It certainly doesn't help that political responses to housing (lack of) affordability are commonly demand-side price games (limiting rent increases, subsidizing loans, tax rebates) that feel good but actually cause harm because they worsen the real problem shown here which is that demand growth outpaces supply growth.
Question for anyone who may know from experience: where are all the people coming from? It's a question everyone in my home city keeps asking after seeing all the new developments, and never really investigating an answer I guess.<p>They keep squishing in apartments and tract housing everywhere there's a postage stamp of land, and it's sold the next day. Even wayyy out in the rural county. My very quiet road was a traffic nightmare by the time I moved on.<p>The media/government report we're at or below the replacement birth rate, and while immigration exists, the people moving in aren't all exclusively immigrants by appearance. Further, the city reports modest growth on the census.<p>So, where are all the people coming from? I have to assume it's mostly elsewhere in the city due to census numbers, but no idea from where or how that makes sense.
My first home (bought 2014) is up 100% and my second home (bought 2019) is up 55% over purchase price.<p>It's unsustainable for this country to think that houses can be both (1) an appreciating investment and (2) affordable.<p>But in order for us to find long-term price stability, people like me must make peace with the idea of our houses _never_ appreciating beyond inflation.
I'm looking for a house now and the market is crazy, every house is subject to a bidding war and selling for at least 25% over asking, which sucks for folks who don't have the cash on hand to pay the difference (since the bank only covers so much). There is no way this is sustainable.<p>I looked into building a house and while its certainly possible its so expensive that everyone is trying to talk me out of it.<p>Why is it so expensive to build? is it mostly building materials or labor? Is usable land shrinking? Solve that problem and the houses will build themselves.<p>At the same time the new houses I'm seeing getting built in my area are a demonstration of the phrase "money can't buy taste". We have all this land to build and we choose to continue building badly-designed single family homes, mainly catering to the ultra rich in order to best recoup the building costs. I'm not against single family inherently but we should try more diverse housing options. It would be nice if we could switch it up and change zoning laws to allow mixed housing in new developments: imagine a set of small apartment blocks with retail on the ground floor, surrounded by well-planned single family units that emphasize walkable spaces and community. That would practically be as close to utopia as we could get in this country but nobody seems to have the vision to push that forward.
Do we really have a housing deficit? If you look at prices they indeed go up because nobody wants to sell and too many people have been wrongly convinced that buying is always a good idea.<p>If you look at rent on the other hand it has stabilized in most location. I was even able to negotiate a rent decrease last summer.<p>I'm not convinced we have a housing deficit. But I'm convinced that too many people are blindly buying at whatever prices, driving the prices irrationally up.
Not sure why a month old press release is being posted.<p>This was released today - <a href="https://zillow.mediaroom.com/2024-07-16-Nearly-1-in-4-sellers-cut-home-prices-as-inventory-grows" rel="nofollow">https://zillow.mediaroom.com/2024-07-16-Nearly-1-in-4-seller...</a><p>A buyer's market looms, brethren & sistren
My concern is that the market incentivizes building at the higher end. People who can "only" afford a 4m home will be helped by the home builders who will build plenty of 3m homes but the people who can only afford 400k are getting very few homes built for them.
Friendly reminder - Data released by Zillow, Redfin, and the likes is not regulated in any capacity. They choose the narrative that best fits their wallets.
Friendly reminder when talking about housing that:<p>1) in 2022, there were 16M homes just lying empty. <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/brendarichardson/2022/03/07/16-million-homes-lie-empty-and-these-states-are-the-vacancy-hot-spots/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/brendarichardson/2022/03/07/16-...</a><p>2) Around 5% of Americans own at least a second home (<a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/228894/people-living-in-households-that-own-a-second-home-usa/" rel="nofollow">https://www.statista.com/statistics/228894/people-living-in-...</a>) and given a US population of about 340M and, given the very kind presumption that: people *only* own a second home and every group that owns a second home has 2 people in it, that'd be 340M * 2.5% = 8.5M second homes.<p>3) "Investor Homes", which according to ( <a href="https://todayshomeowner.com/blog/guides/are-big-companies-buying-up-single-family-homes/" rel="nofollow">https://todayshomeowner.com/blog/guides/are-big-companies-bu...</a> ) tend to be the small houses that people want to buy account for about 22% of purchases *per year*; and they probably aren't selling them, so year over year that takes quite a few properties off the market.<p>We have *a lot* of spare homes if we incentivized real humans that will live in those properties themselves buying properties and more importantly disincentivized or even punished people and companies from owning second, third or more houses. Yes, many of those houses might be in undesirable places; but among 16M "just lying empty" and 8.5M "second homes", we could probably take a *huge* bite out of "4.5M" homes.<p>edit: I've edited the text twice now and I can't seem to get italics working, blah.
Asking why there isn't enough housing is like asking why water is wet. The answer is state/local government regulation.<p>There's an old saying "your margin is my opportunity" and I suspect that the current crop of homes that are built have decent margins, but in a deregulated market an entrepreneur could come in offer more affordable housing options with lower margins.<p>You can see this in vehicles. Nobody complains about the vehicle affordability problem because there are far fewer regulations in the transportation industry (don't get me wrong, there are regulations, but not a constraining as you see in the housing market). There's a vehicle at every price point. You got bikes, then ebikes, mopeds, scoters, motorcycles, sub compacts, compacts, full size, trucks, suvs, and all the way to crazy expensive sports cars.<p>You don't see that in house because affordable housing is not a good business. It's impossible to offer options at the lower end of the market because of zoning laws, environmental impact regulations, a difficult permitting process, nimby's, and affordable housing politicians that are really big proponents of affordable housing except "they have question about this particular housing project."<p>Here is a terrific video that everyone should watch that shows how insanely difficult it is to make affordable housing. A<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4</a><p>Sometimes what you need is less government regulation, not more.<p><i>edited sentence "You don't see that in house it's not a good business." to You don't see that in house because </i>affordable housing* is not a good business.