Dave Rubin recently shared a direct-message clip highlighting Scott Galloway’s blunt warning on MSNBC about housing affordability and the political fallout it’s already creating. Rubin’s show pushed the clip into the wider conversation because this isn’t abstract policy talk — it’s a tectonic shift in voter behavior that the left keeps ignoring until it’s too late.
Galloway didn’t mince words: sky-high housing costs are driving a generation into the arms of anyone promising to fix it, including socialists who offer simple answers to complex problems. That’s a political disaster when the remedies socialists propose would make shortages worse and strip incentives from builders and homeowners.
He used San Francisco as a brutal example of how policy choices have enriched insiders while locking out young families — a tale of markets distorted by bad incentives and overreaching regulation. This is not just anecdote; young voters are telling pollsters housing is their top issue, and when the establishment parties fail them, they look for radical alternatives.
Let’s be clear: much of what passes for housing “policy” today is a tangle of zoning, permitting and local restrictions that inflate prices long before a single nail is hammered. When governments make permission more valuable than production, you get windfalls for incumbents and scarcity for everyone else — a textbook case of policy-created privilege.
The predictable response from the left — more subsidies, more rent controls, more top-down programs — will paper over symptoms while making supply even tighter. Conservatives should call out that approach honestly: subsidies without supply fixes only funnel taxpayer money to landlords and entrenched owners while leaving young people trapped.
Real solutions are old-fashioned conservative medicine: cut the red tape, free up land use, allow more diverse housing types, and get local control back to the people who want to build, not the NIMBYs who benefit from scarcity. If Republicans want to win back younger voters, championing homeownership and entrepreneurship — not virtue-signaling rent freezes — is the way forward.
This is a wake-up call. The left’s fixation on cultural battles while letting housing markets ossify gave radicals an opening; conservatives must offer a clear, pro-growth alternative that restores opportunity. Local elections matter, reformers must organize, and the next generation deserves leaders brave enough to dismantle the policies that made this crisis possible.
