Why in the world would you only show rent as a percentage of median household income from 2006, the peak of the housing bubble? That's actually the crisis; everybody's rent went up during a financial bubble, the bubble popped, everybody's rent stayed the same.<p>And why would you measure median rents against median household incomes anyway instead of against median individual incomes? The median household can grow and shrink depending on housing cost pressure. Maybe the median household is 1.8 median incomes now rather than 1.2, but this statistic wouldn't pick that up.<p>These statistics seem carefully crafted to paint a particular picture, not selected to paint the most complete picture. And then I notice the author and the venue, and wonder why I wasted time on this comment.
In the UK we too have actually more housing stock than households. This amazed me - but it is the age old problem of aggregating national statistics to look at regional problems.<p>The problem is the houses are not in places people want to live anymore. The jobs aren't there. The communities aren't there.<p>So yes there is a housing crisis where the jobs are <i>or</i> there is a lack of jobs and community crisis where the houses are.<p>Once way or another it's a problem
This shows median rents and income moving roughly together, and claims that therefore rents haven't gotten more expensive. But people choose places to live that are affordable for them, say around 40% of income. When rents rise, people move to smaller and crappier places they can afford.<p>So rents could rise 10x per square foot, and when the dust settled people would end up paying about 40% of their income for a place 1/10th the size.<p>The rent crisis manifests in people living in small, crappy places far from their work, not in any of the statistics presented here.
The current top three comments all seem to be generalizing from personal experience, and the experience seems to come from high-rent areas. (Given the HN demographic, probably the Bay Area.)<p>This is not a constructive response to an article based on aggregate national statistics. If the article seems wrong to you, at least ask about statistics that might refute it. For bonus points, find those statistics yourself.<p>Personally I live in a very high rent area (Berkeley), all the houses anywhere near me cost more than $1 Million, but I believe the statistics. To quickly check you can look at rents and house prices in Fresno CA, Mobile AL, Duluth MI, St. Louis MO, Austin TX, etc. etc. The internet has a wonderful set of resources to help us get out of our bubble.<p>If you want to argue that rents in the Bay Area should be more like those in St Louis, fine! That is a policy question we can work on, but it will be a long slog to get where you want to go.
The real crisis is that policymakers in Washington are hellbent on pursuing two diametrically opposite housing/real estate goals:<p>1. House prices will increase to generate appreciation (through 5:1 or more leverage) that households can tap into to finance consumption. Mortgage rates will be kept as low as possible through programs like QEX and abandonment of QT. Tax code will be kept in a state that allows at least the more extravagant spenders to claim a mortgage deduction on income taxes, stimulating home buying.<p>2. House prices will be kept low so that new families can afford to buy a house. Zoning, highway construction subsidies, and suburbanization tax giveaways will keep the dream of a standalone house alive as long as possible, unsustainable economics be damned.<p>It should be obvious, but house prices that routinely outstrip consumer inflation are incompatible with affordability.
The New York Times reveals its myopia. One of the biggest demographic trends in the country is migration away from high cost states to low cost states: <a href="https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5a57cab528eecc1d008b4616-750-563.png" rel="nofollow">https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5a57cab528eecc1d008b4...</a>. Out of the fastest growing metro areas in the country, most are places where rents remain very reasonable: <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthasharf/2018/02/28/full-list-americas-fastest-growing-cities-2018" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthasharf/2018/02/28/full-l...</a>.<p>If you rank the metro areas by population, the median American lives in Richmond, VA or Louisville, KY. These places don’t have a housing crisis. High rents are a self-inflicted problem affecting a handful of metro areas with a minority of the population.
According to this Vox interview with Jenny Schuetz (<a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/5/17/18628267/jenny-schuetz-weeds-interview" rel="nofollow">https://www.vox.com/2019/5/17/18628267/jenny-schuetz-weeds-i...</a>), there are two housing crises: the superstar city crisis of million dollar homes due to exclusionary zoning, and rising rents for low-income households in the rest of the country. According to Kevin Erdmann, the crisis in the rest of the country was caused by federal policies that restricted lending to low-income households, forcing them to rent for more than they would have paid in mortgage (<a href="https://www.mercatus.org/tags/housing-affordability-series" rel="nofollow">https://www.mercatus.org/tags/housing-affordability-series</a> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Shut-Out-Shortage-Recession-University/dp/1538122146" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Shut-Out-Shortage-Recession-Universit...</a>).<p>When Kevin Drum looks at national medians, he entirely misses both of these problems.
For everything prices per unit are decreasing in time, from cars to computers, while housing costs the same percentage of income and that is considered a good thing? Not in my world, there is no productivity increase reflected in cost reductions? Are houses increasing the cost due to increases in features?<p>For this year or this century, housing prices are economically absurd, unless they are seen as a "pay as much as you can afford" type of product and this indicates a supplier market that can be fixed by drastically increasing supply.<p>In a country that deregulated as USA, housing regulations are among the most strict in the world. Is it a surprise costs are very high?
I live in Northern Virginia, where 4 of the top 5 richest counties in the US are located (with the 5th being just across DC into Maryland).<p>The problem is not so much that my income doesn't cover my rent. The problem is that my income doesn't cover the rent for the people who fulfill the services I need to live here.<p>Just as an example, we pay almost as much as our rent for daycare for our two small children. And our daycare providers have to commute from quite a distance to be able to afford anywhere to live. Or they still live with large, extended families. We really like our daycare, and the folk who work there are wonderful. I would personally feel better paying them more, but that's just where we are, the market we are in has settled on this being the "top end" of the childcare market.<p>We're not doing gangbusters, but we're also not doing bad. A few of our friends are doing better than us and they have private nannies for their kids. We can't do that. Most of our friends aren't doing as well as us and I almost want to quit my job just to get their kids out of the places they can afford. There is a big gap between "the best" daycare center and "the middle". We were briefly in "one of the better" daycares while we were wait-listed for our first choice and it was hell.<p>I don't need a place more affordable for me to live. I need a place more affordable for my mechanic to live. For my grocer and my barber. I want to know that the guy teaching my kid to swim is not about to fall asleep from working three jobs.<p>Beyond that, I want to know that the people fixing my roads can live here, too (hell, at this point, I'd like just anyone to fix the roads. I don't understand how we can be so "rich" on paper and yet I need to take my car in every 6 months for a pothole-related repair). I want the folks taking care of the homeless to not be a missed paycheck away from being on the streets themselves. I want my city counsel positions to be accessible to anyone other than folks with their own private law practices.<p>Median rent vs. median income isn't enough. It has to be accessible for everyone who needs to work in the local economy. And that's the problem. We really only have rents that fit the paychecks of the richest people here. There aren't many options for affordable housing.
"The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."<p>Thomas Sowell
This article really rubbed me the wrong way. And I don't have statistics to back up my opinion only personal experience. First it asks the question is rent rising way faster then income then states no it is only rising slightly faster then income. Okay but lets not forget that millions of Americans are living check to check and any loss of income effects their ability to live. So even a slight increase is cause for concern. Next it talks about rental vacancy. I really don't know how that works and if there are a bunch of empty houses around but I do know around here people are begging on Facebook for rentals. If your budget is in the thousands no problem you can rent something tomorrow but that is not the people we are talking about here. We are talking about the poor and there is definitely a problem finding housing. I am employed with a decent job and still had to move back in with my folks. A place that would house me and my kids would set me back about 1400$. I make a couple thousand a month if I am lucky so how can I afford to move out? I could work more hours and see my kids less I guess. I could sacrifice some of the food I personally eat. Perhaps not take the kids for an outing ever would save me the money for housing. Or if I don't need any medicine then I could afford housing. I certainly do a lot of home cooking that helps me keep the little money I have but still not enough for housing.<p>Where do the sacrifices end that allows the average person to live comfortably in a home? In my opinion there is a housing crisis.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics. What does 'average' mean, in a country where the 4 richest billionaires have as much money as the poorest 160 million?<p>"The distribution of U.S. household income has become more unequal since around 1980, with the income share received by the top 1% trending upward from around 10% or less over the 1953–1981 period to over 20% by 2007.... While median household income has a tendency to increase up to four persons per household, it declines for households beyond four persons."
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...</a><p>Clearly rentals have -risen sharply- in the past few years. In -some- places, the number of people who can't afford -any- available rental unit has increased rapidly.
<i>Nor has the nation “lost” 4 million low-rent apartments.</i><p>Since something like the 1970s, we've outright eliminated about a million SROs and largely zoned out of existence the creation of new <i>Missing Middle</i> housing. Historically, single young people with starter salaries routinely lived in SROs or boarding houses. Now, we de facto expect most young people to rent a place designed for a nuclear family and get roommates.<p>New homes have more than doubled in size since the 1950s and the news is constantly filled with articles about the homeless problem.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy</a><p><a href="https://missingmiddlehousing.com" rel="nofollow">https://missingmiddlehousing.com</a><p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_Middle_Housing" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_Middle_Housing</a>
This piece verges on daft or disingenuous. The major problems are major cities (SF, NYC, Seattle, LA, and so on) that have artificially restricted housing since the '70s (<a href="https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-the-1970s/" rel="nofollow">https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-...</a>) and yet we've also seen increasing economic returns since then to those superstar cluster cities (<i>The Triumph of the City</i> is a good and readable description: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/books/review/Silver-t.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/books/review/Silver-t.htm...</a>).<p>So yeah, there's no housing crisis in Eastern Oregon, but there are also no jobs and none of the economic clustering and spillover effects that one gets from superstar cities. So you can try to live in cities and first-tier suburbs where the jobs are, but where exclusionary zoning has made housing ungodly expensive (<a href="https://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-explained/exclusionary-zoning-what-is-it-and-why-does-it-matter" rel="nofollow">https://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-explained/exclu...</a>), or you can live in the boonies where there are no jobs but (relatively) cheap housing.<p>Those of you who are going to reply about remote work: remote work is lovely, but it doesn't generate knowledge spillovers and has a bunch of other problems as well. See again the Glaeser book. It is not a practical, mass solution, although I'm glad it works well for you.<p>Part of this problem can and should be solved at the state level, but DC should also tell states and municipalities that, if they don't end exclusionary zoning, they're also not getting federal highway funding and other federal transit funding. That's the stick DC has.
Of course there is a good ratio of housing units to households nationally. Total population isn't growing that much, and homes aren't being destroyed en masse... how could it be otherwise?<p>The point is that we're undersupplied in growing economies; of course we're also oversupplied in shrinking ones.
The guy talks about millionaire country, dismissing these areas.<p>It takes a lot of poor people to support a millionaire's lifestyle and business.
The housing crises that exists in many cities is the direct result of NIMBY bylaws and regulations. So yes, state and federal governments can mitigate these.