The Foreigner Did It
The housing crisis has real causes. Blaming foreigners is not analysis — it is a political project, and it should not be normalized.
The Article
Fox News ran an opinion piece this week from the Foundation for Government Accountability. The headline: foreigners are “stealing the American dream” by buying up U.S. homes. The villain of the piece — introduced with its own dedicated paragraph, its own dollar figure, its own “strategic rival” framing — was China.
Between April 2024 and March 2025, the article reports, foreigners purchased over 78,000 American homes. Chinese buyers alone spent $13.7 billion. The solution proposed: ban foreign buyers outright, or tax them into submission.
It is a tidy story. It has a villain with a foreign face. And it is almost entirely beside the point.
The Numbers
Let’s be precise, because precision is what the article deliberately avoids.
The United States conducts roughly 5 to 6 million home sales per year. Foreign buyers, at 78,000 purchases, represent approximately 1.3% of the market. That is not a rounding error in the article’s favor. That is a rounding error, period.
Meanwhile, the actual housing shortage in America currently stands at over 4 million units — a deficit that grew in 2025, not shrank. Goldman Sachs estimates that resolving it and restoring affordability will require building 3 to 4 million homes beyond normal construction levels. Even if the U.S. increased building pace by 50%, it would take roughly seven years to close the gap.
Banning every foreign buyer tomorrow would not make a single American family more able to afford a home. The math is simply not there. The crisis is structural, not demographic.
What Is Actually Causing the Crisis
The real causes of housing unaffordability are well-documented, politically inconvenient, and conspicuously absent from the Fox News piece.
Exclusionary zoning laws — the rules that prevent multifamily housing from being built in most residential neighborhoods — are the primary structural driver. Roughly 60% of residential land in major American metro areas is legally restricted to two or three stories maximum. You cannot build your way out of a housing shortage when the law prohibits building.
Then there is the wage problem. The ratio of median home price to median household income has roughly doubled since the 1980s. This is not coincidental. It reflects decades of monetary policy that deliberately inflates asset prices while wages stagnate. Existing homeowners benefit from this arrangement. First-time buyers do not. The system is working exactly as designed — for the people who designed it.
Ironically, even the Fox article nods toward the real institutional problem: it mentions in passing that Trump is pushing to restrict Wall Street firms from buying single-family homes. That is a legitimate policy discussion worth having. Institutional investors purchasing tens of thousands of homes as financial instruments is a documented distortion. But the article quickly pivots away from that story to find a more emotionally resonant target.
This Is Not a Housing Article
Step back from the housing statistics for a moment and look at what this article is actually doing.
It takes a real grievance — working-class and young Americans locked out of homeownership — and points the anger outward, toward people who were not born here. The policy conclusion (restrict foreign buyers) is presented as common sense. But the emotional logic underneath it is something older and more troubling: the idea that the people who belong here are being displaced by people who do not.
This framing did not emerge in a vacuum. It is part of a sustained political project that has defined the right wing in America for the better part of a decade. We have heard it applied to immigration, to crime, to elections, to universities, to the military. The specific outgroup shifts depending on the news cycle — migrants at the border, Muslim travelers, Chinese students, foreign homebuyers. The structure of the argument never changes: something that belongs to Americans is being taken by people from outside, and the solution is exclusion.
What makes this particular iteration worth naming is how mundane it has become. A think tank publishes a paper. Fox News runs it as an opinion column. The comment section fills with calls to ban Chinese property ownership. And the conversation moves on as though this is normal policy discourse.
The consistent identification of foreign-born people as the source of American decline is a pattern that deserves to be called what it is: a political project, not an analysis. It functions to protect the actual systems and power arrangements causing harm by redirecting attention toward people with less power and less voice.
The disclaimer the article offers — “This isn’t a matter of sticking it to foreigners” — does not undo the structure. When the emotional weight of your argument lands on one group of people and your conclusion targets everyone who was not born here, the disclaimer is not a defense. It is a tell.
We should be disturbed by this. Not because the housing crisis is not real — it is. But because movements that consistently blame national decline on the presence of foreigners have a history, and that history does not end well. Normalizing the framework, even in the relatively tame form of a housing opinion piece, is how the framework gets normalized. And normalized frameworks become policy. And policy has consequences for real people.
What Would Actually Help
If you want to make housing affordable for American families, here is what the evidence points to:
Reform exclusionary zoning. Allow multifamily housing to be built in more places. The states that have moved aggressively on this — Montana, for example, with bipartisan support — are already seeing results.
Raise wages. The affordability crisis is not only a supply problem. It is also a purchasing power problem. A home that requires 40% of a median household’s income is unaffordable regardless of how many foreign buyers you exclude.
Address institutional investment seriously. If we are going to restrict buyers, the case for restricting large financial firms purchasing homes as yield instruments is far stronger than the case for restricting a Chinese family from buying a house in California. The scale is different. The market distortion is different. The political will to act, however, is also different — because those firms have lobbyists.
The Dream Deferred
Young Americans are being priced out of homeownership. That is real, it is serious, and it deserves serious analysis. It does not deserve an explanation built on the premise that people born outside our borders are the problem.
The American Dream is not being stolen by foreign homebuyers. It is being foreclosed by zoning laws written by local governments, monetary policy designed to protect asset holders, wage stagnation that has persisted across administrations of both parties, and financial institutions that figured out housing was a better investment than people.
Those are the villains. They are harder to fit in a headline. They are also harder to scapegoat, because many of them are us — or at least, they are the systems we have built and the politics we have tolerated.
The pattern of blaming foreigners for domestic failures is not new. It has never solved the problem it claims to address. What it reliably does is make the actual problem harder to see, and make the people caught in the crossfire harder to defend.
We should be paying attention. Not because a Fox News opinion column is going to collapse the republic, but because this is how frameworks move — from the fringe to the column to the bill to the enforcement action. The time to name it is before it becomes policy, not after.