Jack Ryan is passionate about expanding access to housing. Ryan’s passion makes him ideal as HUD secretary for the incoming Trump administration.
To which some will respond that what Ryan believes in deeply is a given for someone in the running for HUD, such that the belief would hardly set Ryan apart. That’s fair enough, and it would be true if feelings and rhetoric were all that recommended Ryan for HUD secretary. Except that there’s so much more.
Arguably of utmost importance, Ryan has lived his beliefs. Founder of Texas-based The Blaze School with his wife Amanda, the couple created Blaze in order to provide top-level educational opportunity for kids who’ve lost a parent, or both, and who would otherwise lack the means to attend a prestigious school.
Very importantly, Blaze provides more than education. Ryan and his colleagues build houses on the Blaze campus for orphaned children. The list of past HUD nominees is thick with individuals who were passionate about enhancing housing opportunities for those with the least, but few to none matched that passion with action. Ryan has, and will.
Except that there’s more. Much more. Ryan is the founder of REX Realty. To which some might say Ryan’s business activities related to housing don’t exactly make him unique, but for the fact that REX was a specific and courageous response to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). The lobby’s near century-long unwillingness to budge on nosebleed housing commissions has long made home purchases (and sales) very costly for the average American.
With REX, Ryan’s stated long-term aim was to bring commission charges on housing purchases down to zero. Stop and think about what this would mean for lower and middle income buyers. For one, the cost of purchasing a house would decline. At the same time, and arguably more important given how crucial mobility is to individual economic progress, zero commissions would greatly reduce the cost of home sales, and that restrain mobility. Ryan has long made the point that the commission charges for the typical mid-range house swallow up half of the typical middle earner’s annual income, thus making the cost of entering and exiting a home frequently prohibitive.
What’s notable and laudable about what Ryan has done is that in committing tens of millions of his own personal wealth to REX, Ryan was risking substantial sums taking on arguably the most powerful lobby (NAR) in the United States. That he did what he did is further indication of just how much his actions if anything exceed his expressed passions about housing.
Having read this, many readers must be wondering how Ryan had and has the means to found a school, build housing for those of limited means, not to mention sizably invest in a business meant to substantially shrink the costs associated with attaining home ownership. The answer to the question furthers the case for Ryan even more.
Before becoming an inner city teacher on Chicago’s south side, before founding The Blaze School, and before founding REX, Ryan was a Partner in the investment banking division at Goldman Sachs. Writing about his time at Goldman in the 2024 book he co-authored with me (Bringing Adam Smith Into the American Home), Ryan indicated that his job was to contact prominent CEOs about hiring Goldman to “go through all the internal numbers for each of the company’s businesses, subsidiaries, and divisions, line by line, down to the most minute of expenses.” The aim was to re-shape frequently flabby corporations into lean-and-mean ones. In Ryan’s words once again, “we acted as the company’s internal corporate raider with a whiskey eye for even the most trivial of corporate expenses.”
Consider what Ryan did vis-à-vis Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s stated objective to achieve government efficiency. With Ryan at HUD, they would have an expert in place ready and able to achieve their aims. Except that there’s more.
Just as Ryan and his Goldman colleagues vastly improved the corporations they were hired to reconfigure, Ryan’s aim with HUD would be to streamline it not to gut it, but to re-position it to more effectively fulfill its mission.
There once again Ryan is ideal. From his time at Goldman, he learned (and routinely preaches) that business sectors are never harmed by capital inflows. Which is of singular importance when it comes to expanding housing access.
From his perch at HUD, Ryan would credibly preach the importance of removing governmental barriers to the inflow of investment to the housing space. Intimately aware that investment always and everywhere associates with better products and services at lower prices, Ryan would bring the sophisticated genius of investment to bear on a market good that’s been way too expensive for way too long. Jack Ryan would be a great hire as HUD secretary not just because he believes in the genius of more accessible housing, but of much greater importance because he actually understands what’s necessary to make it more accessible.
