From the 1980s to the mid-1990s, home prices grew roughly in line with the economy. After 1997, when almost all the Boomers who wanted to purchase housing had already done so (the youngest were by then thirty-three and the oldest, fifty-seven), home prices rose dramatically. It’s not that growth in the economy or population accelerated suddenly or permanently. The better explanation was government subsidy. The Boomer-controlled government expanded housing subsidies during the Boomers’ prime home-owning years: property tax caps, mortgage interest deductions, tax exemptions on sales, and so on
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