Residential real estate has been a political football for centuries. In the 18th century, European countries taxed homes based on the number of windows, which Fran Lebowitz, writing about in her never to be published novel Exterior Signs of Wealth, claimed was why the French invented a form of “dormir” window in a slanted attic roof that could not be seen by tax assessors from street level. Fast-forward to today: In 2024, the National Association of Realtors spent over $86 million on lobbying for items like maintaining the mortgage interest deduction.
The private home, especially the single-family detached house, is inextricably connected to marital monogamy and parental control of the raising and education of children. So it is often criticized by people who style themselves progressives, who aren’t sympathetic to private property to begin with.
Residential real estate — its quality and abundance — is highly affected by government policies. Just in 2025, we’ve seen:
- Cities and counties try, often clunkily, to deregulate and incentivize conversion of vacant office buildings — emptied by COVID lockdowns, telework, and soon perhaps DOGE — to apartment buildings and condominiums.
- Immigrants and illegal aliens consuming the restricted supply of housing that zoning and other regulation allows the market to produce. This fact can be spun in more than one way. Usually, it’s presented as a cost of illegal immigration, with illegal aliens taking over low-rent and affordable housing. (Go to a rural area and you can hear long-term residents complain.) Recently, the open borders advocates at the CATO Institute spun this as how immigrants are helping “maintain” $5.7 trillion in housing stock. Not mentioned: This is over 10% of the U.S. housing supply, valued at $49.6 trillion.
- Regulation that restricts housing supply potentially being a major battlefield for libertarians versus more statist progressives in the next Democrat election cycle, with the first volley being the Ezra Klein book Abundance.
Folk singer Malvina Reynolds’s song “Little Boxes” had its genesis in a family outing where her socialist parents drove past Daly City and her mother made derogatory remarks about the small houses thrown up quickly to house people moving to the Bay Area who could not find or afford homes in San Francisco. Though Reynolds was never wealthy and had some blue-collar jobs, she did manage to get a B.A., an M.A., and even a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley, so her denigration of the Daly City dwellers has a bit of a New Class tinge, shared by San Francisco residents generally and repeated by the characters in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series. The song is known to many as the theme song of Showtime’s Weeds, where a widow attempts to escape foreclosure by selling pot. (In D.C., I used to see divorced and widowed moms turn to selling real estate — indeed, before the ’90s boom and 2008 crash, such women with no résumés and gay men with no dependents seemed to be the only realtors.)
The late Stalinist folk singer Pete Seeger, played by Ed Norton in the recent Dylan biopic, also popularized the song. Like most Marxists, his faith did not extend to an abolition of the family in his own personal life. He and his wife Toshi lived in a small house in Beacon, N.Y. that is currently worth in the mid-600s — maybe not limousine liberal territory, but significantly more than the average home price both in the U.S. (300s) and in New York state (485K). Seeger’s mortgage was paid in part with money made not from selling weed, but from copyrighting his own versions of traditional folk songs, often produced by “BIPOC” musicians. His (and his associates’) copyright of “We Shall Overcome” earned $16,000 from Hollywood when it was used in the 2013 Lee Daniels movie The Butler. Courts have since reversed some of these grants of copyright and decided that the music belongs in the public domain.
Perhaps progressives are like the ladies in the classic Catskill joke: Two women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know — and such small portions.”
The new bête noire of urban liberals is the Giant White House. Slate writer Dan Kois complains:
Like the giant White House just down the road from us in Washington, D.C., the Giant White House may be occupied by a Republican or a Democrat, but whoever they are, they are rich. Once the house next door was finished, it went on the market for $2.5 million. The house has five bedrooms and six baths and is 5,600 square feet. According to the listing, it has top-end appliances and European Oak Select Grade hardwood and heated floors in the en suite bath and a wet bar in the basement.
Kois goes on to add that this is happening not only in the wealthy counties surrounding D.C., watered by the spigot of your tax dollars, but in other cities Americans are moving to:
This style is becoming the dominant mode in well-off neighborhoods everywhere, from Atlanta to Nashville to Austin to Boulder. If you drive through the Arlington of wherever you live, you’ll surely see Giant White Houses sprouting on every cleared lot. As one went up next door, I wondered: Why are the houses so giant? Why are the houses so white? Why are the houses like this now?
Kois isn’t wrong that the phenomenon is real. I’ve been previewing these $1.5- to $3.5-million homes a few afternoons a week in my professional capacity as a realtor.
He’s wrong that they are always white. Sometimes they’re blue — usually a light blue. Sometimes they are gray — usually a light gray. Sometimes they’re off-white. They are neutral colors that won’t offend most buyers. If the buyer needs excitement, he can look inside at the palatial, ultra-modern kitchens; the plentiful, sybaritic bathrooms; the posh, expansive bedrooms with “his and hers” walk-in closets.
In Malvina Reynolds’s song, the houses were not the same color: “There’s a pink one and a green one / And a blue one and a yellow one / And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky.” However, despite being more colorful than the Giant White House, according to Ms. Reynolds, “they all look just the same.” The Giant White (and blue and gray) Houses on the market now do not all look just the same. Some are traditional styles; some are ultra-modern permutations of Frank Lloyd Wright.
But he’s right about the ubiquity. In the Arlington, Va. 22207 ZIP code, where Kois and such worthies as Jen Psaki and Chuck Todd live, of the 94 houses on the market or under contract right now, 37% (35) are new-construction “Giant White Houses.”
In neighboring, and ritzier, McLean, home to Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney, there are 69 new construction Giant White Houses, 33% of the 209 on the market. In Bethesda and Chevy Chase, Md. (home to George Will and Chris Matthews) combined, there are 57 new construction Giant White Houses, for 25% of the 228 on the market. And in D.C.’s 20008 ZIP code (Embassy Row, Cleveland Park, Kalorama), where Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel have all purchased homes, three, or only 7%, of the 44 houses on the market or under contract are new construction.
I think what these differences are showing us (beside different levels of government obstruction to building new houses in different jurisdictions) is that an adjacent but less expensive area has more empty lots and old tear-down houses that are most profitably scarfed down by the Giant White House. In wealthier neighborhoods, you just refurbish one of the existing whales.
I don’t think the reasons for the Giant White House are mysterious. Public spaces — from libraries full of the mentally ill to parks, tot lots, and green spaces with junkies and homeless tents — aren’t usable or safe, especially for families with small children. Residential property is an asset that keeps pace with or even outpaces inflation. If your property appreciates, the first $500,000, for a married couple filing jointly, is free of capital gains tax. If you have to borrow money out of your home equity, the “income” is not subject to taxation, while the payments you make on the mortgage are tax-deductible.
Anyone who can afford to have a $2-million mortgage should have one (and when you add in the down payment someone lending you $2 million is going to want to see, you are in the range of the neighbor house at $2.4 million that Dan Kois saw.) The Giant White House would exist without government. But government policies certainly shift the market to produce a higher percentage of them.
Jesus Christ is King
