And I spent a few minutes looking at a CPI calculator and put the 2024 inflation-adjusted equivalent to our 1997 purchase price, and, well, there was one single-family match for a similar price, somewhat smaller than ours but with a larger lot and with remodeling that ours was missing.\u00a0 Otherwise, there are two condo choices with three bedrooms since virtually all the condos here are one or two bedrooms, from a time when they were intended for childless residents.<\/p>\n
I should also add that that the \u201chousing shortage\u201d rhetoric is also paired with \u201chousing affordability.\u201d\u00a0 But that label gets tossed around these days with an arbitrary definition:\u00a0 can every prospective renter or homebuyer find an apartment or home appropriate for their family size without paying more than 30% of their income?\u00a0 There\u2019s no magic to this threshold, and the definition of an \u201cappropriate\u201d home\/housing unit has also been shifting upwards over time, in terms of codes and national norms for the amount of square footage per occupant, demands such as air conditioning and sprinkler systems, the end of a \u201cboarding house\u201d or SRO with bathrooms or kitchen facilities down the hall, etc.\u00a0 Frequently when politicians or policy experts or nonprofit advocates talk about \u201caffordable housing,\u201d they are really referring to subsidized housing for those whose incomes are so low that there are no circumstances in which they could afford a home, regardless of whether market forces were allowed to work their magic of constructing supply sufficient for demand and regardless of whether land costs are a major or only trivial part of the construction, because, after all, there are hard constraints around the actual cost of constructing or rehabbing a home and keeping it maintained, with utilities turned on. In the same way as we give out food subsidies in the form of SNAP benefits without yammering on about \u201caffordable food,\u201d it\u2019s simply a euphemism to call government-funded or subsidized buildings which offer units for rent at below-market rates to low-income tenants, \u201caffordable\u201d rather than \u201csubsidized\u201d housing, and there\u2019s no particular reason why providing housing to the poor needs to be done through designated \u201caffordable\u201d\/subsidized buildings rather than through Section 8 vouchers, and why the proposals to help the poor don\u2019t increase the Section 8 budget instead.<\/p>\n
So how would I imagine a real \u201chousing shortage\u201d should be measured?\u00a0 It should be straightforward:\u00a0 the longer it takes a landlord to find a tenant for his apartment, the greater the likelihood is that he will cut rent.\u00a0 The longer a house is on the market, the more price cuts that house will have.\u00a0 Similarly, if a landlord believes he will rent the apartment easily at a higher rate, he won\u2019t hesitate to increase the rent, and the same is true for homes for sale, where in tight markets sellers will price under what they hope to ultimately get, in order to trigger a bidding war.\u00a0 Hence, \u201chousing shortage\u201d should be measured by having an insufficient ratio of vacant\/on the market housing units.\u00a0 We don\u2019t need more than that.<\/p>\n
That being said, what is the media and the experts saying?<\/p>\n
My search produced reporting in 2021 from CBNC<\/a> that<\/p>\n The U.S. is short 5.24 million homes, an increase of 1.4 million from the 2019 gap of 3.84 million, according to new research from Realtor.com.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But this is garbage reporting.\u00a0 All they do is calculate that<\/p>\n The U.S. Census found that 12.3 million American households were formed from January 2012 to June 2021, but just 7 million new single-family homes were built during that time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cHousehold formation\u201d is defined as \u201cwhen an individual moves out of a shared living situation.\u201d\u00a0 But that entire calculation is nonsensical, assuming as it does that every \u201chousehold\u201d should be living in a single-family home, and that 10 years prior, we had the \u201cright amount\u201d of homes.\u00a0 It\u2019s also a metric which is logically nonsensical \u2014 how can \u201cnew households\u201d be formed without homes of one kind or another for them to move into?<\/p>\n CNN provided an update of this claim in 2023, reporting that \u201cThe US housing market is short 6.5 million homes<\/a>\u201d again using this same premise.<\/p>\n Earlier in 2024, NPR reported<\/a> that the shortage of homes was \u201csomewhere between 4 and 7 million\u201d with a link to Pew<\/a>, but that link doesn\u2019t actually explain how it calculated that number, either, as the Pew report is about a survey about opinions on housing policy, with that shortage given in a paragraph about the reasons for concern.<\/p>\n It also turns out that must of the reporting is actually about \u201caffordable housing,\u201d for example, \u201cAddressing America\u2019s Affordable Housing Crisis<\/a>,\u201d which discusses the availability of housing for households with extremely low incomes, defined as either 30% of the area median income or the federal poverty level, and, again, with \u201caffordable\u201d defined as apartments with rents at 30% or less of income.\u00a0 Additionally, they only count \u201crental units with complete kitchen and plumbing,\u201d and they appear to consider adults with roommates to be \u201cdoubled-up\u201d and thus suffering from \u201cdoubled-up homelessness\u201d because they look at raw numbers.\u00a0 The report also introduces an additional definition, that a household is housing \u201ccost-burdened\u201d if, after paying for rent, they can\u2019t pay for their other basic needs \u2014 which, again, points to the fact that policy folks are promoting subsidized housing with the euphemism of \u201caffordable housing\u201d rather than simply recognizing that these folks are simply poor.<\/p>\n That being said, the actual Harris proposal, as reported at CNN<\/a> (because there doesn\u2019t appear to be an official document) primarily involved government subsidies, some directly to homebuyers in the form of $25,000 cash for first time home buyers as well as a $10,000 tax credit (so apparently $35,000 in total?), as well as a declaration that she would cause the building of $3 million new housing units, through tax incentives for builders, and a heavy emphasis on \u201caffordable housing.\u201d\u00a0 Do I think the $25,000 cash will just push up prices by $25,000?\u00a0 It\u2019s not that simple a calculus, but that alone isn\u2019t going to actually remedy a supply\/demand imbalance, and certainly won\u2019t fix issues for the very poor who just don\u2019t earn enough to pay their rent under any circumstances.<\/p>\n \u201cHousing shortage\u201d is a term that conventionally pops up with reference to historical events such as a war or natural disaster destroying housing, or in the past, communist countries putting people on decade-long waitlists because housing was centrally planned, or in rare instances, a particular town or region suddenly becoming jobs-rich, such as parts of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":18846,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[397,661,1509,1356],"class_list":["post-18834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-affordable-housing","tag-housing","tag-kamala","tag-kamala-harris"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"a](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2024\/08\/1200px-Albany_Houses-300x201.jpg\")
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