Spring Homebuying Season, Meet the Toll Booth

I keep a folder of old town hall agendas the way some folks keep baseball cards. Different decades, same polite font, same folding chairs, same promise that the next meeting will finally solve the thing. Housing keeps showing up like a recurring footnote: permit delays, “neighborhood character,” traffic studies, a consultant with a slideshow, and then a vote to do nothing until the next generation gets a turn to be priced out.

So when March home sales slid again, right as the spring homebuying season is supposed to rev up, I did what any library-card patriot does: I checked the numbers, then I checked who benefits from the system that produces those numbers.

What the March data says

• Sales: Existing-home sales fell 3.6% in March from February to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.98 million. Sales were also down 1% from March a year earlier, and the pace came in below economists’ expectations.
• Prices: The national median existing-home price rose 1.4% from a year earlier to $408,800, a record for March in data going back to 1999. Prices have now risen year over year for 33 straight months.
• Inventory: There were about 1.36 million unsold homes at the end of March, up 3% from February and up 2.3% from a year earlier. That equals roughly a 4.1-month supply, still short of what’s usually called a balanced market.

Rates, timing, and the headwinds

Mortgage rates were easing earlier in the year, but March brought a messier picture. The AP noted many March purchases would have been negotiated in January and February, when the average 30-year fixed rate ran roughly from 5.98% to 6.16%. Rates later moved higher, with Freddie Mac showing 30-year rates around 6.37% last week.

NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun pointed to softer job growth and lower consumer confidence as additional headwinds, and he cut his 2026 existing-home sales forecast to 4% growth from a prior 14% call.

If you are trying to buy your first home, that is not a spring market. That is a waiting room with a price ticker on the wall.

The Orwell check: when we call rationing a “season”

“Spring homebuying season” sounds like nature. But housing in America is not weather. It is rules, chokepoints, and local veto power dressed up as inevitability. We call it a market, too, but markets are supposed to let supply and demand meet. When supply is routinely handcuffed, the surprise wears thin.

The liberty ledger: who gets mobility, who gets stuck

Housing is liberty in plain clothes: the freedom to move for work, to leave a bad landlord, to start a family without turning every month into a spreadsheet drill. On the plus side, current owners in constrained areas keep their paper wealth. On the minus side, first-time buyers get squeezed by high prices and still-elevated borrowing costs, without home equity as a cushion. The AP story notes fewer first-time buyers purchased in March than in February.

The Paine test: does our housing politics expand liberty or concentrate it?

The Paine test asks whether policy spreads freedom broadly or concentrates it. On housing, we have spent years concentrating power in the hands of whoever can block new supply, then we act shocked by scarcity. If we want guardrails, they have to be real: time limits on permit reviews, zoning rules legible to ordinary people, fewer endless procedural do-overs, and a hard look at how subsidies and tax preferences interact with constrained supply.

Question for the comment section: if spring is when homebuying is supposed to bloom, why are we still defending the policies that keep the ground frozen?