest housing booms we've probably had in my lifetime you know sales and prices and refinancing were all off the chart

2020, 2021. So rather than a sort of housing deflation or housing bust, we got a

crazy housing boom.

Some of this was in direct response to both state,

...