It’s 30 to 50% of most peoples paycheck, it’s really the piece that matters and the one that is most complicated to solve.
I'm semi-convinced that the reason why we see so many bad ideas in housing is because the good ideas negatively affect too much of the voting public. Or, they perceive the ideas as negatively affecting them.
This is not true.
Not that it matters as I don’t think this is what motivates NIMBY’s but for anyone reading that believes so, this is incorrect.
The old single family home next to the new apartment building gains land value. And this shows up county after county [1]. Building more housing is a valuation win-win, the pie just grows.
[1] https://gardner.utah.edu/news/recent-apartment-construction-...
Noise and dust from construction are often mentioned as well. Construction means heavy trucks entering places where they usually don't intrude.
As a homeowner I don't want to see my home price go down relative to all other homes as that leaves me in a precious position if I need to move, but if all homes fall in price together then that actually makes the prospect of moving less risky as, if I have to move into a house that is a step-up from the one I have, the cost to do so is lower. That would be an improvement over the status quo. High housing prices are a problem even for those with significant equity in a home.
But who doesn't want to see their wage go down is those who build houses. This is the bottleneck. The vast majority of people cannot afford a new house, which means they're stuck in their used houses, which means there is no inventory opening up for those with no houses.
> it's just that the solutions are deeply unpopular.
Is it? The solution in motion is to use AI to push software developers out of software development so that they have to become construction workers, thereby increasing the supply of construction workers, pushing construction wages down. It doesn't seem that unpopular (at least not outside of HN, but even on HN many welcome it with open arms). Maybe it will become unpopular once the motions are complete? That's a tad bit late, though.
For examples:
1. there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out.
2. the glacial pace of issuing building permits for burned out homes in LA.
3. the sudden influx of many millions of immigrants pushes up the demand for housing, resulting in higher prices
> 1. there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out.
> According to state data, approximately 57,421 rent-stabilized apartments were vacant across New York City
Is it actually more complex than that? If the regulation that makes it unprofitable to rent them out is rent control, that's still an accurate statement of why they're not being rented out.
That's about 2.4% of the total number of rented apartments, and about 1.5% of the total housing stock.
How long do you think those apartments are unoccupied, on average?
What portion of the stock do you think would normally be healthy to have on the market?
Scroll down a bit and read the section: "Key Causes of Vacancies"
The market, left to its own, will keep building because someone will see the prices people are willing to pay and think “I want in on that” but then the government comes in and blocks them from building. No building = supply lower than demand which always equals higher costs
Further, It would only have taken you one 5 second search to see the ways government regulations can cause unoccupied apartments
https://www.google.com/search?q=in+what+ways+can+government+...
Please try again.
P.S. google "how many unoccupied apartments in nyc"
Which market are you thinking of?
Los Angeles? Where the homeowner vacancy rate is 0.7% and rental vacancy 4%?
If you literally weren't thinking of anywhere when your responded, where did you get the notion from?
[1] https://api.census.gov/data/missing_key.html +/- one percent
The problem isn't so much that housing has gotten expensive. It's that many of the existing places have moved up-market compared to what they were 30-40 years ago. 75 years ago, Scarsdale NY or parts of Long Island were expensive. But Palo Alto was a drab middle class suburb. As the tech economy has boomed, that has driven prices up in Palo Alto for the same reason they were already high in Scarsdale. And now you have to move to Gilroy.
That's a misleading metric for two reasons. First, "people" includes all the people who bought a house decades ago before the prices went up, and correspondingly paid the old prices instead of the current prices. And second, it assumes that if housing becomes more expensive what people all do is pay more for housing rather than being unable to afford it and then having to take a longer commute to access housing they can afford, live with their parents, become homeless, etc., which negatively impact the amount or type of housing they get instead of the amount they pay for it.
Meanwhile between 1984 and today median income increased by ~290% while median new home prices increased by ~425%:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
And that's with the gap having reduced a bit in the last couple of years, since home prices have declined slightly since the peak in 2022 while median income continued its usual trend.
People are moving out of opportunity zones (and you know…losing opportunity) or moving in with roommates to keep the average percentage low.
Feels like such a basic factor to miss for what is supposedly an economists blog. That metric means nothing.
From https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rental-housing-unaffordabi...
> The net effect of this longer history is that renters today spend much more of their incomes on rent than they did in previous generations. The median renter household in 1960 spent less than a fifth of their income on rent. By 2022, housing costs consumed 31 percent of the median renter’s income. And in inflation-adjusted terms, the median rent is up 75 percent over these six decades while the median renter income has risen by just under 15 percent.
I’m not saying that’s the case. I’m only saying the metric “housing cost as percent of wages” isn’t enough to judge if people are doing worse or better
To take just one example: a 65inch tv costs just $700 compared to $4k just a few years ago
2. Shelter accounts for roughly 34% of the CPI, whereas it makes up only about 16% to 17% of the PCE which underplays the pressures of housing people face. Housing arguably is one of the most basic necessity and people will spend on it. For majority of the people in the country housing as a % of income is the biggest expense, so weighing it at 16% sounds almost ridiculous.
3. PCE also famously isn’t based on household surveys like CPI which means it doesn’t accurately represent the actual inflation either.
4. PCE also doesn’t accurately represent lifestyle downgrades even though it tracks them. PCE will capture if you swap chicken for beef (like people are doing right now) but the conclusion you’ll come to is that people have the same amount of spending power as before.
I also think it’s unfair to look at just food prices. Housing and healthcare have bloomed massively.
We should evaluate research by the research itself, rather than by the author’s subjectivity credibility alone. The is the point I was trying to make by providing alternative research and adding a little bit of nuance to the reply, but perhaps I should’ve been more forthright in addressing my own bias as well.
Why is this the argument when someone challenges your source, but when it comes to someone else's source your argument is:
> This is research from a labor advocacy group, with the explicit aim of the organization to advocate for this sort of thing. This doesn't mean the research is is automatically invalid, but it is bias worth mentioning.
Using CATO as a neutral source though, is sketch no matter what.
> Links the fucking CATO institute
Pot, meet kettle