Open the Door to Homeownership

Create a zero-down, fixed-rate path to your first home — and here’s how we know it works. The down payment is the wall, so I’ll tear it down: a federal zero-down, fixed-rate mortgage for first-time buyers. And this is not some untested idea — America has been doing exactly this, successfully, for decades. When a veteran buys a home with a VA loan, they put nothing down and pay no monthly mortgage insurance, because the government guarantees part of the loan to the lender — that guarantee is what erases the down payment. Rural families get the same deal through USDA loans: zero down, a 30-year fixed rate, because the government backs a share of the loan. About two-thirds of veterans who buy a home put zero dollars down, and those loans have a strong track record.

I’d take that proven model and open it to first-time buyers. The government guarantees part of your loan, so you can buy with nothing down and skip the private mortgage insurance that piles a couple hundred dollars onto a monthly payment — and it’s fixed-rate, so it’s stable, safe ownership, not the exploding adjustable-rate traps that blew up in 2008. To keep it sound and keep it cheap for taxpayers, it works like the VA program: a small one-time fee, not an ongoing subsidy, so the program largely covers its own risk. If you can pay rent, you can carry a mortgage. Let’s do for working families what we already do for our veterans and our rural towns.

Put cash back in first-time buyers’ hands. On top of that, I’ll fight for a first-time homebuyer tax credit — real money back for the costs that pile up around a purchase: closing costs, the move, the repairs every first home seems to need. The zero-down guarantee gets you in the door; the credit helps you cross the threshold and start building equity from day one. Between nothing down and cash back, we turn “someday” into this year.

Build homes at scale — with a bank that pays for itself. You can’t bring prices down without more supply, and the thing choking supply is the cost and risk of financing construction. So I’ll fight to create a National Housing Construction Bank. It’s a lender — not a giveaway, and not new government spending. The government seeds it once, and it makes low-cost loans to homebuilders to get homes built. Those loans are repaid, with interest, and the money gets lent out again — over and over. It sustains itself, and it generates revenue instead of adding a dime to the debt. We already run public financing institutions that work this way; there’s no reason we can’t run one for the homes our families need.

Here’s what keeps it from being just another handout to the industry: I’d aim it straight at local and small builders — the ones in our own communities — not the handful of giant national developers that dominate homebuilding today. Cheaper, steadier financing lets them build more, faster, and at lower cost, and it keeps the jobs and the profits here instead of flowing to some corporate headquarters across the country. More builders competing is itself how you get more homes and lower prices.

And I’d point the whole thing at a bold national goal: 2 million new homes a year. This country used to do big things on purpose. We need aspirational goals again — national projects we can all get behind — and this is one of them. Building the homes our kids can actually afford would lower costs now and pay off for generations. That’s a goal worth rallying around.

Pay for it without new debt. None of this runs up your tab. The construction bank funds itself, and the mortgage guarantee is backed by a modest fee, not an open checkbook. The buyer’s tax credit is paid for the way we fund this whole platform — by closing the speculation and corporate real-estate loopholes the biggest investors use to get rich off our housing. We stop subsidizing the funds treating homes like poker chips, and put it toward the families who just want one to live in.