The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine

Yeah this is such an interesting public policy issue. What's interesting to me is I become aware of it and maybe the last four to five years and it's become well documented. But I don't recall reading much about an impending housing shortage prior to that. Customarily, before something becomes a crisis, we read think pieces about it for years. And obviously there's the NIMBYism issues but besides that I'm not aware of what the big problems are from a public policy standpoint. I'm including zoning in the NIMBY category.

But from a public policy timeline, it feels like it snuck up on us. I want to read some more deep dives on both the cause and more in-depth analysis on potential solutions. I feel very uninformed about a significant issue.

 

Some of those urban centers seem pretty tapped out, in terms of available space. I mean, how far out can the suburbs of NY/DC/Chicago go? California is already building (or built) in places that never should have been built out in the first place (due to fire risk or lack of water). If we are looking at major markets like that, seems like constraints on growth are pretty obvious. More of the potential “growth” is likely in redeveloping old or blighted areas or in increasing the density of housing.

In a strange way, we almost need some Chinese “ghost city” action. Not just the govt just doing it unilaterally, but getting some developers and major employers in a public-private partnership. There’s plenty of developable space in this country, but businesses and people gravitate towards the already crowded and developed urban centers, and the coasts, and its simply expanding the concrete jungle outward. So what would trigger some “inland” growth or new growth? I guess at some point if people are priced out of places like CA they expand into Nevada and Arizona or from NYC/NJ down to South FL, but the same phenomenon happens when they run into the existing suburbia bottleneck in these “new” places.

 

Need to build vertically and more densely. Also, single family housing needs to be a thing of the past going forward.

 

In some places single family housing has long been a thing of the past
for all intents and purposes.

I don’t think the entire country is at that point (as I said, there actually is a lot of space in this country), but maybe some spots are transitioning to where the idea of continually expanding suburbia outward is not practical anymore. To grow, they will need to start developing up, not out.

 

We've got some influential people saying our birth rate is a crisis. I think some of them are really only worried about the birth rates of White Americans, but that's another issue. If we can't handle housing for people in existence, what would we do with a population boom?

 

If you want to increase the population, the main way to do it would be to have the incentives already there in terms of making it affordable, I think that would include housing. But all that would require a top-down government led response. The market certainly isnt going to do it if you can sell a single family home for ridiculous money and local governments dont change anything WRT zoning practices. Look at the backlash to something being done in Gainesville. Lots of vested interests have no interest in seeing zoning changes.

 

I see this in my work every day. It is a huge problem. We cant put a dent in it, and we do a lot.

 

Here is something that many people won't want to hear: part of the solution is the promotion of remote work. We need more housing, for sure, but we can't really build it within the cities. And as Bling rightly pointed out, there is an issue with just spreading further and further away and asking people to commute more and more (and that is before getting into the environmental impact of that).

We concurrently have two problems in this country: big cities where they have experienced massive increases in housing prices due to increased demand for residencies and some issues with meeting that quantity demand with the existing supply without huge price increases. At the same time, we are dealing with dying rural towns, which often have housing but no demand for that housing. This is helping to create the two worlds that we see reflected in our parties: Democrats are largely representing the cities and inner suburbs and are trying to deal with the problems of cities with their increasing density and prices that come with the dynamism of those environments. At the same time, Republicans are representing rural areas, where the population feels like the world is collapsing around them as everybody moves out, and the businesses leave, and they see nobody willing to help.

So why not encourage remote work in those dying communities? It allows the towns out there to stop hemorrhaging anybody with a real chance to make careers/lives for themselves in more economically dynamic metro areas (basically, anybody from rural areas who gets an education). It also might even encourage some people to move out to these towns that weren't originally from there, providing them extra economic development. Meanwhile, it lowers the constant pressure on the cities. It acts as a release valve to limit the pricing pressure on housing in cities.

Unfortunately, it appears that a group of people have tied remote work to laziness or have simply attached it to their own resentments about the world changing. So I'm not sure that we are in position to take advantage of this opportunity to solve two problems with one solution.

 

This is a carry over from the Great Recession, housing permits plummeted and have never caught up.
Remote work would help.
More Multi family housing would help.
The one no one talks about, think about how much quality real Estate is taken by restaurants because people don’t cook at home. It’s terribly inefficient health wise and cost wise as well. I think I posted last year that the average American family spends $3300 a year on eating out…so the economy would be way better with fewer restaurants. Pretty much applies to much of the service industry in general.

 

Curious as to why you think that?

 

density, density, and more density. it helps public transit work, decreases infrastructure and land costs, and supports more mixed use opportunities while allowing for open space in between dense pods of development. hard sell to the nimbys though

 

I figured you'd offer remote work in order to advocate for turning the huge amounts of office space we may no longer need into housing. Frankly, I think most people just don't want to live out in rural areas. They like having a lot of restaurant choices, grocery stores, and other places like that accessible to them. While I don't want to live in the heart of a city, I do like living in a suburb.

As a person who is able to work remotely as much as I want (and works remotely almost all of the time), I don't want to move to a rural area. I've lived in a rural area before as an adult. Was it terrible? No. But I don't want to give up all the conveniences I have now living where I am.

 

One way to lessen the crises would be to use technology and bring homes to market more quickly, and at a reduced cost, vs of the 12-18 months it takes now to build single family homes or 2-3 years or more for high rise construction.

https://www.builderonline.com/build...-neighborhood-of-3d-printed-homes-with-icon_o

Is stacked modular the future for affordable rental?

 

I wouldnt put much stock into housing right now. The lack of housing is not really a problem due to population, it's more of a problem with investment. Housing will start to decline once the Baby boomers start dying off. Lots of vacancies will occur, driving housing down. And the white population issues really isn't just a white problem, it's happening globally in developed countries and is on track for some of the emerging countries in Africa and Asia to have the same problem in the second half of the century.

 

Unless half of it is tied up in air bnb.

 

No thank you. I'm not quite ready for a world depicted in Blade Runner. Having 200,000 people crammed together in block housing will increase suicide rates by 7-fold. Have to be creative in how you build these megacities to make sure to include parks, and tons of sunlit spaces. But I'm staying put on my farm.

 

Lots of land in the Midwest

 

Annie Lowery is a great writer. One thing I would’ve liked to see addressed, although it was a short article, is the size of the house that most Americans now expect. Obviously we’re all colored by our own experience. But the expectation for any new construction Of square footage seems to be substantially greater than even 20 years ago, much less 50. That has to factor into the equation somehow, although her point is well taken on zoning restrictions somewhat driving that

 

A related piece in the Atlantic over “supply skepticism”, i.e., why it is so hard to accept the reality of the shortage. Some astute observations, which I know describe myself and our thinking on so many related issues

Why is housing different? Perhaps because the supply argument seems to defy lived experience. People look around their community and sense that a lot has changed. They see new homes and developments cropping up, even as prices keep rising. This eyewitness account results in people thinking that these new developments either do nothing to alleviate rising prices—or worse,actually cause prices to increase.

The UC researchers note that “the mass public tends to personalize and moralize economic phenomena.” Further, they cite a theory that because our brains evolved to engage in cooperative behavior in small groups, people tend to be better at building narratives that revolve around “detecting intentions and effort, and at policing turncoats” than at “systems-level thinking.” This bias could explain why so many Americans believe that inflation is largely the result of price gouging by greedy private companies, rather than sharp increases in demand for goods and services meeting supply shortages for those same goods and services. Or, more germane, why so many Americans believe that private equity is primarily responsible for the housing crisis (despite owning a near-negligible share of America’s housing stock) or that developers are the only ones who will benefit if we reduce barriers to building new housing. Unsympathetic actors like private-equity firms or developers are easy to cast in a simple tale of good versus evil. What’s harder is conceptualizing the web of regulations, norms, and incentives that has led us to a supply issue with no obvious villain. (Harder still is recognizing the complicity of sympathetic actors like homeowners who have stood in the way of much-needed housing.)


Another factor behind shortage denialism and supply skepticism may be motivated reasoning. They both stem from a desire to reject the necessary policy solution. Building millions of homes is disruptive; it means changes to the built environment, acceptance of multifamily residences in more neighborhoods, and construction, lots and lots of construction. Some people are averse to construction at scale because their intuitions about density are binary: Either you have a major metropolis with supertalls stretching above you, or you have a quiet suburban road; there is no in between. Others are averse because they see developers and development as inherently bad, and thus promoting that as a solution to any problem feels wrong.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/us-housing-supply-shortage-crisis-2022/672240/