Posted on 11/22/2022 9:28:24 AM PST by grundle
The National Association of Realtors compared the issuance of housing permits with the number of jobs created in 174 different metro areas. It found that only 38 metro regions are permitting enough new homes to keep up with job growth; in more than a dozen areas, including New York, the Bay Area, Boston, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Miami, and Chicago, just one new home is getting built for every 20-plus jobs created. The NAR estimates an “underbuilding gap” of as many as 7 million units.
Enrico Moretti of UC Berkeley and Chang-Tai Hsieh of the University of Chicago wanted to know how much GDP and productivity the United States gives up by throttling the housing supply in its biggest cities. In a blockbuster 2019 paper, they found that if New York, San Jose, and San Francisco—just those three cities—had the permitting standards of Atlanta or Chicago over the previous several decades, the U.S. economy would have been roughly $2 trillion bigger in 2009. American households would have earned an average of $3,685 more a year.
In such a world, they estimated in some associated work, 53 percent of Americans would not live where they are currently living. San Francisco would have an employed population 510 percent bigger than it does today—implying an overall population of something like 4 million, rather than 815,000, with 2 million housing units instead of 400,000. The Bay Area as a whole would be five times its current size, the economists estimated. The average city would lose 80 percent of its population. And New York would be a startling eight times bigger. Some back-of-the-envelope math (mine, not theirs) suggests that the United States would have—deep breath here—perhaps 75 million more housing units in its productive cities than it currently has.
(Excerpt) Read more at web.archive.org ...
That would solve a good part of the problem.
What permitting standards? My experience in Atlanta was there essentially no permitting standards, and if there were there was no inspection to back them up.
A tax paying citizen. There are many people here that pay no taxes.
House flippers artifically drive up the price of housing. It’s gone past functional demand, and turned into raw speculation.
Not long ago, when you arrived on our shores, you had to show proof that you were going to be financially independent and a working, contributor to society. Our fathers knew what they were doing.
So let’s give the freeloading low I.Q. bumbs below the border another reason to come here. A free house.
Sales tax, income tax, FICA, property tax?
Oh…but building is not Green. Tent cities and slums are far more environmentally friendly.
And besides, they really aren’t “homeless encampments” they are Democrat vote harvesting centers.
Build more housing of all sizes
aye
That may be the correct answer, but it’s not the one they were looking for.
Get rid of all the people that are here illegally. That will free up housing immediately.
Also, if big investment firms were severely limited in the number of purchases converted to rental units, we might see another substantial closing of the housing gap. (Maybe expand antitrust laws?)
Maybe if we stopped importing millions of invaders each year the housing “shortage” would go away?
“You will own nothing, and be happy...or else.”
The only way many of these young people will ever own a home is to inherit one. By the time the next generation comes along it will be much worse.
And here is America, with millions of homeless, they spend trillions on, “Compassionate” ten year long wars where we won nothing but debt and death, all while routinely giving away hundreds of billions to GD foreign countries.
I find this flat out obscene and criminal.
The Cheap Labor Express crowd will tell you that over 80% of the construction labor force are comprised of illegal aliens.
Increasing wages sufficient to attract legal citizens will drive up cost/price.
Also, requiring Developers to increase their contributions to water supplies and school construction costs, would be more equitable to tax payers. But that too would drive up cost/price.
If you want homes to be more affordable zoning laws need to be changed. The suburbs like to use zoning to make it so only certain types of housing can be built. For example larger lots encourage larger homes for a builder to recoup costs. Density matters too. By making most everything low density a suburb can have a town of nearly all single family detached homes. This despite the market wanting more choices. Such as townhouses or row homes. Other types of housing is made illegal outright. Such as attic apartments, apartments over a garage or splitting a house into multiple units. All of these scenarios are wanted by the market as the current way of doing business simply makes homes too expense for millions of Americans.
But the NIMBY effect is strong (NOT IN MY BACKYARD). Suburbanites are selfish in this regard imho as a real estate professional. In addition to the housing stock I’ve already mentioned, what is needed is more apartment construction. Again, in suburbia that is often worse than swearing. God forbid someone put up an apartment building with 3-bedrooms. A family will move in and they’ll need services like schools! Such a tragedy that a poor family would dare move into a suburb that only wants ppl in single family detached homes that will have a larger tax bill.
So permits for 3-bedroom apartment complexes get denied. The zoning nazis attack anyone who makes an attic apartment or something similar. And people at the lower end of the economic ladder suffer as they MUST pay a much higher percentage of their salary for housing.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.