Clint Cooper, the Free Press editor at the Chattanooga Times Free Press, wrote an opinion piece base on the most recent CRER white paper, “Housing Affordability Trends in Chattanooga.” The piece outlined many of the findings in the research, especially that the main obstacle to housing affordability is high mortgage rates. Mortgage rates are still well above their pre-pandemic levels because of the recent burst of inflation that has still not been controlled fully.
“But since the data in the report covers a period from the pre-COVID third year of the first Trump presidency to roughly the first six months of the second Trump presidency, the bulk of it spans the four years of the Biden administration, when inflation reached its highest point in 40 years.
So its conclusions about the lack of home affordability and high mortgage rates are at least somewhat attributable to the inflationary policies of the previous presidency.”