Solving the housing crisis (08-26-2025--Hour2)

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepeteclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet, And again, thank you so much for your support. I will tell you what a programming director years ago told me. His name is Bill White, and Bill told me, sometimes, Pete, just take the layup. We were talking about show content, and sometimes you got a really easy shot and just take the layup. You don't have to make it more complicated. You don't have to do anything else, just put the points on the board. So all of that is to say, I'm gonna keep talking a little bit more about the top that everybody wants to talk about. This is the layup, because you guys are creating the content for me, and then the content that I worked on. I could just push that till tomorrow because I got a lot of stuff going on after work today and anyway, so it all started. We were talking last hour with Andrew Dunn, and he had written a piece at the Charlotte Observer about a graph that tracks the share of thirty year olds in the United States who are both married and homeowners. A majority of young people fell into that category. Fifty years ago, a majority of thirty year olds were both married and had a home, and now it's like ten percent. It's fallen off a cliff. Home prices, he says, have grown at a breakneck pace all over the country, but especially in the cities where young adults tend to start their careers. New home construction just has not kept pace. At the same time, marriage has come to be viewed as a luxury good reserved for people who have their lives figured out. And see this to me is this is the most detrimental thing that the Left has done to our society, the devaluation of the nuclear family. And I can go into the roots of why that is right. Marxism relies on the destruction of the institutions of the Western hegemony, and of course that's at. The core of it is the family. And so they are very explicit you must destroy the family, break those bonds, and through the government programs over the last sixty years or eighty years whatever, it's been lbj's Great Society spoiler alert, not really so great. It has broken the family unit, and this is now. It was most predominant and most acute in black families for decades, but it is now rippled all the way out. It's in all demographics. Okay, So this has been a really bad idea to have the government act as the father in the household structure because the government does not care. Okay, the government does not care about the family. The man and the woman who start the family, they care about the family. It's their family, it's their kids. He says. Our grandparents often married to build stability. Today's twenty somethings feel they have to achieve stability before they can afford to marry or expect a mate to be financially secure before being marriage worthy. So this is this is difficult as well. And I actually have a lot of sympathy for young women who I feel like, and maybe I'm wrong, but it definitely seems like there is a lot more pressure on them than on on dudes. They have to, you know, from high school, they've got to get into a good college they then have to you know, get a career, they got to make the money, they've got to get their place they have, and then they have to do all of this in a certain amount of time before they're too old to have children. So there's this constant pressure to to do all of these things as quickly as possible. And they are also as Mary uh said in at the end of the last hour on a call in, she said, there's an expectation that's unrealistic among a lot of young people. And that is true as well. I talked about this several months ago. We did a comparison of the average floor plans of homes versus you know today versus when I was a kid, and you know, homes now are built bigger, they have more, they have more stuff in them. They've got like higher end things. Not in all cases. I know some people say, you know, all the stuff they put in my house was terrible and whatever. But the homes are built to higher regulatory codes, which of course drives up the price as well. The first home I bought, and this goes to the expectations, right. First off, I had roommates my entire college career. I mean, I moved off campus after the first year, went back to New York. Worked two jobs all summer long to afford a car that I bought from my neighbor. Drove that thing down to rock Hill, and then I was able to work. And because I could get around town, I could drive to work. And so then I started working after the first the first year in college, and I always had roommates. When I moved off campus, I had three roommates, four roommates, whatever. I always had roommates. And the first time I got my own place was in like this old house that had been converted into four one bedroom apartments. That was the first time. And then I moved up to Charlotte. I got the job here at WBT. I lived alone in an apartment, and then I saved up money and I bought a house. What did I buy? I bought a nine. Hundred square foot home, had no insulation, built in nineteen fifty something. It was over in East Charlotte, not a particularly good neighborhood. But the idea was, I'm buying a house that's in bad shape, and I'm going to fix it up. And I got a. Home loan for it, and I funded the repairs and the idea was to either turn it into a rental property or to turn around and sell it. That was the plan, and that's what I did. I bought the house for like eighty thousand dollars, but again nine hundred square feet. Washer and dryer was in a utility closet off the back porch, so not inside. You have to go outside to go to use the washer and dryer. All of the electrical was from nineteen fifty five, and so I had to upgrade all of that stuff. It was in very bad shape, the whole property was. And so that's what I did. Every night. I would go home from I'd come home from work, and I would work on the house every single night. That's what I did for a couple years. Then Christy and I get married. We sell that house and we use that towards the down payment on the house that we bought together. And at that point that we bought that at the bottom of the when the market tanked in like eighth nine, and so we got a very good deal on that house. Funny enough, when we come back into town, when I. Get this was four years ago, we come back to Charlotte and that house listed the weekend we were driving around trying to find a place that house listed, and they were asking for one hundred thousand dollars more than what they paid us for it, and they had done no work. In fact, the shed was gone. Apparently a tree fell down and took out the shed and so they never built another shed. And all the stuff that they touted in that home is like, hey, look at the stuff we got. It was stuff I did. It was the new backsplash, it was the new countertop, the new sinc. We put a new HVAC system in. All of the stuff that we did is stuff that they were touting in the listing. And I was like, I am not paying you one hundred k more for the house I sold you. But it is very difficult now to do that to find a place. But that's the thing. The expectation was, I'm going to find a place in a neighborhood that at some point in the future I'm banking on will be revitalized. And that's why I chose the home that I chose in that area because it was close enough to No Daw where that was coming, and then close enough to Central Avenue where that revitalization was coming. And my thought was at some point those areas are going to connect in. And I was right. That house that I sold for like one hundred and ten thousand, I want to say, or one hundred and fifteen thousand, is now listed at like three hundred plus thousand dollars. And they took out one of the bedrooms. It was only three bedrooms, one bath, and they got rid of one of the bedrooms. So now it's two one bath and it's like three hundred something thousand dollars. But it's the location. It's the proximity to Charlotte, to Center City, and that's why the property value is what it is. And every house around it torn down, blown up. They're all these large MC mansions everywhere. I don't want to say mac mansion. That's not really fair. I don't like that term either, but it's like, you know what I'm talking about. The houses are all now puffed up. They're like four thousand square feet and stuff, and that's the expectation. I think that a lot of kids that I say kids, but I guess millennials and gen A's, gen Z's, gen Y's whatever. Like I think a lot of younger people grew up in those nicer types of homes, and they grew up in bigger floor plans, so they have this expectation that that's what they should be able to afford too. But it's like, yeah, no, no. I bought my home when I was thirty and it was an eighty thousand dollars fixer rubber, but that was my expectation. I'm a simple man. What can I say? All Right, if you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events, and I know you do too, and you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app and it's a website, and it combines news from around the world in one place, so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check Dot Ground, dot News slash Pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent breaking news. Everybody. Taylor Swift is engaged to Travis Kelce. You'll remember where you were when you heard that. Like their kids are going to be like super babies or really messed up. I am not sure which, but everybody's talking about it. Oh my god. Yeah, I don't care. Domy, congratulations to them whatever. Let me get to some of your messages. I have a lot of them. Thomas says, we never trusted the government. You're right, they don't care about you or your kids. Our children both went to college. We planned and financed most of it through investments while they were growing up because of their ages. They were both in school overlapping for two years, had small student loans, but they were manageable and they paid them off as they got their first jobs. If they chose not to go to college, the savings could have gone to the cost of a trade school or their first home. We and they always have looked at their degrees as an investment in their futures. Regardless of the type of career they choose, they would have a degree that allowed them to move up in their jobs as opportunities presented themselves. Well see, and that's the other. Thing too, right there, is that that dynamic is now changing. There are now job listings being put out by major companies and they do not want college degree people because the brand of a college credential because that's what it has become, is just a credentialing service, particularly at the you know, the the best schools. They're they're devalued because the people coming out of them are just going to be toxic in your workplace because they've raised little radical activists, not people that can actually contribute to your bottom line. So like that dynamic is changing too. Anyway, back to Thomas's message, he says, we sent them to college to get educated beyond what they learned in high school. Now it has paid off as they move up in their careers, are married and own their own homes. Parents that want their kids to go to college need to plan and to be realistic. They need to be honest and admit that a college degree, unless it is tied to receiving a meaningful education, though, is worthless. Planning, being realistic, and living within your means is still a solid lifetime strategy that is correct. Thomas. I'm back on the text line and it moves around a bit as I yeah, when people text, it bounces the feed sometimes here I think where I was here from anonymous, the price of college is going crazy. I went to North Carolina Public College and I got an engineering degree in nineteen seventy eight. My son graduated from the same college with the same degree thirty five years later. The tuition was over ten times what it was when I attended, but the average starting salary was only about four to five times that very highly compensated degree out of college. Between the bloating of colleges and loan programs, it's put it out of reach. I could afford to pay for my education and work my way through college without debt. There's no way that my son could have. Right. If you're telling me that a college degree on an annual basis undergrad is going to cost me what thirty k a year, Like how am I? How am I making enough money to pay for that and to pay for a place to live if I'm not living on campus, and which, by the way, a lot of these costs of colleges have gone to the campus housing stuff, which is ridiculus. Like we had a prison cell. Okay, that's where that. That was my freshman year and yeah, and half of my sophomore year. For a year and a half, I lived in the dorms and it was a prison cell. Like we had bunk beds, we had a desk and bulletin board I think, and like everything was like permanently mounted everywhere so you couldn't take stuff. I mean you could move the beds around, but that was it we had. We had nothing. We got like we got a dorm fridge like halfway through the first year. And it was like, this is big time. We got a fridge in our dorm. This is from John. I'm thirty nine. My wife is a state at home mom because of the high prices of daycare. If she would work, she would be working to pay for daycare. Right. I think I read that one already from stand both my This is from Mark. Both my kids have great jobs. They the key is to start out small then go bigger. But inflation is making it extremely hard for my kids today. Inflation must go down. Yeah, that's part of it. And this is, you know, regarding the housing costs. You don't build, we don't allow to be built, to be built, the kind of starter home tract housing that I grew up in on Long Island. You know, Levittown. You've ever heard of Levittown? Or have you ever seen the album cover for Billie Joel's Nylon Curtain? That was my neighborhood. Every house looked identical, right, little cape CODs, grid pattern on the street whatever. And then over time, yeah, you make improvements to the house, but we don't allow for that kind of low cost construction to occur anymore. And then you ban all of the you know, the modular homes and trailer parks and all of that stuff too, And now it's like, okay, well, well where can you build? You got to go farther out. You just got to keep going farther out, which then adds to the traffic problems. Daisy says, amen to Mary's comments, and Johnson as Mary made excellent points. I live frugally and it's tough. I couldn't dream of a new car realistically. Well there is another one. I have never owned a new car, and neither has Christy. We have never owned new cars. There's a book called Life's Little Instruction Manual, and one of the pieces of advice was own the nicest house you can afford and the cheapest car you can afford. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina. 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Cabins of Ashville has the ideal spot for you for any occasion, and they have pet friendly accommodations. Call her text eight two eight three six seven seventy sixty eight or check out all there is to offer at Cabinsofashville dot com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Text line This is from Bob Pete. I sit here, sixty five years old, listening to you, having retired three years ago and never made one hundred k a year. My wife stayed home with the kids. We drive a twenty twelve Honda with one hundred and seventy five thousand miles on it, a nineteen ninety seven GMC truck one hundred fifty thousand miles on that, no house payment, debt free for at least ten years. A company I worked for paid for my advanced degree provided I got the grades. Kids want too much too soon. My first job was delivering newspapers at twelve years old. Someone earlier said, the kids are lazy, and I agree, working hard is fading fast. So here's and I largely agree with that. But those are results of actions taken by the parents. If you didn't make your kid go out and get some form of employment, do some kind of work, and you just said, oh no, just be a kid, and you just kind of gave him all the money and never made them work, like, you can't really blame then then, for not having the kind of work ethic instilled in them that they otherwise would have. Now, part of the other side of that is I have a nephew and he wanted to work, and he was fifteen, and he went all over the place trying to find anybody to hire him, and they would not hire him. Now, this was up in New York, and they got child labor laws or something up there. But no, I'm kidding, but they yet nobody, nobody wanted to hire him because he was too young up in New York. He eventually found stuff to do, little odds and end you know, odd jobs and stuff like that. But like you have to, you know, it's like the participation trophy generation, Like that was the parents doing that. Boomers, I'm looking in your direction. That was you guys that did that to those kids. So like you blame the kids for growing up in that with that mindset that everybody gets a trophy. But the kids didn't do that. The parents did that. Let me see here that text line bounced again from anonymous. Staying home with the children is a different type of investment. Any mom who wants to stay home should read the tight Wad Gazette. That's a good name, the Tightwad Gazette. By amy decision, she wanted to have a lot of children and stay home, and so she cut cut cut expenses. Amazing. Yeah, I mean that is part of the thing. It's part of this is also our sort of cultural bias against delayed gratification. And it's very easy to see something and say, oh, I want to buy that and just go out and spend the money and then rack up a bunch of debt and all of that. But the you know, delaying those purchases and thinking through, like what exactly is my budget for this? Do I have the money for this? And following a budget, even making a budget. So many people don't even make budgets, and like, how do you know? It's like Marcus Lamonis says, how do you know your business if you don't know your numbers. Well, when you're running a household, you got to know your numbers. Right. When I bought that first house, they wanted to give me or they wanted to do. Yeah, they said to me, you have enough. And this was back during the Wild West, days of adjustable rate mortgages and stuff and you know, all these exotic products. They tried to give me a loan for I don't even remember. It was some ridiculous amount of money, and I was like, I like, I can't afford that kind of a loan for a house. Like I want a house that's a fixer rupper so I can make some money when I sell it in you know, five to seven years, which would be when the arm came when it would readjust So I said, I don't want a three hundred thousand dollars loan. What would be the monthly payment on that? And they tell me the monthly payment. I'm like, well, yes, I guess I could afford that if I don't eat or furnish the place. Or turn on any utilities. Yes, I guess I could probably just take my entire paycheck and turn it over to the bank. That does not seem like a sustainable way. See, and a lot of people though they just did that. They just took those loans and then when the rates adjusted, it all came crashing down. We bought our first house in nineteen eighty eight. It was eleven hundred square feet. Sounds a lot like yours. Young people today have the expectation to go straight into a three thousand square foot, five hundred thousand dollars home. So in eighty eight, Jennifer says, they paid fifty eight thousand dollars. Yeah, and look, there are websites that you can find Christy. Christy has an app it's called something like cheap Homes or something like that, from all over the country. And she'll show me some and it's like, here's like a five bedroom, I mean it's in Detroit, but five bedroom, you know, three bad and it's thirty two thousand dollars. Like you can find them, but there's a trade off. It's gonna require a lot of work. You're gonna have to do that work, and you're gonna have to do that work over a long period of time because you can't do it all at once, because you can't afford to do it all of it at once. But you can get the property and then you can live there while you fix it up. That's what I did. People asked, did I flip the house. I did not flip it. It was more of a rolling over kind of a process, more like a rolling over while you have like a backpull or something, so you. Can't really just kind of roll over. You kind of just have to inch over real slow. That's what I did. I lived in one room in the house while I fixed up another, and then when I fixed that room up, I moved into that room. I slept in that room and I fixed up the other one. I just did that throughout the house. Yeah. Yeah, you have to make some sacrifices. You have to lower your expectations, or better yet, just have realistic expectations. And the more adversity you are willing to put up with, the better off you're going to be with the delayed gratification when you get to reap those rewards like this is a this is all throughout life. Housing prices are way up while wages are stagnant. Gee, I wonder if that has anything to do with one hundred million non citizens here who compete for housing driving up the prices and jobs driving down wages. Dealing with the invasion solves most of the middle class economic problems. I agree, I absolutely agree. They are competing on the wage level because they are illegal. They then undercut legal residents and Americans ability to command the minimum salaries. And then you've got or the salaries that they should be paying otherwise, and you have the pressure on the housing inventory. 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Talk about a return on investment, right, You got to check out Incentive trip Kit for your business. Visit incentive tripkit dot com because great trips deserve even better returns. Well, we're really just solving the world's problems, that's all. It's what we do on this program. We solve the world's problems between noon and three. From the text line, Stan says, in essence, most people expect to live after they leave home the way they lived when in their parents' home, without understanding what their parents went through to create that home and the lifestyle it afforded them. That's a very good point. Right. A fish doesn't know it's wet. Kids grow up in a certain environment and they think this is normal, and then they go off on their own and they realize, well why, or they ask themselves, why am I not getting the same lifestyle? Oh, because mom and dad have been working for twenty years in order to provide this lifestyle to me that I just took for granted because I didn't realize. How when you go. Off on your own and you got to start all over or again like that's you got to go through some stuff, you know, and by the way, that builds character, resistance to pressure builds strength. You learn stuff, You. Learn how to repair stuff, you learn to fix stuff, learn about a house or you know, you learn to live on your own. All of those things are important. What do the kids call them? Adulting skills? This is from an anonymous Texter. You start building a fire with twigs. Yes. Indeed, the cost of housing in and around Charlotte. For the past decade, Mayor vy Lyles has been preaching more affordable housing. Can you please explain? Is it more affordable housing or is it more affordable housing? I'm not sure what part. Of the housing economy is she going to detach from the price. Apart from the small percentage of designation of designated below market rate sites, the price of homes has continued to go up. Sounds like a supply side issue too. Okay, so there is a perfectly rational logical explanation for why it seems like a supply side issue. It's because it is. Yeah, it's because it is. It takes a lot of time and money to build homes in Charlotte thanks to zoning laws and permitting and all of that. Colleges are money pits for liberal studies and frat parties, not worth the return on investment. This is from Mark who says, thank you for reading my messages, but you did not read the full message. Thanks again, The beginning was about the nineties. You didn't read that, okay, Mark, you wouldn't know this. I'm trying to read off of a text line that is like the Matrix. Have you ever seen the Matrix the movie? The constant stream of all of the numbers and letters and all that stuff just teaming down the screen. That's what I'm trying to read from. And as soon as somebody texts in, it bounces the screen up. So I'm trying to read the text messages. So if you send me multiple messages, they're going to be they're going to be separated by everybody else that's texting in. So it's hard for me to connect your text messages when there were like six or seven in between them. So I would advise you just write one big text message, and this way I'm more likely to see it as one message. So I apologize if I missed your message. Let me go over and talk to Ray. Hello, Ray, welcome to the show. Hello Pete. How are you today? I am well, sir, how are you? I'm good. I just wanted to throw my two cents forth in. When I was ten years old in Virginia, my dad and mom bought a tri level, half brick, half vinyl siding house in a cul de sac nice neighborhood. I think it was nineteen five. And just another couple things. I think if you buy anything, it doesn't matter what it is as far as a home, just buy anything, and it gives you that psychological sense of owning something and it kind of puts you on the right path in life. And I used to be in sales and our sales it was door to door sales, and our manager always was having quotes he would say to motivate us to get out there and sell things. But a couple quotes he said was there are three kind of people in the world. Those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened. And also the other quote, which is a really good one to help people along in life to understand things, is I think is this one. It said the people that live like most of the people want to live are the people that are willing to do the things most people don't want to do. Yeah. Well, now that's just my comment. I want to throw that out there for people. Words of wisdom. I appreciated Ray. Thanks, all right, take care. No, it's exactly right. Yeah. People look at they look at the stuff or the way somebody is living, or the stuff that they own, and they think, you know, I want to live like that. I should be able to have that too. But we'll never ask that person how did you actually get that? And the amazing thing is that when you actually talk to like really successful people, they will impart all of the knowledge to you. They are happy that they love talking about it. And I've said this before, but I have found it to be true, which is whenever I've talked to people who have started their own businesses became very successful. I've known several people like this in my life, and whenever I would ask them, you know, how'd you start the business, what was that like, or what your as your business do and all that. When I'm asking them questions about their business, they always talk about the hardest years. They always go back to the beginning, scraping by sleeping in the warehouse, you know, not being able to afford the utilities and stuff. Like, all of those hard times, the hardest times, that's what they are most proud of of getting through. That's what their success is based on, Like they were able to overcome all of this adversity. And it's going to be hard, and a lot of people just don't want to do that. And that's fine. It takes all kinds of people right to make the world go round. But yeah, it's just it's uh, a lot of people don't want to actually do the work and make the sacrifices. And that is in all aspects. Of life. Let's see here. I would the issue you're speaking to today goes back to the breakdown of the traditional family. U. I think so too. My grown son always had a part time job when he was in This is from Cohen in Belmont. My grown son always had a part time job when he was in high school in college. Now, my fourteen year old grandson mos lawns all over the neighborhood, and my nineteen year old granddaughter works at the y and goes to college. There's nothing wrong with working. Yeah, this is the other thing. When you raise the minimum wages and you allow in illegal labor, you then prevent younger people with no skills and no experience from gaining access to the labor market. You prevent those high schoolers from getting jobs because there's too many applicants in the competition pool. So that's been one of the trade offs. It's not a good one, not in my mind. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.