After five months and more rejected offers than she can remember, Stefanie Campagna was starting to doubt whether she might be able to buy a new home in Rochester, New York.
That was until this month, when one seller finally said yes. To get there, Campagna had to pay $100,000 over the asking price, outbidding 36 other offers.
Her story is a sign of the times. In today’s housing market, even the lucky ones often face exhausting ordeals and need to stretch their budgets to land a home.
In the past few weeks, President Trump has blamed America’s largest homebuilders for the country’s housing affordability woes. In a social media post this month, Trump compared homebuilders to oil cartel OPEC, accusing them of sitting on empty lots to keep home prices artificially high.
Economists broadly agree that America’s affordability crisis is rooted in a long-running shortage of homes, a supply problem years in the making.
Homebuilding fell dramatically in the years leading up to the 2008 housing crash and never fully recovered.
Yet builders and economists say this supply shortage isn’t caused simply by builders sitting on empty lots. They say that building new homes has only gotten harder, slowed by regulation, labor shortages and high financing costs.
Some in the industry wor
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