Posted on 01/06/2020 10:42:40 AM PST by karpov
Politicians bemoan the lack of affordable housing, but their policies often create the problem. Look no further than Oregon, where restrictive zoning and mandates have yielded the lowest rate of residential construction in decades.
Oregon’s population grew by nearly 400,000 between 2010 and 2019. But the state added a mere 37 housing permits for every 100 new residents, according to a report released last week by the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis. Economist Josh Lehner found that “while much of the attention is paid to rising housing costs, we know they are the symptom and not the cause of the disease. The chief underlying cause is the ongoing low levels of new construction this decade.”
Mr. Lehner adds that “on a population growth-adjusted basis, Oregon built fewer new housing units this decade than we have since at least World War II.”
That’s no surprise since Oregon’s land-use rules have been dysfunctional for decades. In the 1970s lawmakers worried about sprawl imposed strict limits on urban expansion. These urban growth boundaries have failed to adjust sufficiently to growing populations, choking residential development despite high demand. Rising housing prices are the inevitable result of this government-imposed scarcity.
Portland is now desperate for affordable housing and says it’s at least 23,000 units short. But its policies discourage investment in housing for low- and middle-income families. Its land-use zoning is more restrictive than more than three-fourths of other metropolitan areas examined in a new working paper by Harvard and University of Pennsylvania researchers. Since 2017 Portland has enforced an “inclusionary zoning” requirement on new residential buildings with 20 or more units. The city now compels many landlords to rent up to a fifth of new units at below-market rates.
Some Portland builders have responded by erecting luxury buildings
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Wait’ll all us boomers start dying off. Affordable housing won’t be an issue. :)
There’s no housing shortage in the liberal bastion westcoast states where you can claim a sidewalk for yourself.
Lol. RATs are morons who could screw up a wet dream.
lol Good one! Me, I’m not seeing a whole lot of new home construction around me, just TONS of new apartment complexes. Figured that was just a shift away from home-ownership until loans get repaid, jobs get found, etc. Seems we went through this same thing late 80s-early 90s, too.
Look at the Green New Deal. This is the Democrat Fascist Party utopia. We peon are live in urban tenements, taking mass transit to our government approved job, working at our government directed tasks, eating our government directed diet using our government directed amount of electricity.
A legitimate mystery, i.e. one that I can’t explain is: “why wouldn’t a developer be able to make just as much money putting more, smaller, cheaper units in a given building than fewer, larger, more expensive ones.
All the new construction is for “luxury” condos, which of course means they can mark up the fixtures and the granite countertops etc, but what about just a bare bones 700 sq ft 2 bedroom with a galley kitchen and you can put twice as many of them per floor?
Good.
Meanwhile there’s a 2-3 year waiting list to get a house built in N. Idaho due to a shortage of builders.
Soylent Green?
Politicians bemoan the lack of affordable housing, but their policies often create the problem. Look no further than Oregon, where restrictive zoning and mandates have yielded the lowest rate of residential construction in decades.
...
Higher prices are almost always due to supply problems. And those supply problems are usually due to bad regulations.
“mystery”
Location.
A luxury unit will only get the luxury price if the location is right. You don’t have free access to all lots because most are already owned by someone else.
For vehicles, you can compose your fleet accordingly for cheap/expensive volumes. Not so for housing because location is fixed and beyond your control.
WE need more Mexicans. Eliminating all forms of welfare would help.
That's about three new residents per each new housing unit. I'm not sure how this results in a crisis. We have eight residents in my house, down from a high of eleven.
Can someone explain what I'm missing?
“Meanwhile there’s a 2-3 year waiting list to get a house built in N. Idaho due to a shortage of builders.”
We were # 7 on our contractors list; could not get good help!
The ideal liberal household is two Sodomites or two Lesbians. Normal families don’t matter.
From the Cascade Policy Institute:
Optimizing land-use to make Oregon livable.
Oregon has the nation’s most restrictive, statewide land-use regulatory system. Most private land is zoned for either “exclusive farm use” or “exclusive forestry use”, which severely limits the ability of property owners to develop lands in accordance with basic market principles.
In addition, state law requires “urban growth boundaries” around all cities, designed to limit urban expansion. Changing these boundaries to accommodate population growth is a slow and expensive process.
The result of this over-regulation is a de facto cartel of landowners with developable land, enforced by the government. This has created a shortage of land available for housing in many parts of the state. With the cost of buildable land skyrocketing, it has become impossible to build “starter homes” or moderately-priced apartment complexes in most cities.
In response to the government-caused housing crisis, many elected leaders have promoted policies such as rent control. Unfortunately, these policies can only make the housing problem worse by discouraging new private investment in housing.
https://cascadepolicy.org/land-use/
This is why wall panel plants and truss plants are so busy.
There are not enough carpenters to build houses in many places in the US.
I sell lumber to multiple wood truss and wall panel plants in the mountain west. Business is BOOMING.
All those Oregon builders must have closed up shop and moved to North Idaho. Ive never seen so much residential construction going on. Every time I drive down a road, a new development has broken ground. For-sale lots long-empty are suddenly snapped up and ground broken. The old mill worker cottages in downtown Coeur d’Alene are being scraped and big new condo and townhome projects are popping up.
The charming character of the old neighborhoods and the expanses of the Rathdrum Prairie are all being wiped out.
“Meanwhile there’s a 2-3 year waiting list to get a house built in N. Idaho due to a shortage of builders.”
We were # 7 on our contractors list; could not get good hourelp!go
My wife and I attended a get to know your new light bulbs and fixtures in 2020 in California at our local hardware store.
One of the ladies there had lost her home in the fires two years ago in California. There is such a shortage of building materials, she will finally be getting the cement to pour for her new foundation a week from now with the crew do the pouring and whatever is needed.
We didn’t have fire damage, but we needed 2 new skylights due to leaks. Last spring, our roofer and contractor placed orders with the 2 big hardware store and a smaller one. We finally got one from the small building supplier. We are on standby for the other one. If it comes, we or the roofer or contractor will buy it and store it until late spring summer.
Our back deck was rotting and our contractor ordered the redwood last after the fires, and we got a cancellation order from the local supplier and enough of his rationing for our front porch. The redwood for the back deck came here in August, and someone cancelled a small order and we got it for the front deck/porch in October.
Apparently, some of the fire victims are being told that they can’t replace their burnt up wooden decks with new wood decking. So they are cancelling their orders. Those of us without burnt decks apparently can replace old rotting ones.
One of our contractors has a brother in the independent trucking business, and they discussed going to Oregon, Nevada or Idaho to buy wood and other supplies and bring down here to resell it here after the fires.
They found out that was a basic zero inventory supply of materials needed to build or too repair homes or whatever in the other states. The good carpenters are down here working.
So they gave up on that plan.
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