The American housing market is currently performing the economic equivalent of a death rattle, and quite frankly, it’s the most honest thing the country has done in decades. For years, the United States has operated under the collective delusion that a pile of timber and toxic drywall in a cul-de-sac is not a place to live, but a sentient ATM that produces infinite wealth. Now, as the news cycle begins to whine about the market ‘shuddering,’ we are forced to watch the slow-motion collision between a generation of homeowners who think they’re financial geniuses and a mathematical reality that does not care about their retirement plans. The 'good times' are ending, and the only thing more pathetic than the collapse itself is the desperate clutching of those who thought the party would never end.

Let’s be clear about what these ‘good times’ actually were: a period of artificial, state-sponsored euphoria fueled by interest rates so low they were practically an insult to the concept of value. The Federal Reserve spent years acting like a bartender serving free drinks to a room full of people who were already blackout drunk, and now that they’ve finally turned the lights on and called for the check, everyone is shocked to find they’re broke and covered in their own fiscal vomit. The Right-wing response to this is, predictably, to blame 'government overreach' while simultaneously praying for the very subsidies and rate cuts that created the bubble in the first place. They want a free market, but only if it guarantees that their three-bedroom ranch in Ohio doubles in price every five years for no reason other than the passage of time.

On the other side of the aisle, the Left-wing performative activists weep crocodile tears over ‘housing affordability’ while residing in zip codes where they’ve spent the last twenty years filing environmental injunctions against anything taller than a birdhouse. Their version of progress is a ‘Low Income’ apartment complex built three towns over, so long as it doesn’t obstruct the view from their solar-powered patio. They treat the housing crisis as a tragic mystery, as if the laws of supply and demand were a right-wing conspiracy designed to hurt their feelings. The reality is that both sides have conspired to turn the basic human need for shelter into a speculative casino game, and now that the house is winning, they want to complain to the manager.

To the homeowners currently 'shuddering' at the thought of their equity evaporating: you were never wealthy. You were merely the temporary beneficiaries of a liquidity surge that had nowhere else to go. You didn't 'invest' in your community; you bought into a pyramid scheme where the prize was a mortgage you can’t escape and a lawn you’re required by a homeowner’s association to keep green during a drought. The current stagnation is simply the market’s way of admitting that a house is just a box where you put your stuff until you die, not a magical engine of permanent prosperity. The inventory is frozen because the people who locked in 3% interest rates are now prisoners of their own good luck, huddled in kitchens they can’t afford to renovate, watching their ‘assets’ turn back into what they always were: depreciating stacks of lumber.

The tragedy of the American housing market isn’t that it’s failing; it’s that it was ever allowed to be the primary pillar of the national identity. We have built an entire civilization on the premise that the most important thing a human can do is sign a thirty-year contract for a piece of dirt they will never truly own. Now, as the market shudders, the facade of the ‘American Dream’ is peeling away like cheap lead paint. The Federal Reserve’s attempt at a ‘soft landing’ is a fairytale for the economically illiterate. You don’t land a Boeing 747 made of debt on a runway paved with wishful thinking without some debris. This is the end of the line for the accidental millionaires and the aspiring landlords. Welcome to the reality of the shudder—it’s cold, it’s expensive, and nobody is coming to save your equity.