Here is the Census Bureau's definition of a housing unit:
Housing unit is a house, an apartment, a group of rooms, or a single room occupied or intended for occupancy as separate living quarters.... Tents and boats are excluded if vacant.... Living quarters of the following types are excluded from the housing unit inventory: Dormitories, bunkhouses, and barracks; quarters in predominantly transient hotels, motels, and the like, except those occupied by persons who consider the hotel their usual place of residence; quarters in institutions, general hospitals, and military installations except those occupied by staff members or resident employees who have separate living arrangements.
Seems pretty thorough! Now here is the ratio of total housing units to total households:
Starting in 2011, the number of housing units per household began a steady decline. We would need 7 million more housing units to get us back to where we were in 2011.
UPDATE: The original version of this post included a bunch of stuff about California housing, but I transposed a pair of numbers and produced a wildly wrong result. I've deleted the whole thing.
Corrected numbers for California are here.
About that second footnote: so how do you prevent the earthquake that drops California into the sea & gives the Republicans a permanent majority, or did that dire prediction get debunked?
That was the Christopher Reeves Superman movie.
Didn't see it, but was aware of book(s?) predicting it, & a coworker expressed concern when the USGS transferred her husband to California - she was thinking of leaving him!
"Blocks on opposite sides of the San Andreas fault move horizontally. If a person stood on one side of the fault and looked across it, the block on the opposite side would appear to have moved to the right. Geologists refer to this type fault displacement as right-lateral strike-slip."
From the UCGS site - https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/earthq3/safaultgip.html.
Do we have to re-gerrymander the congressional districts?
Only once every 150 years or so, after a Big One.
Already accomplished in effect, at least in so far as seats in the House are distributed relative to the percentage of votes cast, and such disparities are cited as evidence of gerrymandering:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_California
Not quite 2/3 of the votes went to one party, which then got almost 80% of the seats.
Maybe I’ll set up a Monte Carlo model, but my intuitive sense is that in a two-party system with single-member districts, some degree of overrepresentation is baked in, even without systematic boundary-drawing.
California dropping into the sea has always been nonsense.
But it stopped, & I don't remember noticing why or when- maybe trumpism will, too, although my ability to hope is diminishing.
Wrong! Wrong!! Wrong!!!
The fault on the east side of the Sierras will let loose and the rest of the States will be underwater. California will be fine.
Almost what Goldwater wanted! Yes, folks, I wasn't expressing a serious belief, just wondering when that hysteria ended...
Or, there are too many people in California.
Seems wrong. It's not physically impossible to produce (a lot) more housing in California, and it needn't even involve a great deal of land, given the existence of technology that allows us to stack multiple units of housing on a single piece of property.
It's just a matter of making it legal.
“Full” isn’t simply a matter of having somewhere to increase housing density. It also includes, but is not limited to, a sufficient and stable supply of water, and energy, and transportation.
Ahh, got it. I thought since Kevin's post was regarding housing your comment was related to, um, housing.
Well, a shortage or surplus depends on both supply and demand. I was asserting demand was too high.
This would explain why California's population growth is on the decline.
Every time a recruiter approaches me about a job in California or Massachusetts (and it happens on a weekly basis these days), I just can’t bring myself to make a move due to housing costs and long commutes. Michigan is not the best place to live (it’s snowy with a -3 windchill, 13 degrees.) but it will do until I retire in a few years.
This is bizarrely parochial and myopic. I live near Santa Fe, and even though housing *costs* here may be lower in absolute terms than (say) the SF Bay area, the housing *supply* and housing costs relative to median household income are in critical conditions.
There's no point averaging numbers like this across the country. It makes very little difference if a bunch of small towns across the midwest have thousands of available housing units when almost nobody would consider moving there.
If you were going to do this sort of analysis more meaningfully, you'd need to look at migration patterns and job vacancy levels, then combine that with regional housing unit supplies (and costs relative to median income). I absolutely believe this would give a very different picture.
Because fuck humanity,
S gunmaker unveils semi-automatic rifle marketed to kids,
https://www.rawstory.com/us-gunmaker-unveils-semi-automatic-rifle-marketed-to-kids/
That's 'US Gunmaker . . .'
Up until this point the article had been all households and housing units. Then Kevin defines households as families.
Well no, households are defined by somebody else, probably the Census. But maybe Kevin or somebody should see how this definition might make California different from other places. Is it related to the large proportion of immigrant farm workers?
I was mostly calling out Kevin’s playing (whether deliberately or otherwise) the Telephone Game with his shift from households to families, but yes, the Census Bureau’s definition is important.
Merely anecdote, but one of the houses in my immediate group of about a dozen is occupied by three or four unrelated twenty-somethings.
I live in CA. One child has his nuclear family, brother-in-law and mother-in-law living in one house. Another son has his nuclear family, brother-in-law, friends, and occasionally father-in-law in his house.
On my block there are two houses shared by either family or friends. So yes, households frequently include much more than families, especially nuclear families.
There is no large proportion of immigrant farm workers. The total agricultural employment in the state is about 400,000, or about 1% of the total population.
It may still not qualify as a "large proportion" but https://farmworkerfamily.org/information supposes
So, in 2011 the ratio was 117.8%, which I assume means there were 117.8 housing units for every 100 households. Ie, there were more housing units than households. And as of 2021 it was 111.8 for every 100 households. Continues to be more housing units than households. And the nation is said to be in a housing crisis. So is it there isn't enough housing, or that there isn't enough housing where households wish to be housed?
As of 2019 the Census reported more units than households in California:
https://censusreporter.org/profiles/04000US06-california/
Where did Kevin's get his data and what is the date? Did something drastic happen since 2019?
Given Kevin hardly ever provides actual links to the data sources of his charts, we may never know.
In California at least, but I suspect in a lot of other parts of the country as well, the Great Recession basically killed off the construction industry for the better part of a decade. Nothing was getting built. Credit dried up for builders and buyers. Workers either found new jobs or went back to Mexico. Not surprising that there's now a big shortage of housing.
Off tropic and back to Covid. I hoped omicron would decimate the willfully unvaccinated and look… it did! Yippee!
“The Omicron wave is breaking, but deaths, which lag cases by as much as several weeks, have surpassed the numbers from the Delta wave and are still increasing in much of the country. In 14 states, the average daily death toll is higher now than it was two weeks ago. They are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Kentucky, Maine, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.”
Alabama! West Virginia! Kentucky! That’s awesome. One more super contagious variant please! Kill the willfully unvaccinated and leave the rest of us alone. The angel of death knows if you’ve gotten the jab! 😂 💉
Pingback: Update: Housing units in California – Kevin Drum
How about using this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=MfJM
Another interesting data point is the owner-occupied housing estimate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=MfJD