Marcel Ophuls, Myth-Shattering War Documentarian, Is Dead at 97
Mr. Ophuls died on Saturday, Agence France-Presse news agency reported on Monday, citing a statement from his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert. The agency did not provide a cause of death or say where he had died. Mr. Seyfert could not immediately be reached for comment.
Mr. Ophuls had directed several minor feature films before vaulting to fame in 1969 with 'The Sorrow and the Pity,' his four-and-a-half-hour documentary on wartime Clermont-Ferrand, an industrial city located almost at the center of France. In a dispassionate, incisive style, he interviewed shopkeepers and farmers, bankers and entrepreneurs, teachers and lawyers who either collaborated with the Nazis and the Vichy regime or actively resisted the occupation — but who in most instances had turned a blind eye to the roundups of Jews and anti-Nazis.
When the film was first shown in Paris cinemas, it was met with shock, outrage and tears. It stripped away the myth — fostered by Charles de Gaulle when he returned to France with the victorious Allied armies in 1944 — that a vast majority of his compatriots were either open or secret supporters of his resistance movement.
Originally produced for television, 'The Sorrow and the Pity' was banned from French airwaves until 1981. Conservative politicians denounced Mr. Ophuls, calling his work a 'prosecutorial film' that unfairly portrayed the French as cowardly or worse. 'It doesn't attempt to prosecute the French,' Mr. Ophuls insisted in a 2004 interview with The Guardian newspaper. 'Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?'
'The Sorrow and the Pity' used French and German wartime newsreels of Vichy's leaders — Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain and his ambitious protégé, Pierre Laval — as well as footage of Adolf Hitler visiting France in the wake of his conquering army. Adding to the documentary's broader perspective were interviews with Anthony Eden, Britain's foreign secretary during World War II; Pierre Mendès France, the Jewish future premier who escaped Vichy imprisonment and fled to Britain, where he joined de Gaulle; and Christian de la Mazière, the notorious Parisian journalist and businessman who fought with a Waffen SS regiment of Frenchmen.
But the true protagonists of Mr. Ophuls's film were the ordinary citizens of Clermont-Ferrand, whom he and his colleague, André Harris, a journalist, interviewed at length. They included two farmers, brothers who fought in the resistance, the older one captured and sent to a concentration camp; a shopkeeper who took out newspaper ads to explain that he and his family had always been Catholic despite their Jewish-sounding last name; and two schoolteachers who claimed not to remember the cases of colleagues persecuted by the Vichy regime. Also memorable were interviews with the former Nazi garrison commander of Clermont-Ferrand, who fondly recalled the passivity and collaboration of most of the locals in contrast to his previous service on the Russian front.
Mr. Ophuls went on to direct a half dozen other documentaries, most notably the Oscar-winning 'Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie,' a 1988 film about the former head of the Gestapo in the French city of Lyon. But 'The Sorrow and the Pity,' which was also nominated for an Oscar but failed to receive the prize, remained his undisputed masterpiece, perhaps in part because Mr. Ophuls brought his own complex, profound relations with France to the making of the film.
Marcel Ophüls (he later dropped the umlaut) was born Nov. 1, 1927, in Frankfurt, Germany, the son of Max Ophüls, the director of the classic films 'Liebelei,' 'La Ronde' and 'Lola Montès,' and Hildegard Wall, an actress. After Hitler rose to power in 1933, the Ophüls, who were Jewish, fled to France, becoming French citizens in 1938. When the Nazis invaded, the family escaped to the United States and settled in Hollywood, where his father directed several of his films. His son became a U.S. citizen and served in the Army.
Marcel moved back to France in 1952. In 1956, he married Regine Ackermann.
Aided by his father's reputation, Mr. Ophuls tried to become a feature film director. 'I was born under the shadow of a genius,' he told The Guardian. 'I don't have an inferiority complex — I am inferior.' Critics disparaged the three feature movies he directed, though one of them, 'Banana Peel,' a 1963 detective film starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, was moderately profitable.
In 1967, Mr. Ophuls directed his first documentary, 'Munich or Peace in Our Time,' about the 1938 diplomatic surrender by Britain's prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, to Hitler's territorial claims over Czechoslovakia. The film combined archival material and interviews with ordinary witnesses of the era, presaging the technique Mr. Ophuls used to remarkable effect in 'The Sorrow and the Pity' and later documentaries. 'I never take a note or rehearse a question before interviews,' he told Francine Du Plessix Gray in a 1987 New York Times article. 'All my discoveries must occur during the shooting in order for the viewer to share my own sense of surprise.'
Mr. Ophuls began working on his masterpiece in 1967 for French state television, where he and Mr. Harris were reporters. But both were dismissed for their sympathetic coverage of the Paris student and labor protests in 1968. 'The Sorrow and the Pity' was completed the following year with financial and technical assistance from Swiss and German state television networks. Though it was broadcast in neighboring countries, the documentary was banned from French television and shown in only a few Parisian movie houses.
The controversy helped ensure the film's critical and commercial success when it was brought to the United States in 1971. A.H. Weiler of The Times called it 'a surprisingly educational and fascinating experience despite its inordinate length.' The film also paved the way for revisionist scholarly accounts of wartime France, including Robert O. Paxton's 'Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944,' published in 1972, and Henry Rousso's 'The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944,' published in 1994.
Mr. Ophuls followed 'The Sorrow and the Pity' with 'The Harvest of My Lai,' a 1970 documentary about the massacre of civilians by U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War, and 'The Memory of Justice,' a 1976 documentary that examined the Nuremberg trials to suggest that the victorious Allies sometimes displayed hypocrisy in judging Nazi war criminals.
He released 'Hôtel Terminus' in 1988. The documentary on Klaus Barbie — the escaped Gestapo officer who lived in Bolivia after World War II until his 1983 extradition to France, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity — earned Mr. Ophuls an Academy Award for best documentary feature. The biggest problem with the documentary, Mr. Ophuls conceded, was his inability to interview Barbie or show him on trial because of his refusal to appear in court.
Mr. Ophuls chronicled his own life in 2013 with an autobiographical documentary, 'Ain't Misbehavin',' recounting his early days in Germany and touching on his and his father's work.
Mr. Ophuls acknowledged the contradictory strains that being a Jewish refugee from Nazism wove into his life and work. Despite his dual U.S. and French citizenships and his choice to live and work in France, he also still considered himself German.
In a 1988 interview with James M. Markham for The Times, he pointed out that his wife was German and had been a member of the Hitler Youth. 'My brother-in-law was in the Hermann Goering Division,' Mr. Ophuls said. 'I don't believe in collective guilt.'
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Why Housing Feels Hopeless
On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic 's David Frum opens with reflections on the upcoming 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and what Donald Trump's recent statements about 'Victory Day' reveal about how America is forgetting the meaning of peace, cooperation, and democratic leadership. Then David is joined by Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, for a candid look at the broken state of the U.S. housing market. Kelman explains why both buyers and sellers are miserable, how pandemic-era mortgage rates have frozen supply, and why the next generation is increasingly stuck, unable to buy, and often unable to move. They discuss zoning reform, immigration, housing deterioration, and why, despite the bleak outlook, Kelman still believes there's hope for long-term correction—if America can relearn how to build. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest today will be Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin, an online real-estate-brokerage service, and our topic will be the state of the U.S. housing market. Before my dialogue with Glenn, I want to offer some thoughts on quite a different subject: the impending 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. On August 15th, 1945, the imperial Japanese government communicated its surrender to the United States and the allies in the Pacific War. That ceremony was formalized with a ceremony in Tokyo Bay on September 2nd, bringing the war to its legal conclusion. The United States and every belligerent in the war have observed many commemorations of this immense event. As the commemorations have extended in time away from the events that they commemorate, a kind of vainglorious note has tended to enter into these commemorations, never more so than in the message President Trump issued on the 80th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe. I quote from his Truth Social account: 'Many of our allies and friends are celebrating May 8th as Victory Day, but we did more than any other Country, by far, in producing a victorious result on World War II. I am hereby renaming May 8th as Victory Day for World War II and November 11th as Victory Day for World War I. We won both Wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance, but we never celebrate anything — That's because we don't have leaders anymore, that know how to do so! We are going to start celebrating our victories again!' Now, it's kind of news that the United States never celebrated V-E Day or V-J Day before Donald Trump came along. Of course it did. But it is true that in the past, these celebrations were always muted with a remembrance of the terrible suffering that the wars brought to those who fought them, the terrible damage they did to the world, the terrible unnecessariness of the wars, and the hopes for lasting peace. But as we get more distant, there has been a tendency—and Donald Trump expresses it more than anyone—to think of World War II as a kind of military Super Bowl in which the United States and a bunch of teams competed. The United States won the trophy. They had the biggest point spread. They had the fanciest jerseys, the prettiest cheerleaders, and so yay, us. I think as we approach this anniversary, that way of thinking seems even more unhelpful than at any time in the past. The thing I'd like to commemorate on this 80th anniversary is not the war that ended on August 15th, but the peace that began on August 15th. The long peace in Atlantic and Pacific—nervous intended of its start, overshadowed by the threat of nuclear destruction of the Cold War, but building and growing and enhancing the lives of people whose parents and grandparents had been on both sides of the war. Victors and vanquished, Allies and Axis found a way to come together and to build reconciliation, to build a new kind of world. And American leadership was absolutely crucial to the building of this world—the American leadership in providing aid to the war-ravaged countries of Europe and Asia. The American guarantee of security that was tested in Asia, Korea, and Vietnam, that was tested in Europe and periodic crises over the city of Berlin. That was backed by American strength and power and supported by a growing number of allies, increasingly democratic allies. The triumph of bringing to democracy countries that had been non-democracies during the war, countries like Portugal or South Korea that had been American allies but began not as democracies, but achieved democratic government. All of this, supported and paid for by the mounting prosperity achieved by the free-trade system that was built by American leadership in the world after World War II. And all of these accomplishments are things that have now been put at risk. As they're put at risk, I think if we remember the end of the war, we need to remember also the beginning of the war. The American role in the years before 1945 was not as magnificent, not as glorious, not as something to be proud of as the American role in the war and afterwards. The war was made inevitable by a lot of bad American decisions in the 1920s and was nearly lost because of even worse American decisions in the 1930s and '40s. Trade protectionism, isolationism, indifference to the fate of struggling democracies: Those are part of the American story too. And while the heroic achievements of the years after the war—the turn to free trade and collective security—those are receding, the mistakes that brought the war into being, those are being repeated. In 2025, America is less the country it was in 1945 and much more the country it was in 1925 and 1935. It is funny that Donald Trump is taking credit for a victory that was only made necessary because people did the things that were recommended by the presidency of Donald Trump. The greatest accomplishment of the United States in its history was the peace built after 1945. I think that is the thing that together with Japanese, together with Germans, together with all the defeated, together with the British and the French and the Canadians and the Australians and all those who helped to win, we want this war to recede into history. We want only its lessons to remain alive. Its lessons of cooperation, collective security, democracy of trade. If those lessons are at risk, we need to reaffirm them. That's the message for this day, not boasting. Every time Donald Trump speaks of war, I think of a poem by Rudyard Kipling called 'Recessional,' and there's a line in that poem that haunts me because it seems to describe so well our present situation. Kipling wrote —he was addressing a prayer to the god of armies. He said: 'If, drunk with sight of power, we loose wild tongues that have not Thee in awe.' I think the America of Donald Trump is a little drunk with power. And even as that power is waning, it is loosing wilder and wilder tongues than ever. And it's not keeping in awe this divine spirit, the spirit of justice and reconciliation that is the thing that I will be thinking about on August 15th of 2025. And now my conversation with Glenn Kelman. But first, a quick break. [ Music ] Frum: Glenn Kelman is the CEO of Redfin, an online home-brokerage service. Prior to joining Redfin, he was a co-founder of Plumtree Software, a publicly traded company that created the enterprise-portal-software market. Glenn was raised in Seattle and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. Glenn, thank you so much for joining The David Frum Show today. Glenn Kelman: So excited to be here. Thanks for having me, David. Frum: Oh, so, so grateful to you. So let's just start with the open-end question: What is going on in the housing market? We've had a terrible spring. There's more bad economic news this summer. What's the state of the housing market? Kelman: Home prices are softening. So for the first time in nearly a decade, home prices seem likely to soften in the second half of the year. Interest rates may go down just because the jobs news was weak, and that would be a welcome respite, but inventory has been very low for a long time. Sales volume has been extremely low, probably 30 percent below historic levels on a per-capita basis. We haven't seen this sales volume since 1997, when the United States population was about 30 percent smaller. So the market has been moribund, but home prices have held up, and we're going to see that in the June numbers. But if you look further ahead, 35 percent of listings are staying on the market for more than 90 days. We have many unsold listings right now. It has just gotten hard to sell a house, especially in the Sun Belt, and so that may bring some relief to homebuyers who really need it. The average age of the first-time homebuyer is 38. It used to be 31 just a decade ago. Frum: Well, one of the things that is strange, and you're sort of anticipating the question is, this is a market that is experienced as a bad market, both by sellers and by buyers. Kelman: Mm-hmm. Frum: And normally, at least one of those two groups is happy. Bad news for sellers, good news for buyers. Bad news for buyers, good news for sellers. Now, they both seem unhappy that the prices are high. Buyers can't buy, but the buyers aren't there, so sellers can't sell. Everybody's miserable. That doesn't seem like an equilibrium state. Kelman: No, it isn't. I think we're at an inflection point. So mostly people who have had to sell their home have been able to do so quite easily over the past two or three years. So even in the post-pandemic correction, it was fairly straightforward. But now home sellers are struggling, especially people who bought a house during the pandemic. We are talking to them about lowering their price and they can't, because they'll be short on their mortgage. Now, we're not going to have anything like the great financial crisis in 2008, where there was a wave of foreclosures. But for a particular population of folks who did buy during the pandemic, it has suddenly gotten very hard to sell their home and pay off their mortgage. And so right now the market is just teetering in a very unhappy equilibrium. I think that prices will come down, and I'm one of the people who views that as good news. When bread prices come down, when gas prices come down, most Americans view that as cause for celebration. But when home prices go down, about half of us are worried about it and the other half are throwing a party. And really, for the younger generation, we need prices to come down. Frum: Well, is the cause of the misery that the people who bought during the pandemic and a lot of people were buying with money that was almost free? Very, very low interest rates? Kelman: Yeah. Frum: And now it's five years on and the cheapest money is the five-year interest rate that resets after year five, and those people are now thinking about selling, but they're selling to people who have to go borrow at real interest rates. And so that's the mismatch. The secret is one group has a low monthly payment, but wants to sell the house at a high price. The other group has a high monthly payment and cannot possibly meet the price. And that's the mismatch and that's why everybody's miserable. Kelman: That is a huge part of it. So about 75 percent of American homeowners have a mortgage below 5 percent. We're unlikely to see a rate like that anytime in the foreseeable future, and so those folks create this rate-locked inventory. Many, many people in America—more than half of all Americans—really couldn't afford to buy their own home at current interest rates. So it's very common for us to go to a listing consultation with someone who has had another baby or is going through a divorce, had some kind of life event where they need to move, and when they realize what they're going to be able to afford from the sale of their home, they decide to stay put instead. Frum: Let's go around the country, and let's start in what it's like—what I understand, like what the Dust Bowl was during the Great Depression, Florida is to today's real-estate market. It is just the endless source of bad news. So tell us the story of Florida, and then let's go around the rest of the country. Kelman: Well, Florida has all kinds of problems, and some of them are climate change–related because insurance rates are shooting through the roof. So, so many buyers in Florida get a home, get a mortgage, and they think that's all there is to it, and usually that's the case. But now there's a third rail, which is getting insurance, and because there have been so many storms, insurance rates are sky-high. The state has tried to regulate that to some degree, but it's really a triple whammy. Because home prices have gone up; many people are moving into the state. That has started to slow. Florida has always been a real-estate-driven economy, so the overall economy struggles when real estate struggles like no other state in America, and that just makes it extremely volatile, especially condos in Florida right now. Very hard to sell. So there are places where it's still easy to sell a home in Florida, but those are getting more scarce, driven by those three factors. Frum: What's the strongest real-estate market in the country? Kelman: Strongest real-estate market in the country is probably in the Midwest right now. It just saw less volatility than before. So if you went to a place like Austin, Texas, somewhere in the Sun Belt, home prices went up 40 or 50 percent during the pandemic and then came crashing down. But a place like Chicago has been very Midwest and stylish as you would expect Chicago to be, and so that market has been holding up. I think it's some of the markets where we saw the biggest pandemic highs that we're now seeing the most volatility. West Coast markets are doing better because there were a bunch of Amazon workers or Google workers who thought they could move to Texas and keep their jobs, and now they're being called back to the states. And so this exodus that we saw from California and Washington State is now reversing, and that is supporting the market. If I had to say the biggest split in the market right now, condos are just always more volatile than houses. Townhouses are also much more volatile. Those are the first parts of the market to go. Builders are really struggling right now. Yeah, so the incentives that they're offering the homebuyer usually involve buying down the rate, and then they're offering 5 or 6 percent to a buyer's agent, when normally it would be 2 or 3 percent. That's an incentive that the consumer herself doesn't see. It's an indication that home-builder sentiment is very negative. I think it's been negative for 15 months. They've got their own double whammy where consumer demand is softening, but also their labor supply is shrinking. Frum: Well, let's talk to the generational aspect because that's probably one of the most socially debilitating. So you said, a decade ago the first-time homebuyer averaged 31 years old. Today, the first-time home—how old, say it again? Kelman: Thirty-eight. Frum: Thirty-eight. So let's talk to those 29- and 30-year-olds who said, I thought I was one year away from buying a house, and now I discover I'm nearly a decade away. I'd like to have a house when I'm of age to have children. What hope is there for me? What hope is there for them? Kelman: Well, we just need a correction with a correction. So we already talked about this phenomenon where home sales plunged at the end of 2022, but home prices kept increasing, and that was because all this inventory was rate-locked, and now we're starting to see inventory pile up. It's getting harder to sell a home. We think prices will go down by at least 1 percent in the second half of the year, and that means that homebuyers may catch a break, but 1 percent probably isn't enough. The second part of this is that there just has to be a building boom. There's this big debate on the left about whether or not we should continue with the current policies or be much more permissive about building not just houses, but nuclear power plants and high-speed rail and all sorts of other projects to bring the American economy forward. I will be quite explicit about this. I am a 'yes, in my backyard,' YIMBY kind of politician. I really think America has to be good at building houses or the next generation is really gonna be in a pickle. We always talked about 'the bad vibes economy,' where Joe Biden wondered, Why are people so down on the economy, especially this younger generation, and it's just hard to be optimistic about the economy, even when unemployment is low, if you're living in your parents' basement. And so I see some hope—Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, unlikely bedfellows, are now sponsoring a bill to lower housing regulation and to get more homes built. It passed through the banking committee on a unanimous vote. It's something that I think the president could really get behind. I had hoped when he started his term, that because he's a builder, he could be the builder in chief or the developer in chief. Mostly he has not addressed this issue. Kelman: David. Are you trying to get me in trouble? I do not think— Frum: He's a name licenser. He's not a builder. When was the last time Donald Trump built anything? Like, 1980? Glenn Kelman: I think he has an enthusiasm for construction. Frum: Yes. Yes. Kelman: Regardless of his bona fides— Frum: He draws—those are his favorite doodles. Kelman: Yes. (Laughs.) Frum: He draws skylines. (Laughs.) Kelman: They are his favorite doodles. Frum: And writes his name on— (Laughs.) Kelman: It's the White House right now. He wants to build another room in the White House. I know it's going to have this Louis Coutures kind of vibe, but, nonetheless— Frum: Louis Coutures at Las Vegas. But okay, we're not going down the politics path. I just want to hear more hope for the young. Because even if the day of the 2.75 percent mortgage is not returning soon—and that was a trap, by the way. The way you got 2.75 percent was by saying, I'm signing up for five years, and then letting the interest rate reset, which is not advice that anybody should, any young person who doesn't have a lot of other resources should be following. You want the length of your loan to be the length of time you're going to own the home. The depression generation knew that. But anyway, 2.75 money, or even 3.25—we're not going to see that in the mortgage market so soon, even if the overnight rates come down. So, what's the hope for the young? What's the hope for the young? Kelman: I think the hope for the young is that mayors have been losing their jobs over housing. If you look in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, there has been so much rage over the high cost of housing that it has really shifted the politics. There have been a bunch of state bills in California that failed five years ago that made it easier to build housing, made it easier to build accessory dwelling units, lifted parking requirements, and other things that dwindled the supply of housing in California. And now that state has gotten religion about trying to get builders back to increase the supply of housing. So I think there's just a new political movement. It is a bipartisan issue on the left and the right. At the local level, especially, there has just been this religion that we have to make it easier to build houses and increase the supply of homes. We are probably 4 million, 5 million units short of where we need to be, just given the demographics. Frum: Yeah. Well, if we were having this discussion 10 years ago, 2015, what we would've said is, The outlook for housing is exciting because the autonomous vehicle is almost here. And when it gets here, people won't need to have their own individual parking places anymore because these autonomous vehicles will be rolling around the city. It'll be robot Uber for everybody, at least in any major place that's got any population density. You'll press the button for the robot Uber, it'll be there in eight minutes, and you will not need a parking space and that will cut $40,000 or $50,000 off the price of a condo. What has happened to that hope? Kelman: Mania. So, the classic realtor move when you can't afford to live in the city is to look in the suburbs and then to look in the exurbs, so people's commutes just get longer and longer and longer. And at some point the rubber band always breaks, where people just aren't willing to live in New Jersey and commute into Manhattan. But now because of Zoom and maybe because of autonomous vehicles, at some point we are going to see people who are more tolerant of longer commutes. We have certainly had these conversations with customers and been surprised. There are people living in Sacramento who commute into San Francisco, and that's because they're only coming to work a couple of days a week. But it's also because the cost of housing is just insane in San Francisco. And I think there's probably a broader trend here, which is that it used to be that the politics of housing were toxic in San Francisco, New York, LA, and Seattle. But if you went to Indiana or Chicago or Florida, there it was still possible to work a middle-class job and get a starter home. So the American dream died in different places at different rates until the pandemic, and then all of a sudden you saw LA's housing problem come to Indiana, where people showed up with Monopoly money from LA saying, I don't care if the house is $300,000 or $500,000; it's easy for me to afford. And so I think now the housing crisis isn't just a local political issue; it's a national political issue, and it did, I think, contribute to some of the economic anxiety that was nationwide. Previously, I think you felt like if you were living in San Francisco, your kids had to go to Harvard and then to Yale and major in computer science and get a job at Google and become a VP if they had any hope of buying a house in the same city they were raised in. Now I think that anxiety has spread to other parts of the country, and that's why I think there's a broader consensus that we need to do something about housing in America. We need to build more housing. We need to deregulate a little bit. Frum: Well, from your vantage point, as the intermediary between buyers and sellers—if I said, Okay, we got the governors of the states here, with their notepads open, ready to take dictation, what are the top two, three, even four steps you'd recommend to make it easier to buy, build housing, and make housing cheaper? Kelman: Almost all zoning laws. So zoning. Frum: Be specific. What would you change? Kelman: Well—and this is an issue where I think Donald Trump has been on the wrong side of the issue—but some places only allow single-family homes, so they don't allow density. You can't build an apartment building. You can't build a condo building, and that's because rich people like to have less density, fewer cars on the road. There's a certain kind of neighborhood that's a leafy neighborhood. And so in the past you would see Republican homeowners really argue for zoning laws that made it very difficult to build a house. And then on the left, the issue that people really fought for were some kinds of rent controls, which discouraged us from building rental housing. And so the zoning laws that were popular on the right, the rental controls that were popular on the left—both of those need to go. We've already talked about the parking minimums, but mostly it's just the approval times. So if you talk to builders, they will say that it's just so much easier to build a house in Arizona than it is in California even though the housing shortage is so much more severe in California. And if you look at what drove California's boom, Orange County used to be orange groves, and then the city made some unholy alliance with the builder to turn the whole thing into a suburb, and they built houses faster than at any point in America. And I just think, we may not need that rate, but we need something like it if we are to give hope to a new generation of Americans. My broader argument is that I think this will be good, not just for housing, but I do think we need to upgrade the American economy so that it's ready for the 21st century. And if we are going to do that, we need to start saying yes to solar and wind and nuclear power, to high-speed rail, and all sorts of other projects. Liberal cities are going to fail if they can't get stuff done. And the sharp end of that spear has been this YIMBY movement. This 'yes, in my backyard' movement. So I think that's the hope for progressive politics. Frum: I think one of the things that people often lose sight of—we talk about housing building. People don't understand that houses fall apart. We lose housing every year, a certain percentage. It's a physical asset; it deteriorates over time. And so the idea that—and this is the thing that I think the rent controls understand—that the housing is dropping out of the market all the time because it's aged; it's dilapidated. And you either need to tear it down and build something new or you need to invest, in order to upgrade it. But in either case, you don't just build once and then forget. And the owner isn't just clipping coupons. The owner is having to, if you want to maintain that unit, actively reinvest all the time to maintain its quality. And so it's not just build and forget. One of the reasons that you could be able to say, well, we don't have a lot of natural population growth. Immigration is slowing down; why 4 or 5 million units? You see this in big cities. A lot of things are just dropping out of the market. The building falls down. There's a number—I'm going to forget what it is—of the number of apartments in New York that are rent-stabilized and vacant. The building is beneath the city's code, and so it's not allowed to be inhabited, but the landlord can't afford to renovate it because it's rent stable, and that's tens of thousands of units in the city of New York. Now, not everybody has crazy rent-stabilization schemes, but everybody has the problem of housing deterioration, which is not something that I think that a lot of people in the YIMBY argument world—the YIMBY people might get it—but not everyone understands. Or remembers, I should say. People understand it once you explain it. Kelman: One thing that people forget about home-price corrections is that it's not just that the same asset is selling for less money because of the laws of supply and demand; that happens, but if you looked in past corrections like 2008, 2009, and actually walked through the houses, you would see that they were run-down, that nobody had lived in them for six or 12 months, that there had been a foreclosure. So the actual quality of these housing assets across America declined even as the price for the same house also declined. So there were two factors that drove this wealth destruction during the last major price correction, which was in the great financial crisis. And so now, if you look at what the mayor of Detroit has been talking about, there are taxes for investors who own blighted properties. It's sort of a use-it-or-lose-it tax—that you have to invest to make the property really livable or you have to sell it because there's sort of a vacant-property tax that's quite punitive. Frum: And so that forces turnover in the marketplace. Kelman: Yeah. And I think there's a broader issue here. Of course I'm an advocate for turnover in the marketplace because we're a brokerage and we make money every time there's a trade, but to me it's bigger than that. What has made the American experiment so dynamic is this idea that when Flint, Michigan, goes through a downturn because we're just not making as many cars as we used to in America, people eventually move. That is the story of the Okies going to California in a John Steinbeck novel. But if you look at the likelihood that an American will live and die in the same town in which he was born, that has actually increased. David Frum: My Atlantic colleague Yoni Appelbaum has a very important book about this called Stuck. Kelman: Yeah. Frum: I think the figure that Yoni cites is—now, we're an older country than we used to be, on average, so you'd expect a little less movement. If you adjust for age, if you look at people in the equivalent age group, an American is about—if I remember Yoni's book correctly—about half as likely to move at their peak moving years than a comparable American was in the 1980s. We're not talking about pioneer days, we're talking about the 1980s, when there were personal computers and airbags in cars and— Kelman: (Laughs.) It's not so long ago! We were both alive then. Frum: A lot of channels on TV. Disco was dead already. (Laughs.) And in the 1980s, Americans at the peak years of moving were twice as likely to move as Americans—and housing prices have to be a huge part because once you get a house, you think, and especially when you move from a depressed area to a thriving area, that the housing hit that you have to take to move from Flint to wherever the jobs are today is so terrible that people say, Well, here in Flint I may not have a job, at least I have a roof. Kelman: Yeah, and here's where I really will be teaching my book. Redfin exists to lower the fees paid to a real-estate agent. If you couple the fees paid to an agent with the lender fees and the title and escrow fees, it's about half of your down payment, and so there's this conventional wisdom that you need to live at a house for seven years before you offset those fees and get the appreciation necessary to make it a profitable decision to own a home. And those fees should be half of what they are. If you look at what it costs to trade a stock or what it costs to trade almost any other asset, all markets have become more liquid except the real-estate market. And real-estate liquidity is more important to American society because it determines where we live, where we send our kids to school, who our neighbors are. The demographics of the country are really stuck. Frum: There is a lot of inefficiency in the housing market. And that can be fixed by technology and transparency. Kelman: I think so. It's been a slow road to make real estate more efficient, because it's a cooperative industry. So what that means is that you have one agent representing the seller and another agent representing the buyer. And if you were to replace one of those real-estate agents with some kind of chatbot, I think the other would take offense. And so nobody wants a disruptive real-estate agent, because you worry that somehow you'll lose access to the club, and it still is a club that's running the U.S. housing market, that gates access to the most exclusive listings in the best neighborhoods. And so I think people are very risk averse. Homebuyers are very risk averse about working with different types of real-estate agents. And I am not one who thinks that the real-estate agent will be automated out of existence—I tried to do that when I first got into this business—but I do think that technology can make the process much more efficient. Redfin has proved that in part. We charge half the fee. Our agents are three times more productive, but we still only have about 1 percent market share, and that's because people are skittish—skittish about working with a different kind of real-estate agent. Frum: Yeah. As we wind this up, I want to deal with an argument that you hear a lot if you like the work of Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein. You've seen them caught up to this argument with people who want to personalize the problems in the real-estate market and say, The problem here is not zoning laws. The problem is not interest rates. The problem is that builders are greedy. They're wicked people, and they're colluding in wicked ways to make housing less available to others. And this is ultimately a cause for moral reform rather than technical reform. I've put that in a kind of unsympathetic way because it's pretty obvious I don't think much of the argument, but let's hear from someone who's there and knows. Is there any possible truth to the argument that what is going on here is some kind of conspiracy by home builders to oppress America? Kelman: (Laughs.) I don't think so. I mean, I've been to home-builder conferences and it's a bunch of guys wearing cowboy boots. Most of them are Republicans. But they are trying to make money, and the way that they make money is by building more houses, and they are very much in favor of trying to build as many houses as they can. So I think there's some hostility to rent controls because it makes it harder to build properties for rent. But mostly these are people who are very pro-immigration. These are people who are very pro-housing. They got their clock cleaned in 2007 because they were building a massive number of units at very low price points with very skinny margins. And you just have to have a little bit of sympathy for them. They're making a bet 18 to 36 months in advance of the demand. They have to buy the land; they have to get all the materials; they have to get the labor and build the house—and to stick their neck out that far, they have to believe that they're going to be able to get the project done. And so when they encounter political resistance to that, they simply build somewhere else. That's why there's been so much construction in Florida and Texas and less in some progressive states. And so I do think, you know, the Derek Thompson, Ezra Klein argument that we should judge liberal governance by its ability to actually get things done and the simplest way to lower housing prices is to bring those builders back—there's no conspiracy here. They're just trying to figure out where they can build properties. Frum: Let me finish by asking you a little bit about change in the—if we think of the house as a technology, it's an especially conservative technology. Human life changes rapidly, but people still want dining rooms or think they do, even though they don't eat in dining rooms anymore. They want a lawn, even as it becomes ever more unaffordable and difficult to maintain and even as they move to climates where lawns don't make sense. A lawn in Arizona—tough problem. We talked about the possible elimination—of how the autonomous car might liberate us from the need to have a parking spot for every high-rise unit. If there are autonomous cars and you don't need to own your own car, you don't need the parking spot. Are there other places where the technology of the house, as we know it, could change? I mean, do you put any stock on this idea that young people might be attracted to a kind of, like, clubhouse living where you own your bedroom, you own your bathroom, but you don't necessarily own your kitchen or your public spaces? Do any of those technologies hold promise or do you think that's a lot of lifestyle-section talk that people—in the end, people want the house that they grew up in? Glenn Kelman: I do think it's a bunch of baloney. You hear about it every once in a while, and I'm just too old, David. I think that people say that they're open to all sorts of alternative living arrangements, and then they have a couple of kids and they want the same thing that everybody else does. So the change in the floor plan that we've seen has been the second master bedroom because so many people now have their parents helping them raise their kids, helping them buy the house. There's a lot of nepo homebuyers where the parents kicked in half the down payment and they just have an extra bedroom because they spend months of the year with that family helping to raise the kids. So that's maybe the only major change in the floor plan. And then the change in the process is, you should just remember that as we talk about how to bring manufacturing back to America, there is one asset that has to be manufactured in America. It's 20 percent of GDP, and it is the house. There are different parties that have tried to do more of the construction in a factory where the house is built in one place and then shipped very short distances because the shipping is so expensive. But the cost of construction and the speed of construction come down. It's using lasers and all sorts of other computer data and engineering techniques to build actually higher-quality housing, where it's just to a higher degree of precision. There's just so much that we could do if we just made it easier to build houses. I think we could lower the cost. And, of course, the offset on that has just been the labor. It is a real issue that many of the people who build houses in America come from south of the border. And I have wondered—because the new immigration policies—if we are going to see, especially as we talk about AI and worry that men, especially, can't find the kinds of jobs we had 50 years ago, if more traditional Americans, nonimmigrant Americans are going to move into the construction industry. But that is going to be an issue. We'll see how it goes. Frum: Is there an immediate effect of immigration pending that rotation of the labor market? There are sections of the house-building process that, as I read it, are more immigrant driven than others. Like, roofers are more likely to be immigrants, especially illegal immigrants. Drywalling is very much an—and part of that, it should be said and to understand here what's going on, the dangerousness of the roofing job, which is one of the most dangerous jobs in America. And so that tends to be that—and this is where there is maybe a moral story—that you can invest in making the roofing process safer, or you can hire somebody who, if injured, has no right to complain. And a lot of builders are attracted to option B. And by the way, a lot of buyers are voting with their dollars to tell the builder, Don't invest in the cost of making the roofing process safer. Just hire someone who can't complain if he's hurt. Kelman: Yeah, well, I hope that isn't the only solution. I don't know that it's just danger or even low wages or the willingness to do hard work. There are also craft-level jobs that have been staffed by immigrants—so people who make cabinets, people who do electricity. Americans aren't going into trades at the levels that they once did, and I think we should just account, at least for a moment, for the impact that tariffs have on housing. It's not just lumber; it's appliances. It's a wide range of goods that are imported from outside the country to build the house. And so it's just a tough time to be a builder right now because there's so much volatility in the economy and these people are making long-term bets where they buy land years ahead of actually trying to get a sale. And so if your whole supply chain and your labor market have been disrupted, it's just harder and harder to make that bet. Frum: Okay. Here's where I want to end. I want you to think about someone who's 28, 30, 31, who's confident that they're going to keep their job for a little while so they don't have the immediate fear, I'm going to lose my job, which many people have right now. But let's say you don't have that fear, but they don't own a home. What's the outlook for them? Can you say something hopeful to them about their path ahead? And any advice for them about where they should be looking? Kelman: My hope is that for the first time since 2012, home prices are coming down, and I think that trend is going to continue into 2026. And so maybe time is on your side. It also seems likely that rates are going to come down, at least somewhat. And so I don't think there's going to be some revolution that lets you buy a home for half the cost in three years. But I do think that after years and years of home prices going up, at least since 2012, homebuyers are going to get a break. And I'm really glad that you are. Frum: Thank you. Thanks for talking to us, Glenn. We're so grateful to you for your candor and your time. Kelman: Yeah, David, it's good to see you. [ Music ] David Frum: Thanks so much to Glenn Kelman for his fascinating insights into the U.S. housing market. Thanks to all of you for listening and viewing. If you enjoy this program and the content, I hope you'll share it as widely as you can on whatever platform you use. As always, the best way to support the work of this program and of all of us at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you'll consider doing that. And for now, goodbye and see you again next week. Thank you for watching and listening to the David Frum program.
6 hours ago
South Korean president will meet Japanese leader ahead of summit with Trump
SEOUL, South Korea -- South Korean President Lee Jae Myung will meet Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba in Tokyo next week before flying to Washington for a summit with President Donald Trump, underscoring how Trump's push to reset global trade is drawing the often-feuding neighbors closer. Lee's two-day visit to Japan Aug. 23–24 will be an opportunity to deepen personal ties with Ishiba and put bilateral relations on firmer ground. Their talks will center on strengthening trilateral cooperation with Washington, promoting 'regional peace and stability,' and addressing other international issues, presidential spokesperson Kang Yu-jung said Wednesday. Their meeting will come weeks after South Korea and Japan secured trade deals with Washington that shielded their trade-dependent economies from Trump's highest tariffs. The separate agreements negotiated their rates of reciprocal duties down to 15% from the originally proposed 25%, but only after pledging hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. investments. Lee and Ishiba previously met on the sidelines of the June G7 meetings in Canada, where they called for building a future-oriented relationship and agreed to cooperate closely on various issues including trade and countering North Korea's nuclear and missile programs. Relations between the two U.S. allies often have been strained in recent years over grievances stemming from Japan's brutal colonization of the Korean Peninsula before the end of World War II. South Korea's previous conservative president, Yoon Suk Yeol, made active efforts to repair ties with Tokyo, including a major compromise on compensation issues related to Korean victims of Japanese wartime slavery, aiming to bolster trilateral security cooperation with Washington against North Korean threats. But Yoon's presidency was cut short by his brief imposition of martial law in December, which led to his ouster and imprisonment, leaving uncertainty over Seoul-Tokyo relations under Lee, who has long accused Japan of clinging to its imperialist past and hindering cooperation. Since taking office in June after winning the early presidential election, Lee has avoided thorny remarks about Japan, instead promoting pragmatism in foreign policy and pledging to strengthen Seoul's alliance with Washington and trilateral cooperation with Tokyo. There also have been calls in South Korea to boost collaboration with Japan in responding to Trump, who has unsettled allies and partners with tariff hikes and demands they reduce reliance on the U.S. while paying more for their own defense. Following his meeting with Ishiba, Lee will travel to Washington for an Aug. 25 summit with Trump, which his office said will focus on trade and defense cooperation. His meeting with Trump comes with concerns in Seoul that the Trump administration could shake up the decades-old alliance by demanding higher payments for the U.S. troop presence in South Korea and possibly move to reduce it as Washington shifts more focus on China.
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
Buyout giant Blackstone lines up top job for Sunak lieutenant
Wall Street titan Blackstone is lining up a former key lieutenant of Rishi Sunak to join its European operations just months after the former Prime Minister was previously linked to the firm. Lord Petitgas, a former Wall Street banker, is being considered for a senior role at the US private equity giant. He stepped down from his position advising Mr Sunak following last year's general election defeat for the Conservative Party. The former prime minister hired Lord Petitgas as his business and investment tsar in 2023, after he spent three decades at Morgan Stanley. Lord Petitgas ran Morgan Stanley's investment bank from 2007 before becoming head of international in 2018. French-born Lord Petitgas – who was nominated for a life peerage last year by Mr Sunak's government – had ties with Blackstone during his time in Downing Street, organising a 2023 business summit which counted the company as a key backer. The former banker was Mr Sunak's key link with the UK business community, orchestrating meetings and round tables with leading FTSE 100 bosses. It comes after speculation that Mr Sunak was also being lined up for a top role at Blackstone, which is one of the world's largest investment funds. It was founded in the 1980s as an offshoot of fund manager BlackRock. Mr Sunak was last year photographed with a shovel breaking ground at Blackstone's new Mayfair headquarters alongside the private equity giant's billionaire founder Stephen Schwarzman. During the event, Mr Sunak joked 'where's my office?' – prompting speculation that he could be on course to join the company once he left government. Mr Sunak is also reportedly friendly with Blackstone's Lionel Assant, its most senior leader in Europe, both having worked together at Goldman Sachs when they were young men starting out as junior analysts. However, Mr Sunak has since joined Goldman Sachs as an adviser, returning to the bank in his first major role outside of politics since losing last year's election. Blackstone has stakes in numerous UK businesses including the National Exhibition Centre Group and Haven Holidays. It previously owned Merlin Entertainments, the parent company of amusement parks and attractions including Alton Towers and Madame Tussauds. Europe is a key market for Blackstone, with Mr Schwarzman pledging to invest at least $500bn across the continent over the next decade. Its new HQ, overlooking Berkeley Square, is set to house 500 staff. A Blackstone spokesman declined to comment. Lord Petitgas could not be reached for comment. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
