Private credit has grown from roughly $250 billion after the global financial crisis to an estimated $2.6 trillion, according to research from the CFA Institute Private Credit: Market Structure, Fund Design, and Retail Access2. This growth has increasingly come through funds sold to individual investors.

The main investment channel is the business development company (BDC), a US fund that must report every loan it holds, and its value, in quarterly US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings. 

Listed BDCs trade on an exchange; non-traded BDCs are bought and redeemed at net asset value (NAV) set from the manager’s own loan values.

Retail access is not the problem, missing prices are. For the fastest-growing part of the market, the loan-level filings are the only public view of how a portfolio is built.

Among the 72 BDCs which consistently submit filings on the SEC’s Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) system, non-traded net assets grew from $32 billion in early 2023 to $116 billion by the end of2025, and listed ones from $42 billion to $55 billion (Figure 1).

This means there is limited data on the majority of the funds holding the loans.

Market prices provide transparency. When investors doubt a listed BDC’s loan values or sector bets, its shares fall below NAV for all to see. A non-traded BDC’s NAV follows a valuation policy under board oversight but is never tested by trading. 

Dave:
We hear constantly that the United States is millions of homes short and the answer to high housing costs is simple, build more units. This is a belief I’ve had and talked about on this show many, many times. But research from Kirk McClure and Alex Schwartz reaches a totally different conclusion. After comparing household growth and housing production across US markets from 2000 to 2020, they found that most places had enough total housing, calling into question a major assumption investors are using to underwrite deals and plan their portfolios. Our guest today, Kirk McClure, is a professor emeritus at the University of Kansas and one of the study’s co-authors. Today, he’s joining us to go through the research behind the headline, how the study defined a shortage, what the data actually showed, why nearly 14 million vacant homes do not automatically solve the problem, and why Kirk believes affordability is driven more by lower incomes meeting higher prices than by too few units.
I’m Dave Meyer. This is On the Market. Let’s get to it. Kirk, welcome to On the Market. Thanks so much for being here.

Kirk:
It’s a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

Dave:
Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to this interview for a while now. I know you were traveling all summer, but there is this narrative that’s very pervasive in the real estate world that we have a housing shortage in the United States, but your work calls that into question. So what got you interested in this topic in the first place?

Kirk:
Well, I have to tell you, I assumed that the narrative was correct. When my colleague, Alex Schwartz and I started, we were talking about the shortage and asked what seemed to be the fairly straightforward question, well, is the shortage similar across all markets of the United States? And our initial working hypothesis is that we would find a greater shortage in the so-called hot markets, the East Coast, Boston,
New York, Washington, Miami, on the West Coast, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego. And so we went about trying to quantify that and answer some questions about what it meant in terms of translation into affordability. Simply put, we couldn’t find it. So then we became very skeptical of our own work and passed it around to a few people. But let me tell you the very basics that we found. If you go to decennial census data, what we found for the period of 2000 to 2020, population grew by about 18%, 17.8 to be exact. The households grew by a greater number, 20.3%. And the quick sideline there is the only way households can grow faster than population is that there is some ample inventory of housing. Now it’s possible, unlikely, but it’s possible that the increase was drawing down the inventory of vacant units when units were not being added quickly enough.
That’s possible. But in fact, that wasn’t the case. We found from, again, 2000 to 2020, housing units grew by 21.2%. So
Housing stock grew faster than household formation, which grew faster than population. That makes it a little hard to square with the notion of a shortage. Doesn’t mean that a shortage isn’t possible. So that’s when we started to search out, did we have some sort of aggregation bias? We have a little over 900 metropolitan markets in the United States, just shy of 400 major metropolitan areas, 500 or so micropolitan, that’s the new word the Census Bureau has given us. About 140 of those metropolitan area, only one major New Orleans, and then a lot of micropolitan areas are declining in population. So we thought it possible that somehow the static stock and declining households in those lagging metropolitan areas were creating false numbers. So what we did was we took every county in the United States, we identified the counties in metropolitan areas and tracked them from 2000 to 2020.
And what we found was out of the 900, subtract out the 140 or so declining ones, take the remaining 760 some odd metropolitan areas, only 19 actually had what we would define in normal sense as a shortage, meaning the housing production had not kept pace with the rate of household
Formation.

Dave:
Interesting. So

Kirk:
That’s what surprised us. We had a little trouble going through with that and bluntly, we had a lot of pushback too, and we appreciated that. That’s helpful.

Dave:
Yeah. Okay. Well, just so everyone understands, just kind of want to explain, population is obvious as grows as a person either is born in the United States or immigrates to the United States minus the people who pass away or leave. And that one’s pretty straightforward. But household formation, I guess, or household is basically one unit of demand for somewhere to live, right? And so you can have these things move differently. So for example, if you have a family with two children and those two children each go out and rent their own single bedroom apartment, that would go from being one household to three different households. And so when you’re trying to measure demand for housing, household formation and households is a better metric than population growth. We look at this when we’re trying to figure out which markets are hot or cold or stuff like that.
What you’re showing is that the total number of units was growing faster than household formation. And so just basically on the highest possible level, you’re saying from 2000 to 2020, there were more units created than units of demand created. And so the logic would follow, how do you have a shortage in that environment? My question then is, were you starting from a shortage? Starting in 2020, was there some net deficit that preceded your research that could explain it?

Kirk:
Good question. And it’s one we worked with. One of the questions we had to surmount in this is what statisticians do is start figuring out where could the model be wrong, but our starting point was 2000. The question then was, is that a good year? We have, I think, a good strong argument for why 2000 was a good year. We had just come off a decade of pretty balanced growth through the ’90s, which I think could all agree was economically a very good time, good employment, good wage growth. Essentially, we saw the population growth, household formation and housing unit growth all track fairly close together. That’s the way a balanced market should be. There is something bad about building too few units, but equally there’s something bad about building too many units. So we are looking for that balanced growth. We found that generally for the nation making 2000 a good period.
Now I hasten to point out that there have been follow-up studies to our own. For example, that makes the argument for the New York City metropolitan area, 2000 wasn’t a real good starting point that we should look at 1990. Had we done that, we would’ve come to a slightly different conclusion on the New York metropolitan area. And I agree that there are going to be all types of these little problems, but we don’t believe we had a bad starting point. Let me give you another sort of the problems we had to reckon with. One of the most important studies that made the initial conclusion that the nation suffers from a housing shortage was from Freddie Mac. They’re a good bunch of economists over there. They do great work, but they made a decision that their starting point would be 2010. 2010, if you think about it, we just had a big bubble.
The bubble collapsed. We were going into the great recession. So their logic was that while we’re looking at the recovery period from the great recession,
Not an entirely bad assumption, but it led them to what we believe was an incorrect conclusion because for every hundred households that we form in the United States, we probably ought to build 103, 105 units. That’s to maintain a healthy inventory of vacant units. During the decade of 2000 to 2010, we built in excess of 140 units for every 100 households. So what we had was 2010 then becomes a bad starting point because there was a large overhang of units. If you only look at 2010 to 2020, then it is true that the stock grew less fast than did household formation. But when you have this huge multimillion overhang of extra units, then in fact that smooths out over the 20 year time period. So there is some disagreement on that.

Dave:
Yeah. Well, that makes sense to me because so much of the narrative around the shortage is that during the great financial crisis, builders stopped building and haven’t kept up with population growth or household formation. But if I’m getting what you’re saying is that we had sort of a glut prior to the GFC. And so even if we had a slowdown in building from whatever it was, 2010 to 2017, 2018 or whatever it got back to that normal pace, that that was just compensating for the oversupply that came. And so from your perspective, starting in 2000 makes sense because it captures the glut and then it captures the slowdown and then you get this longer period of time. All right, we got to take a quick break everyone, but we’ll be back with Kirk McClure right after this. Welcome back to On the Market. Today I’m speaking with Professor Emeritus from the University of Kansas, Kirk McClure, about his research into the housing shortage or lack thereof.
Let’s jump back in. So you mentioned Freddie Mac, that’s one source that has said that there’s a shortage, but I’ve seen other studies from NAR. I’ve seen it from, I think some of the big banks have put out some studies too. Are they all following a similar logic? They’re starting at 2010 or where else does your research differ from what they’re doing?

Kirk:
All right. Let me speak to a second approach that came out of the Moody’s team and I think theirs is especially good, but again, you have to parse out the assumptions and say, how would we guide federal housing policy in this situation? What Moody’s did is it says we find a historical rate of household formation for different cohorts. I think we all know that when people are in their 20s to early 30s, that’s the time they’re going to graduate from college, move out of mom and dad’s house, get that first job, get their first apartment, start saving, eventually become a homeowner. So we have these rates of household formation that have been true for various cohorts. By the time somebody like me retired, the likelihood that you already own is very, very high. So we’re not going to find a great deal of fluctuation that my cohort is not hurt by a slowdown in construction, but the Gen Z cohort is.
And I think that’s the nuance they brought to it. They said, “If we had household formation rates as high as we would have expected from the good decades preceding 2000, then what should be the household formation rate and what units do we need in order to satisfy that?” And I think that’s a very good approach to it.

Dave:
Are they essentially saying that household formation is lower because affordability is lower and so you have to sort of think about what would it be? If we had the level of affordability we had in the 90s, more Gen Z people would be forming households, but household formation is repressed because of low affordability.

Kirk:
Exactly.

Dave:
Okay.

Kirk:
But now here’s the difficulty of it. I’ve spent an awful lot of my career writing papers basically for HUD, for members of Congress trying to say, “Here’s how we can do our housing investments better.” The difficulty with the Moody’s study, they attribute any diminution in a household formation rate for any cohort, but especially we focus on the younger ones. They attribute that to a shortage of units. What I read for the Gen Z especially, it’s this whole problem of school was costly, so they’re coming out with debt. Units are higher now. They have a hard time finding the necessary money to make the first and last month payment just to sign a lease on a rental unit.

Dave:
So

Kirk:
They’re still living in mom’s basement. On and on with then given those demands, it’s hard to save. An awful lot of other factors are in there. If more units were there, would Gen Z have a higher household formation rate? Probably marginally.

Dave:
I

Kirk:
See. But what really needs to happen is they need jobs. You know when trying to get a mortgage, you don’t just need a job. Gig work won’t get you a mortgage. You’ve got to show steady employment. You’ve got to have the savings necessary for the down payment on and on and on. And with the 2836 rules with the banks, if you’re already suffering from high student debt and car payment on even a modest automobile, that doesn’t leave you a whole lot of room for additional mortgage debt. And then you start comparing that mortgage debt to the price of homes out there and life is tough at that end.
So I do agree with their work, but I find it hard to ascribe the low household formation rate to a shortage of housing units. I think the housing market is a pretty smart operation. A builder knows how long his units have sat on the market. The bank knows if the builder is coming in saying, “Gee, I’m having a little trouble paying off that construction loan because that unit just won’t sell.” We do have problems with, I realize historically mortgage rates don’t seem high to me, but I’m well into my 70s, so I’m accustomed to 7% mortgage

Dave:
Rates. Yeah, you’ve seen some stuff we haven’t seen in a long time.

Kirk:
But when your older brother got a 3% mortgage a few years ago, you’re still thinking that’s what you ought and that’s not going to happen.

Dave:
No, I’m with you on that for sure. So you think, yeah, it’s a confluence of factors that are slowing down household formation. It’s not this one-to-one thing where, hey, there’s less units, people are not moving in. There are other things. I buy that. I mean, I am not Gen Z, but I can see, I look at a lot of data about debt and you look at credit card debt and as you mentioned, student loan debt or just stagnating salaries for younger people, higher rates of unemployment for younger people. There’s a lot of things that are probably contributing to this. So how do you explain the current housing market then? Because, and I know there’s a lot to this with… I can give you my own theories, but in your world, if there’s not a shortage, why do we have such low affordability in the housing market and why are prices so high?

Kirk:
Well, one of the best things about our paper is that it has started other people trying to either refute its support and so forth. There’s been some follow-up work. Some economists at the Federal Reserve did a great piece. It’s an old chart that many of us looked at. If you use the Case Schiller price index as a measure of housing price, and I really believe it to be the best because if it’s very careful, you have to have two points. You have to know what a house sold for in the past, you have to know what it sold for recently, and that’s how they then figure out what constant quality homes are doing over time. We policy wonks tend to have a bad habit of saying, let’s compare that index to the median household income because that reflects that household in the middle, what their ability to spend is.
And as you might imagine, those numbers were pretty close through the ’90s. What happened with 99, 2000, prices took off. We debated for several years whether we had a bubble. By the time the bubble crashed, we all were pretty much agreeing we had a bubble. The index came back down and more or less came close to that median value. Again, that was the global financial crisis. It wiggled around for a little bit, but it’s taken off. Now comes the question, do we have a second bubble? Maybe yes, maybe no. The Federal Reserve economists simply said, look, it’s really the aggregate dollars in a market that set house prices. And this is the K economy argument, but when you have so many people who are becoming so very, very rich and there are few investments treated so generously by our tax code as investing in your primary home,
So that in fact what you have are a lot of very high income, high wealth households pulling up the home prices. So if you track the case shielder index and just the mean household income, you find they track very, very closely. So all of our concern of price rising faster than median is important for identifying affordability problems, but realizing that in fact that price index is tracking very closely with the aggregate income out there, that explains an awful lot of why owner-occupied homes are going up. Now, it’s not as easy then to flip that and say, “All right, just because the owner-occupied homes are going up so rapidly, why are rents going up?” I find mixed research on that one, but the notion of rental is the substitute, so that’s why they have a complimentary price rise. But what I think everybody can agree is rents have risen faster than median renter income.
Again,
Not faster than average renter income. We’ve had a lot of households come into the rental market, priced out of the owner occupancy market, so that has pulled up rents, but it leaves us with the very bad situation that we have a large percentage of our population, the wage earners, if you will, who are renters, not necessarily by choice, but they are trapped in a situation where rents are rising beyond their means. And for what’s worth, that’s a third avenue of research, and they define that as a shortage when they say, “Look, the number of units we have affordable to say the 50% of area median family income renters, that’s essentially the very low and extremely low income renters, we have many more households than we have units affordable to them.” And that I think is an understandable way to define a shortage. The difficulty I always have with that is I’m a big proponent of rental assistance.
When we talk about a shortage, somehow it goes into members of Congress mind that we need to get out hammers and nails and build more units. If we don’t really have a shortage of units, is that the most cost effective way to address the problem?
It seems to me the answer is no. We have tried rental assistance in various forms over decades so that in fact, it seems clear to me that we can get more bang for the federal dollar spent through rental assistance to help low income households consume rental units that already exist rather than go out and build more rental units.

Dave:
Interesting. Yeah, I’ve heard that argument and that does make sense to me because efforts to build supply by the federal government have not always been the most cost-effective route. So maybe just helping renters makes more sense. But from an economic perspective, Kirk, I guess the thing that I always wonder here is if there’s this mismatch in affordability, there’s enough units, but renters can’t afford it, shouldn’t market price, shouldn’t the equilibrium come down? Shouldn’t rents come down then because there would be a high level of vacancy, at least in these middle level apartments where it’s… Wouldn’t you see vacancy there and then people would have to lower their price if this was really the case?

Kirk:
I agree with you. It sure seems like it should.

Dave:
Right? Yeah. Okay. Well,

Kirk:
That’s pretty much economics 101, right? Yeah. If that aggregate demand in that segment of the market is failing to keep up, then you would think the market would adjust. There’s conflicting evidence on this. I am one of those people. I played a very minor role in the creation of the low-income housing tax credit program clear back in 1985 when it was put together. And I think it was a genuinely heartfelt way for the government to try to augment the supply of units affordable to truly low income households. Unfortunately, it has become over time a surrogate middle income housing program.
So we are spending between 11 and 15 billion per year in the low income housing tax credit program. But if our shortages are among people who are very low and extremely low income, which is to say these are people who can only afford units at 500 to $700 a month, our low-income housing tax credit units being bills are coming in at $1,200 and $1,400 a month. They are adding to a segment of the market that arguably already has saturation. And in fact, there’s some very good research that says there is something on the order of 85% displacement of market rate units by a tax credit unit. For every hundred tax credit units built, 85 fewer market rate units are being built. So we’re only creating a small net gain, and even then we’re adding them into a market segment that is serving bluntly a level of middle income households.
Filtering we know doesn’t work terribly well, so adding in the middle isn’t causing the lower priced units to come down.

Dave:
Yeah, that tracks with what I hear from developers. The numbers just don’t make sense to build affordable housing right now with the cost of construction and labor and financing. In most places, you can’t build something where 500 to $700 in rent is going to give you a good risk-adjusted return if you get a return at all. And so yeah, I totally get that. Everyone says, “Yeah, build more affordable housing.” That would be awesome if you could, but no one can make the math work. I mean, you are more of an expert than I. I don’t really know, but it makes sense to me if we have the units, and certainly we’ve seen a lot of multifamily supply in the last couple of years. There are certainly rising vacancies in a lot of metro areas across the US right now that maybe the answer is to get more dollars into the hands of renters who can then fill the existing units.
That makes sense to me. We got to take a quick break everyone, but we’ll be right back. Stick with us.
Welcome back to On the Market. Let’s jump back in with Professor Kirk McClure. Where do you see this going from here, Kirk? I know the crystal ball question is always a little bit of a trap, but so much of the narrative around the housing market has been, yeah, appreciation has fallen off over the last couple of years. Real home prices are actually down off 2022, even though the nominal prices are going up, but it will come back because there’s this shortage and there’s always going to be this lagging demand. Where do you see the housing market heading for the next few years?

Kirk:
We have what seems to be a persuasive narrative that prices are high because we have a shortage of units. Government should then create programs that foster more production. I have yet to meet a home builder whoever though there was such a thing as too much housing. If the government’s going to

Dave:
Subsidize

Kirk:
Them to build more, they’ll go out and build more, but I don’t see the efforts at the federal level to foster greater production going very far. You’re probably aware of the low-income housing tax credit program. There was a vote two years ago now, I should remember the exact time, but to increase the production of the program by about 12%. There is no doubt in my mind the developers will line up. They will bring proposals to the various state housing finance agencies. They will produce units, but remembering the displacement number of 85%, if anything, I think that displacement number will go higher. If you’re an underwriter, private sector, market rate properties, and you see tax credit properties operating in a market and you see occupancy numbers coming down, the first thing that goes into your head is maybe we ought to back off of these multifamily rental properties.
If we normally did 500 units a year, then let’s back down. So I truthfully have enough confidence in the guardrails that already exist in the marketplace to think that there’s not going to be any great damaging effect. The part that worries me most is the tax credit program already costs us 11 to 15 billion. We’re going to make that something like 13 to 17 billion now. We will build more units, but we won’t have any positive effect in it. The affordability problems will continue, so the K economy will continue to diverge, and that’s the part that bothers me. Again, quick sort of background piece. The housing choice voucher goes to the hand of the household, low income household. They pay 30% of the rent and utilities out of their income. The remainder is paid by the program. That program is expensive. It’s in the 30 billion a year, but at the moment it serves a Only one in four truly low income households.
If we added to that program, and I only dream of days when we would have enough money for every eligible household, but let’s say we expanded the program sufficiently that we helped two out of every four eligible households. We know the units are out there. We know from the waiting lists in these cities that are measured in years. Somebody signs up for a Section eight
Housing choice voucher, in all likelihood, they will wait years before the housing authority calls and says, “It’s your turn.” So in fact, the program works. I think we would have much greater beneficial effect than overbuilding the middle price of the rental apartments. So I realize that’s sort of long-winded answer to where do I think we’re going, but that’s where I think we’re going. We’re going to overbuild where we don’t need them, and we’re going to leave many truly poor households without the assistance to enter the market in a good way.

Dave:
So both from a renter and a owner occupied standpoint, it seems. Yeah.

Kirk:
The work that Alex and I did, we looked through a litany of programs that have operated in various times in the past for home buyers, first time low income home buyers. And there’s a lengthy list of tools out there and we know they work. We can do things to get the loan to value ratio low. We can help out on the down payment. We can provide various types of loan insurance to the lender in the event of nonpayment. One of the biggest problems that the very low income home buyers suffer is irregular income. Well, we’ve got insurance programs that can smooth that out. It doesn’t mean there would be nonpayment, but it does mean we can keep that household from being evicted because they can’t pay for a few months during a layoff. So there are all sorts of these programs that have worked in the past.
We would like to see us focus on how do we make better use of the stock we already have rather than thinking the answer is build more units.

Dave:
If we overbuilt in the middle market, I just don’t understand how prices aren’t falling there.That’s the part that is confusing to me is it seems to me, I don’t know, maybe because we’ve been in this era of low interest rates that people held on or the lock-in effect, but now with rates going up and affordability being low and really historically low, the prices just have to come down. I don’t know. I’m like, I can’t wrap my head around having too much supply in the middle and prices not falling. Well,

Kirk:
I agree with you completely. I think at some level, part of the problem is quality of the data. The data we have will tell us the rent on paper that a property manager says he or she charges. But in fact, I know of no good data set that tells me about concessions.

Dave:
Correct.

Kirk:
I’m here in the Kansas City area. I have friends and colleagues who are property manager and they will tell me repeatedly, “I used to be able to charge for carports. I have to give them away now.”

Dave:
100%. So

Kirk:
I do believe we see some downward pressure on price. It comes out at that level of concessions, but to see a truly measurable, let’s say even a 10% drop in rents, I don’t think the kind of overbuilding in the middle has yet caused that drop. Now that’s not everywhere. Again, the advantage I have of living here in Kansas City is we’re not a hot market, but property managers will do what they have to do to try to keep things going. And if that means concessions, they’ll give those concessions. When we really see drops, then I start picking up other signals. Here’s an example. The Missouri Housing Development Corporation unable to use its low income housing tax credit allocation during a year or two. That means not enough developers showed up saying, “If I build, they will come and occupy my apartment.” Even in a federally subsidized program like the low income housing tax credit program, you still got to build a property, you’ve got to hit an occupancy level, you’ve got to cover costs, you’ve got to make your reserve payments.

Dave:
For sure. Yeah.

Kirk:
And if they feel the market is saturated, they back off and say, “I’ll wait and see next year or the year following that.” And we have seen some signs of it, but enough to say that rents will drop, I don’t see it. And the other piece of that, for what it’s worth, again, Alex and I did a piece where we did a simulation of what would be the effect of a drop in rents by five, 10, 15. We even did it up to 25%. And the answer is that it would not solve the affordability problem because what will happen is, okay, let’s say you even have a 25% drop in rents. Now imagine what that would do to the feasibility of the rental portfolios all over the United States. That would

Dave:
Be

Kirk:
Awful. But if it happened, it still doesn’t solve the affordability problem because the greatest benefit goes to the highest income renter households. They receive the greatest benefit. They will then become less burdened. They will have a burden less than 30% of their income. Whereas that household that’s only able to afford say six or $700 a month, but they’re paying a thousand, well even coming down to 750 is still beyond their means. So we’ve got to be a little careful about what we’re wishing for. We don’t really want prices to drop dramatically. We may want the pace to calm down, but in fact, we’ve got way too much investment in some really beautiful rental properties all across the country and the rents need to stay at or near the real rent levels we have today, or we’re going to have a whole lot of defaults and foreclosures on our hand.
Nobody wants to see that.

Dave:
Correct. Yeah. I’m not saying I hope for that. Just the way you’re explaining it makes me feel like it should have happened already.
How do you see this impacting the owner occupied side of things? Because we obviously have had a slowdown in appreciation and the demographics point to a declining population probably. People argue about when that might be, but if you just extrapolate out the birth rate and immigration rates right now, probably going to have a declining population at some point. So do you think though that long term in terms of just property values for even single family homes, there’s going to be downward pressure because if we have sufficient units today and we have a declining population and perhaps declining households in the next 10, 20 years, wouldn’t that bring down pricing or property values?

Kirk:
Possibly. But again, go back to the two pieces about the fundamental drivers of housing prices today. We have an awful lot of people who’ve made an awful lot of wealth, stock market, wherever. They’ve done quite well.
They go into a submarket and remember racial segregation is slowly subsiding, but income stratification is becoming more and more prevalent in our metropolitan market. The very rich only live in districts with very rich and the not so rich, but pretty close living. So we have this separation that enforces the bidding up of the prices. So that wealth is there. Now the question is, should we be subsidizing those households to invest in a home as a way to build wealth? I think it’s a wonderful argument when we’re talking about the working poor as it were. They can continue to live as renters or they can become homeowners and enjoy the benefits of wealth development so they can pass it on to their kids. But right now we say for all households, whatever income level, the first half million bucks you make every five years, you can trade for another house and that is exempt from capital gains taxes.
I can see social value in that for a guy who is standing behind a cash register or he’s putting mufflers in cars and he’s trying to help his family make some money. I’m not sure I see value for that for the households that are up there mid six digits.
So I am concerned about that. The reason I’m particularly concerned is there’s a fair effort growing in Washington to raise the capital gains exemption even further saying, “Oh my God, it’s old. It’s out of date. We have 15% of our homeowners who are in need of it to be in higher.” That 15% has already then made more than a half million bucks on their home. Do we really need to subsidize through tax benefits anymore? I think no. I’m

Dave:
Laughing because we have a panel show and I got in this argument with three of my friends and panelists on the show. I was saying that it’s crazy to try and raise that. I think it’s a champagne problem. If you have that problem, that’s a problem anyone would be grateful to have, that you made so much money on your home that only 500,000 is tax free. Mind you, you still get that 500,000 tax free. It’s just anything you earn above 500,000 is tax free.

Kirk:
The irony of this you see is my colleague in this research is Alex Schwartz, lives in New York City and of course that is a hot market where he made colleagues on the West Coast. In coastal California for a piece of real estate, that does not seem like a huge number. So it’s difficult, but in the near term, I see those debates coming up and it bothers me. I would rather see us more focused on how do we truly solve the problems of the low income. And I don’t feel we’re doing that right now.

Dave:
Kirk, thank you so much for being here. This has been an eye-opening conversation. I really appreciate you sharing your work and your research with us today.

Kirk:
It’s been a great pleasure.

Dave:
And thank you all so much for listening to this episode of On the Market. We’ll see you next week for another episode.