CNBC surveyed voters aged 18 to 34 and found their top political issue is housing costs. Not healthcare. Not food. The thing they sleep inside.
This beats food costs. Food. The stuff you need to not die multiple times per day. Apparently these voters have solved the eating problem but remain baffled by rent.
The survey positions this as a political issue. Because nothing says effective governance like asking politicians to fix the price of a scarce resource in cities where everyone wants to live but nobody wants new buildings near them. That always works. Just ask Venezuela how price controls went.
Here's what the survey really found: young people want houses to cost less while simultaneously wanting their neighborhood character preserved and their property values to go up if they already own. They want the laws of supply and demand suspended for their personal benefit. They want physics to stop.
The 18 to 34 demographic has identified housing as their priority. The same demographic that spent the last four years explaining how rent is theft and landlords are parasites now wants the government to intervene in the rental market. They have discovered that calling someone a parasite does not manifest a free apartment.
CNBC calls this the All-America Economic Survey. All-America. Like a high school football team. They found that young voters care about housing costs more than anything else, which is another way of saying young voters have correctly identified that they are poor and would like to be less poor, please.
The technical analysis here is straightforward. Young people are angry about prices. Old people own the houses. Democracy is when these two groups negotiate. The negotiation has been going great for about forty years now.
Every generation discovers they can't afford what their parents bought at 25, then spends a decade blaming avocado toast before realizing the previous generation simply rigged the zoning laws.
Photo by Janelle Hiroshige on Unsplash
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