Over at Vox today we have yet another piece about "America’s housing crisis." The author proposes a "radical" solution (land taxes) that's not especially radical, but put that aside. The real issue here is that America doesn't have a housing crisis.
I'm not sure why, but I find the new urbanists one of the most annoying groups in the progressive pantheon. It's not because they're wrong, precisely, or because they're meanspirited, or anything like that. There's just a disconnect from reality that seems to motivate so much of what they say and do.
Take America's housing crisis. Here it is:
We have as much housing per household as we had in 2001. And just in case you think I'm cheating with this "household" business, here it is per person:
We have more housing per capita than we did in 2001.
Now, there are places—California is ground zero—where the amount of housing per person has indeed gone down. But is this a housing crisis? That depends on what you think the "right" amount of housing is. Urbanists consider it obvious that the right amount is about 4 million more than we have, but the people of California have made it crystal clear over the years that they disagree. They don't want more housing.
So selfish of them! Drawing up the ladder after they've gotten on board! Maybe so, but another word for this phenomenon is "democracy." People who live in a place get to vote for the policies they like, and Californians have decided they don't really want more people. Roughly speaking, California hosts about 10% of the population of the country on less than 1% of the land (the 50-mile-wide stretch from San Francisco to San Diego), and Californians think that's enough.
And anyway, California is still a very nice place. If we build 4 million more housing units, what will happen? Rents will go down and lots of people will resume migrating here. Then rents will go back up and we'll have yet another crisis. What's the point?
But this still doesn't really explain why I find the urbanists annoying. Here's my real beef: they are obsessed with big cities. They spend nearly all their time trying to convince us that big, crowded cities should become even bigger and more crowded. Or that suburbs should become big and crowded, just like cities. This is a fantastic waste of time. Residents of big cities don't want to become more crowded and resident of suburbs don't want to become more like cities. They will fight you forever on this. Absolutely forever. The game isn't worth the candle, especially when there are so many other far more useful things we could be devoting our energy to.
So why waste time on this? The urbanists will haul out studies about economic gains, environmental impacts, mass transit, etc., but they massively oversell those benefits and completely ignore the downsides of crowding. Instead, they should be spending approximately 100% of their time promoting policies that would get people out of big cities and into smaller cities that have room to grow.
Honestly, we don't need a bigger New York or a bigger Los Angeles. But we might need a bigger Flagstaff or a bigger Knoxville. That should be the central goal of the urbanists. I don't understand why it isn't.
Don't let Matty Y see this.
Or, Progressive Patron Saints forbid, which led to an overall population decline. Even if one does not accept California/the United States/the Planet is “full” today (and it isn’t simply a matter of space…) it should be clear that population growth must not be sustained indefinitely, and we have to learn to live with that sooner or later. And it is likely easier sooner rather than later.
I grew up 20 miles from Knoxpatch and went to college there. I see no reason to move there or to recommend anyone else move there.
Even if you could somehow induce developers to invest in building millions of new units in California, there is absolutely no guarantee that any of them would be priced affordably. Land is outrageously expensive, as are permitting fees and labor costs. The only way to recoup that is to build luxury homes and condos that sell for $1 million. I suppose you could build a bunch of tiny homes out around Barstow or something for less, but w/o high speed commuter rail connecting it to the LA basin, there's not much point.
As for making smaller cities elsewhere in the country more attractive, that's actually not a bad idea, although even many of these places, like Boise, ID or Spokane, WA or San Antonio, TX are crazy expensive now. What we need is a way to draw people back to Rust Belt cities like Cleveland, Rochester, or Scranton. Lots of cheap homes there.
Don't buy too much into the developer Kool-Aid here. Yes, land prices are basically the biggest expense in new housing development, but that's partially because of how many units can be built there. If not as many units can be built there, the land price isn't all that high, inherently. There is some noise to this as the land price does go up a little bit if the value of the house that's on it is going up a lot (because if you can build an expensive house on a lot that's 75K empty today, but in 5 years that same house is worth 25% more while costs to build have only gone up 20%, the land price can absorb the difference and you still come out the same...).
The real reason that only luxury housing gets built is because we're so underbuilt - there is enough pent-up demand in the whole market that developers can build only high-end housing and it will all still sell like hotcakes until the demand at the top is satisfied. Only then will developers build anything other than high-end. It's a brutal truth of the supply problem.
I doubt the land price of 6000 square feet in Sunnyvale, CA would be any lower with one singe-family dwelling on it vs a quadplex. The share per unit would be different but not the land price itself.
San Antonio, TX is the 7th largest city in the US with a population of about 1.5 million, FWIW.
Citing city proper populations is effectively meaningless. The economics of housing don't care if your city is "large" because you've incorporated hundreds of square miles of countryside surrounding the core (thereby rendering the population within city limits large, but non-dense). Jacksonville's an extreme example of this. It's bigger than San Francisco. And also tiny compared to the Bay Area.
I don't think San Antonio is a "small" city by any reasonable definition. But it's MSA just cracks the top 25.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
(It'll soon merge with metro Austin, though, and when that happens we'll be looking at a top ten US metropolis, and maybe top 5 or 6 in 40 or 50 years).
$1 million?! Try $1.25 to $1.5 million
Why would I want to live in a blue island surrounded by red insanity?
Urbanists consider it obvious that the right amount is about 4 million more than we have, but the people of California have made it crystal clear over the years that they disagree. They don't want more housing."
Fine then. Don't complain when housing values soar because lack of supply and you have to pay more in taxes as a result (Oh wait a minute, Prop. 13, Sheesh! No wonder you think this way when the government is basically protecting you high property taxes). Don't complain about homeless people in downtown LA, Frisco or camped out near freeways because they can't find affordable places to live (although as we both know that's only part of the problem). Don't complain about people having to live in Sacramento to work in San Francisco because people making working-class salaries can't afford to live there. Tell those poor bastards (to their faces) who got accepted into UC-Berkeley and will now have to go to school elsewhere because some asshole who also owns a house in New Zealand(!) invoked a state law to prevent a new dorm from being built. If you're a non-complaining NIMBY sir, then I salute you! At least you're not a hypocrite.
I agree, that more housing needs to built in places like Fresno or Bakersfield with room to grow than big cities like San Francisco and urbanists should not be so myopically focused on big urban areas. But these communities and other rural areas, all across the country not just in California, all have the same problem: lack of new or affordable housing stock. There are plenty of jobs and needs and services in these areas to be filled. But no one is going to move to such places if there's no place to live in them let alone be affordable. Only by building more houses will this gordian knot be cut.
I concede that "America" doesn't have a housing crisis, but everything you wrote after making that point is nonsense, and it makes me sad to see someone who is usually quite thoughtful and clear-sighted write such drivel.
I know YOU don't like living in big cities, and that's fine! Don't live in a big city! But the idea that someone who wants to live in NYC or LA or Miami or Chicago would get the same social, professional, and cultural benefits from moving to Knoxville is preposterous. Some people actually want that big city lifestyle, and proposing that they move to a much, much smaller city instead is ridiculous.
I live in New York City, and I think it is an amazing place to live, and I think that anyone else who wants to live here should be able to do so. But to make that possibility a reality, we need a lot more housing here!
Regarding the "people in suburbs really like the suburbs and don't want to turn them into cities" argument, I don't disagree. But the point of the Vox piece that set you off was that single-family-homes-with-big-lawns-type suburbs are an incredibly wasteful use of land that could instead support many, many more units of housing. People who like living in suburbs that are on extremely valuable parcels of land should have to pay much more to be able to do so. If it's still worth it to people to live there, then fine - pay for the privilege and keep your very wasteful suburb. But "I got here first so I get to decide when it's full and someone besides me should bear the cost of my preferences" is an argument so bankrupt its not worth engaging.
You're dead on.
Yeah,
The stat I have seen is roughly 1/3 of people want to live in large cities, 1/3 want to live in traditional suburbs and 1/3 don't care and just want to live as close to work as they can afford a place. Since ~80% of our built housing stock is in suburbs there is a huge demand for what is available in cities.
Actually Kevin DOES live in a big city. If I'm not mistaken, he lives in metro Los Angeles, which has a population of about 13 million.
How is my little parcel of suburban paradise wasteful? Give me a break! I've weighed what I send off in my green bins to be composted, and it comes to ~2 tons of green waste per year (tree branches, shrub trimmings, etc.). Using the standard figure of 2167 lbs CO2/Ton sequestered in compost, that's 4200 lbs of CO2 that I've sequestered and given back to the community as compost. That's not counting the carbon I've permanently sequestered in my fruit trees that are still growing like gangbusters. Now that I'm telecommuting, I drive less than 10,000 miles per year with the milage I get on my car, it produces about 10,000 lbs of CO2 per year. But at the rate of growth of my 10 fruit trees, I'm pretty damn sure that I'm sequestering more carbon than I'm expelling into the environment. Electricity use is relatively negligible because I have solar panels. And I bet you don't have solar panels on your condo's porch.
Now let's talk about water. On my little piece of suburban paradise, I use water at about 30% the rate of the average almond farmer. Roughly in line with what fruit growers use.
So, tell me about how wasteful I am?
I didn’t mean “wasteful” in the sense of environmental waste, though it is true generally that urban living is better for the environment than suburban living.
I meant “wasteful” in terms of “500 people want to live where only 50 people are able to live because of restrictive zoning.” The land is very desirable and can support much more housing than is permitted. That makes it wasteful to use the land that way.
If roughly 50 people wanted to live on that same parcel of land I wouldn’t call limiting it to 50 people wasteful.
"But the point of the Vox piece that set you off was that single-family-homes-with-big-lawns-type suburbs are an incredibly wasteful use of land that could instead support many, many more units of housing."
There's enough space for everyone in this country to have a single family home with a big lawn.
It was like a switch flicked and the progressive left stopped caring about non-climate environmentalism a little less than 10 years ago.
The sad fact is, California does not have the water to hold much more people. It's not about housing units. Since these same people go sideways at desalination they can't have everything and Americans don't want to live in commie blocks. Do these progressive urbanists support something radical like a Missouri R - Colorado R aquduct? (Hint: No)
Sure, the thing in Berkeley is stupid but it's a straw man. They're just full of shit and are using the housing issue to do dumb stuff like allow open-air drug use areas. They have lost their minds.
[The sad fact is, California does not have the water to hold much more people.]
This is incorrect. California's population could double and there would still be plenty of water for people as people only consume about 20% of the available water. The remaining 80% is roughly split 50-50 for environmental use and agriculture. You can argue that this the optimal use but it doesn't have to be this way. Finally the majority of the use by "people" is actually used for landscaping purposes which is an argument against developing more suburbs with large lots in California.
If this current mega drought is the new normal, there is no more water for, or to be had from, agriculture. Past fractions notwithstanding.
California has plenty of water for people if we forced farmers to stop growing nuts — especially almonds. Before the current drought, almond farmers were using 10% of California's water, and farming overall used 55%. "Environmental" water used 33% and urban/suburban used 12%. Environmental water is either water that runs out to the sea on undammed northern rivers, or that is pumped into coastal aquifers to keep sea water from contaminating the aquifers. I've heard that nut farmers have cut back their water usage significantly during the current drought, though, but I don't know if this is BigAg propaganda.
Almond milk is a plague.
Was always happy my grandmother switched to soy milk when her cardiac health demanded it.
That said, oatmilk is tops.
I don’t like urban living anymore. Tried it for a while when young and had a blast. No longer interested.
Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded.
Kevin, you sound like a cranky Republican ca 1992.
"Residents of big cities don't want to become more crowded"
You spell *property owners* in a very weird way. Because I'm sure you didn't mean to pretend that those sets are the same, or even close, right? I know you're not that dishonest.
Anyway, I don't really care that much. I'll be leaving the Bay Area for different reasons. I just can't stand bullshit from folks who are supposed to be on my team.
Kevin ***is*** a cranky GQPer c. 1992.
I was just thinking about this the other day, & I would bet cashmoney that KD voted GQP more regularly than not up to Bush-Cheney's first White House run. This would also explain Drum's unrepentant Elizabeth Warren Democrat positioning. He basically is Elizabeth Warren.
I can't decide whether Kevin is a Rockefeller Republican or a Reagan Democrat.
Once again, you're looking at national housing units vs. national household numbers and assuming that that is what matters for housing markets. It is not.
Housing is regional, and even sub-regional - down to the level of about as far as you can drive in 30 to 45 minutes from a central hub area. You know, metro areas.
We absolutely have a housing crisis. Lots of those housing units are in states, regions, and cities that have lost population to other areas where there aren't enough housing units.
How else would you explain the dynamics of the housing market prices? It really is just supply and demand, for the most part. In cases of extremely constricted supply, you get the weird stories like foregoing inspections and bidding wars and homes going on contract in 1-2 days.
I see it every day because I live in one of these markets, and in a sub-area of the market that's especially hot as it's one of the last remaining vestiges of affordability within the confines of DC's metro system.
I don't agree with this at all. I'm on the older side now and well housed but I know a lot of younger people and they really struggle. We should build a lot more. Yes, yes, yes. This (Bay Area) is one of the places where there is opportunity. We should build to meet that opportunity. Let people move to the country and to smaller less economically vibrant cities when they retire.
I don't think I am alone in thinking this. ALL the younger people I know (55 and under!) think this way. It is only the people of retirement age who don't see it this way. I think the tide is moving my way. It is becoming seriously harder to block housing and it should become harder still. Build!
There is also this point about not understanding why urbanists don't want a bigger Flagstaff or Knoxville. Well, part of that is that smaller cities like that aren't terribly urban - the first part of the battle is making them more urban. They're still extremely car-centric, from things like density to parking minimums to street/road design.
There's also the assumption that urbanists don't want small and medium cities to improve and be bigger, which is just flatly untrue. It's just that the biggest cities get the most attention because the problems are most obvious there, and exacerbated more by our systemic real estate capitalism.
At first glance, the problem seems obvious. There was a dearth of new housing construction after the big housing bust. You can see the slumping ratio right in those charts, and that the ratio has only recently caught up with the last local maximum. One could argue that there is now plenty of housing, that is, assuming everyone had all the housing they needed at the peak of the boom. (If you look at those charts, with per capita peaking in 2007 and per household in 2010, you can see the number of people per household rising in the wake of the crash.)
Housing per household is just not a very good measure since the lack of affordable housing suppresses household formation. Housing units per capita is a better measure, but a lot depends on the demographics and specifics of the housing stock. The mode of the baby boom echo was in 1989, so those people are now about 33 and looking for grown up ready housing stock. Single bedroom units might be perfect for singles, but are a challenge once one has children or part of a couple doing remote work.
Most people need money to pay for housing, so they need to live somewhere where they can earn money. That often means moving to a growing urban area or its suburbs, both expensive options. Even economically growing rural areas can have housing crunches. Look at the fracking boom in North Dakota. Remote work can provide some flexibility, but, anecdotes aside, it hasn't dramatically restructured the job market yet.
We might have all the housing we actually need, but are those units of the right size and in the right place?
I'm of the view that the Information Age is making big cities obsolete. I've lived in communities of sizes ranging from a few thousand people to a few million. My observation is that the negative effects of crowding (traffic congestion and such) become significant when a population concentration exceeds about 100,000 people. As a result, my view is that we should aim to for population concentrations (cities, in effect, even if there are multiple municipalities within the metro area) of not more than 100,000 people. Obviously, this calls for MAJOR shrinkage of the bigger cities and will take at least decades, perhaps as much as a couple of centuries.
A good starting point would be to put policies in place that will discourage any further growth in the big cities.
The problem with that idea is that you lose the positive effects of concentration like functioning mass transit. I suppose in a dense enough city with a population of 100K you could just walk or bicycle anyplace you need to go, weather permitting.
A city of 100,000 is small enough that commutes are short and the number of people commuting is relatively small. You don't need mass transit; individual BEVs will do nicely.
But we might need a bigger Flagstaff or a bigger Knoxville. That should be the central goal of the urbanists. I don't understand why it isn't.
Because nobody wants to live in Flagstaff?
What are you going to do to make Flagstaff more appealing, make it as unlike Flagstaff as possible?
What would the people of Flagstaff think of that? They'd sack the capitol.
Flagstaff is an absolutely wonderful town. One of our favorite places in the world! But it is surrounded by National Forest and has already gotten very expensive. Nowhere to build!
I will admit my remark may have been over-hasty.
The cost of housing in Flagstaff is 43% higher than the national average.
https://www.payscale.com/cost-of-living-calculator/Arizona-Flagstaff
Oh my God someone came out and said it. Thank you Kevin Drum.
It's not only LA residents who are affected by the housing crisis. It's anyone who wants to move to LA, and to the extent it limits the economic vibrancy of urban economies, it affects economic growth for the whole country. Yes LA is a democracy, but so is America, and it's in the interest of all Americans to have the option of moving to any city in the country where they think they'd have the best life. (For the record, I'm a homeowner in LA who benefits from high housing costs and would be annoyed if more people moved here. I still think the housing crisis is important to address.)
I think the point is we are destroying the planet and need something like https://www.half-earthproject.org/ denser cities would help.
You know how lead spread through our cities and especially poor neighborhoods? They need to cleaned up and redeveloped.
Transit oriented design helps with energy use and housing costs. Trees in cities clean the air.
Kevin's prosperous suburban lifestyle means he cannot understand the benefits of beautifaul dense and prosperous cites rather than sad climate destrying suburban sprawl.
Actually, it's cities that are more miserable places. All the noise and people isn't good for one's mental health
"Beautiful dense and prosperous cities" also known as "human anthills".
Talk about swerving from deep dive to so superficial its barely helpful! Kevin!! Come on.
The "crisis" is not defined as housing unit per household. Its not like we had no housing crisis in 2008 but then had one in 2015 and what does the chart say now.
The crisis is defined as what used to be (or should be) affordable vs. the reality of the market. I look out my window at Hancock Park, Los Angeles, and a see a neighborhood which was brushed over now being bid up by the younger generation who is unwilling to drive miles and miles to work. Where does that leave the lower middle class families who can no longer afford it? Who knows? That's the crisis, but it can't be solved just by building more units, that's for sure.
In a free market, house prices are set by a number of factors, and the largest factor, by far over the last sixty years has been virtually all of the desirable parts of the US joining the rest of the first world when it comes to house prices.
In 1960s Southern California, I do assure you it was not 1960s London or 1960s Paris. Orange County had barely gotten started, and large parts of Los Angeles were in the process of being abandoned for suburbs, and those suburbs were brand new.
The article focuses on land held as parking lots for chrissake. Just look to Europe for answers to allowing affordable housing in the cities where people want to live.
No need to reinvent the damn wheel on this one.
Just look to Europe for answers to allowing affordable housing in the cities where people want to live.
That's news to me. Much of urban Europe is comparably expensive to Urban Blue America. Japan is the better model.
By how much has Japan’s population grown over the last couple decades? https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/population-growth-rate Suggests the population has been shrinking for the last decade plus. Somewhat easier to have more affordable housing if demand is decreasing.
Japan's big cities continue to grow. But yeah, I would imagine the rent for an apartment in some agricultural burgh three hours' drive from the nearest good sized metro is silly cheap these days in Japan.
+1 Tragic Kingdom
Nice straw man you got there, Kevin. Honestly when I ready KD's on "urbanists" I begin to wonder about his take on any other of the folks he disagrees with because he characterizes the urbanist argument an absurd way that no one would agree with and that bears no resemblance to any actual urbanist position I'm aware of. Maybe, just maybe, Kevin, these people are not crazy and you are willfully misunderstanding them because you're afraid someone is going to make you sell your multi-million dollar California tract home or it's going to lose value or something, I don't know.
Kevin hears "urbanist" and all he can think of is Midtown Manhattan. I hear urbanist and I think historic Savanah, Georgia.
I can't sum up the urbanist argument here but it is not about making cities bigger or making them more crowded. It's about putting people ahead of cars. That's it!
I used to live in a nice "urban" neighborhood in Atlanta of single-family homes. The streets were a grid that connected to everything, there was a large public park, you could walk to Turner Field, there were shops and restaurants you could walk to, nearby 2 to 3 story apartment buildings. It was quiet and lovely. At the same time I worked in a massive office complex in the northern suburbs surrounded by 8 lane feeder highways, parking lots, 20 to 30 story buildings. Sure they were spread out far enough so you could not possibly walk from one to another but your impression when you were out there was hardly of being in a place that wasn't "crowded".
This is what the urbanists are talking about dude. I know you rarely read or respond to comments but you are just arguing with your own made up villians here Kev. I suggest you read Home From Nowhere by Howard Kunstler (an entertaining crank of the subject if ever there was one) for a primer.
Funny how my suburb’s community FB page has been having constant posts by people desperately looking for family housing. Funny how people my agency works with us having an impossible time finding housing.
I’ve heard many rental housing (single family thru triplex) have been taken off market. Housing prices locally, both homeownership and rental, have increased dramatically - and this isn’t even a hot market area.
Sorry, Kevin, gotta disagree. Don’t care what your data says, real world is trumping it.
I think there's a problem with your thesis, Kevin. Housing isn't just hard to come by affordably in New York City and Los Angeles. Housing is hard to come by in cities that aren't anyone's idea of big or full of culture. Hell, housing is hard to come by in the cities that you explicitly named.
In Knoxville, housing prices were up over 20% from the end of 2020 to the end of 2021. https://www.wate.com/news/local-news/realtor-calls-knoxville-housing-market-wild-wild-west/
In Flagstaff, housing prices were up almost 35% from the beginning of 2021 to the beginning of 2022. https://www.redfin.com/city/6089/AZ/Flagstaff/housing-market
Another city that few would consider hip, Spokane, has seen housing prices jump over 60% in the past two years. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/business/economy/spokane-housing-expensive-cities.html
Housing is a national crisis. People who lived in big cities and made big money there are balking at absurd housing prices and voting with their feet to move somewhere more affordable. They're bringing their money to smaller cities and outbidding residents for housing there, driving prices up there. Then those residents are balking at their newly absurd housing prices and voting with their feet to move somewhere more affordable. At some point, there will be no more affordable cities for people to move to because they will all be plunged into the vicious cycle.
My primary beef with the 'build baby build' progressive crowd? The evidence is at best 50-50 that it *might* actually get somewhat progressive results (and even then only at the far margins), but voters ARE NImby pretty much everywhere. And once they've kicked the progressives out of office for that maybe marginal gain then all the REAL progressive policies get trashed too.
I'm just not willing to sacrifice the power to push for education/heath/policing reform at the altar of 'unleash the developers!'
Which I guess is just a long-winded way of turning Kevin's 'democracy' point into a cost/benefit viewpoint....
If more public space were devoted to housing and less to automobile storage and transportation routes, much of the problem could be solved. Which is to say, if cities and states stop subsidizing automobile owners, with tons of free public space that would be a step in the right direction. You know, charge drivers for the actual costs. As it is, the most densely populated places are crowded and noisy -- because of our choice to subsidize motor vehicles.
Less than .1% of our land area is taken up by parking lots
Jobs are being created predominately in about 6-10 metro areas. So what exactly are people supposed to do in the Kevin Drum Approved Residential Growth Areas of Knoxville and Flagstaff for income, if the private sector has already decided to not bless those metro areas with surplus jobs to support residential growth?
Reasonable government policies can certainly affect where jobs are created. It would make sense to discourage job creation in major metropolitan areas, and encourage job creation in minor metropolitan areas.
Jobs are being created predominately in about 6-10 metro areas.
Yes, And many of those areas—Raleigh, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, Charlotte, Orlando, San Antonio, Nashville—are a lot cheaper than California, even if prices in some cases have risen pretty dramatically compared to what they were 15 years ago.
Kevin is being overly glib and dismissive here, to be sure, but to some extent the problem is self-correcting: more affordable areas are indeed creating a lot of jobs. Because people can afford to live there! In large measure, the actual problem is that the highest wage/highest productivity areas are no longer able to create large numbers of jobs. And that's because of the price of housing.
Once upon a time, the richest and most productive metros in the United States were some of its most rapidly growing areas. By and large that's no longer the case. Greater NYC isn't growing very fast. LA's growing even slower. I suspect we'll see a dramatic slowdown in Seattle, too.
We're poorer (it's been measured) as a country because of this dynamic.
So let me get this straight: These so-called 'progressives' want a) their student loans forgiven, and b) they think the government should do something about making housing in the places they want to live more affordable.
I do not think 'progressive' means what they think it means.
House prices are way up, higher than in the 2006 bubble:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=MCRD
This is for single-family dwellings for the entire nation, not just big cities The consensus seems to be that this time it's not just due to banks going wild, it's a real supply/demand problem. This does not necessarily mean that people are sleeping in their cars because they can't buy a house, although there are lots of homeless people, but there is something out of whack in housing with respect to how it was before about 2000.
Exactly right. The obsession with how tall buildings are in the handful of cities where elites live is obnoxious.
Flagstaff?!? Nice as it may or may not be, there’s even less water in AZ than CA.