A good first step would be for governments to stop doing everything in their power to make sure the cost of residential housing increases every year more than t

A good first step would be for governments to stop doing everything in their power to make sure the cost of residential housing increases every year more than the rate of general inflation. I understand _why_ they do so, homeowners are a big and powerful constituency, but it is an incredibly inefficient and counterproductive way to go about doling out pork. This means things like eliminating the mortgage deduction, property tax deduction, special cap gain rules, getting rid of Fannie, Freddie, FHA, forbidding the Fed from buying up MBSs, eliminating the homestead exemptions, and getting rid of no recourse rules. Not sure how much of a role start up can play in this sort of political reform. A good next step would be decoupling education from housing so that the purchase or rental of a home doesn't implicitly include quasi-private school tuition. Here I see a good role for the private sector. While for-profit charter operators can be very controversial, excellent charter schools with scalable models are a necessary precondition to selling the public on a voucher system which implicitly buys you larger catchment areas and has the desirable decoupling effect. If the private sector can do that, godspeed as far as I'm concerned.