Here is Look #1:
On a national level, there's nothing to see. Housing is historically plentiful. Here's Look #2:
This is new building activity, and nationally it once again looks OK. But building has nearly ground to a halt in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, New York City, Baltimore, and Washington DC.
There are two possible solutions to this. First, we can force big cities to approve a lot more housing that they don't want. Second, we can wait for people to migrate toward places they don't want to go. Bottom line: Someone's going to end up unhappy, and the only question is who.
There is a TON more red on that map than just around those metroplexes.
It's also just a weird way of looking at this. There's a ton of red on that map around Detroit, for example, which has plentiful housing, it just isn't building much new.
It also has an unemployment rate of nine percent. HMM.
I... what?
What a ludicrous thing to write.
It is true "I don't want to go somewhere where I can't be employed" is technically "I don't want to migrate there." But that sort of, you know, elides the point.
There are plenty of people who would be entirely willing, eager and happy even, to go live in some of the places where housing is plentiful... if you provide them with jobs there.
You continually bang on and on and on about how housing is "nationally plentiful, it's just these metroplexes where it is scarce." Those metroplexes are where jobs are. It is, still, better to make 90k a year as a professional in the Bay Area and live in a closet than it is to make 35k a year flipping burgers in Detroit (a much, much worse and more demanding job with much worse benefits) and be able to afford a whole-ass house.
I don't want to live in Detroit, tho.
Does than mean someone else must accept an N story apartment building be built next to their house in the place where you want to live?
(If this is a duplicate, apologies, the site is a little wonky today…)
Not exactly that. If a person who does not want an N story apartment building to be built next to their house can pay the taxes on the additional value that would redound to the municipality were that building approved and constructed, then "Yes" that person can say "No", block the building and start paying the lost taxes.
But I doubt very many people except those already living on multi-acres estates could or would make that choice.
Being "first" historically is a lousy way to delegate political power. Do you want Native Americans to control the government? Now, maybe they'd do a better job, but they fought amongst themselves for centuries before Europeans came along, so also, maybe not.
While the mechanics may be different, the means being employed in your example suggest that yes, one may be forced. Required to release the balloons and pull a Carl Fredricksen as it were…
Rick, you live in Santa Clara County, right? Does “building ground to a halt” jibe with your experience? Because around where I live San Mateo County) there seems to be a lot of building of multi-level apartments and condos. Particularly in the El Camino Real corridor and along the freeway. Lots of complaints about congestion on Nextdoor.
I’ve seen apartments go up where single-story quadplexes or bungalows were on Mathilda Ave. and noticed some stuff on El Camino and the like, but I’ve not been taking much of a census
It just became noticeable to me recently and I commented to my wife that it wouldn’t be long before they were talking about a housing glut.
I didn't know you guys were in the Bay Area. If so, you may find this account amusing.
https://bsky.app/profile/nextdoorsv.bsky.social
There's hundreds of apartments being built in both Solano and Contra Costa counties too. Huge complexes.
The population of Solano County is about 450,000. For Contra Costa, it's about 1.1 million. "Hundreds of apartments" is somewhere between 0.01% and 0.1%, which is meaningless for reducing housing costs.
They're going to have to build a lot more than that to make even a dent in the problem.
I think there's wonkiness Internet wide today...
Yes. "I've got mine, screw you; get the hell away from me, I don't want people living near me" is an unjustified stance that should be met with ridicule.
Basic free market analysis says you own your land, and the air space above it, and so can decide what is done with it. You don't own the land next door or the air space above it and therefore have no right to decide what is done with it. You don't own views, you don't own access to sunlight. In other words yes, you an N story apartment building be built next to your house.
Then you aren't one of the people I was talking about?
Plenty of people would like to live in Detroit, or Dayton, or wherever. Is this universal? No, of course not. But the main thing stopping people from moving there is not an aesthetic dislike for the place, it is that they cannot live there and make a good living.
Many of the aforementioned Bay Area professionals making 90k a year and living in a closet would deeply, deeply consider a Rust Belt city if they could continue doing their professional work in their field there. They'd almost certainly be willing to take a pay cut to do it, dropping to like 65k a year but being able to afford a house three times the side of their efficiency apartment with mortgage less than half of what their rent was. But the jobs don't exist.
Would EVERYONE in the Bay Area take that deal? No, there are some people who are wedded to specifically that area for reasons, or specifically have a distaste for the Rust Belt. But many would.
Rust belt cities are not the places with good jobs and reasonable housing. Large swathes of the south have both.
Yes, and people move there, which proves my point that people will absolutely move places with affordable housing if jobs are there.
Kevin continually gestures at places that only have one of those things to claim "there is no housing shortage."
that is why Kevin's post was not "ludicrous"
"Second, we can wait for people to migrate toward places they don't want to go."
People ARE migrating to places they don't want to go. Places that have jobs and reasonable housing but are unattractive to many for other reasons. Like Texas.
I live in Seattle, I know people facing this predicament.
Here in Seattle
The ludicrous remarks are not Kevin's.
Seattleites (I live in Seattle) ARE discouraged about housing prices. They ARE considering moving places they like less. Coincidentally I had exactly this conversation with a couple of shop workers earlier today. There ARE places that have jobs and more reasonable housing. Texas is the state they mentioned. Young marrieds both, they make $80 - 90K, their wives are employed, one a teacher, the other a purchaser. Their inability to buy a house is a big deal for both.
I can vouch that "we can wait for people to migrate toward places they don't want to go." is not ludicrous, it is what is happening.
One of our workers moved to TX a couple of years ago. Good jobs, slightly lower pay more than compensated by the lower cost of living. Same story with another worker who moved to Alabama. One is an engineer, the other an electrician. Neither are flipping burgers.
Building in Seattle is hard. The zoning is strict but not terrible, ADU rules are pretty flexible. The biggest problem is ungodly waits to get permits approved. Seattle could fix this anytime by hiring more people and making Seattle Department of Construction & Inspections easier to work with.
Faster permitting with moderate zoning reform would go a long way to making Seattle goodness available to more people.
The map shows what Kevin said. Areas with highest housing demand and great jobs are mostly brown and red. That is crazy, they should have the most permits. Yes, depressed areas also have low permitting for obvious reasons, that is irrelevant to the point KD made.
It's a good thing I didn't say there weren't!
And building hasn’t ground to a halt in Seattle. We’re building like crazy. Tens of thousands of units. But our population grew by 20 percent in 10 years, much of that very high-paying jobs.
I think ultimately it is unsustainable for a country as large as the U.S. to only have 10 or so metro areas people want to live in.
These metro areas are larger than some countries.
Tons of people would like to live in smaller cities, or the rural or suburban life. They quite enjoy it.
Give'em jobs and they'll do it in a trice.
It might be problematic because Capital has moved jobs away from these areas and probably part of it is geography – small towns are small because they're hemmed in by a river or mountains or a bay etc etc. Not a cinch but maybe those are reasons.
The big metropoles don't have those problems → voilà !
There are plenty of emptied-out Rust Belt cities, tho.
Empty of jobs. Maybe those with surplus cash could move there and be comfortable, but most need work, jobs, infrastructure. I will admit there are exceptions, but that's because Capital came back. Anyway manufacturing is gone, in the main. If a city is to re-emerge, it must reinvent. I've read education is probably the easiest and most efficient way to do that – again that costs.
Just a quibble, but manufacturing isn't gone. It just on average makes high value rather than low to high value producets, takes 90% fewer employees to produce that value, and the employees have to have higher level education and thinking skills to do the jobs.
Huzzah, manufacturing is back, it's just not distributed evenly or at all.
Yes. Hence my position of "you give people a place to live affordably with jobs and they will move there."
Springfield, Ohio. Population peak: 70,700, in 1990. Population in 2000, just before I moved out: 65,875. Population 2023: 58,082. A significant fraction of the 10,000 Haitians are thinking of moving out now, after the (now) President-Elect and Vice-President Elect have libeled them, and all of the threats from the last few months.
Lots of available housing there. Plenty of job vacancies, now, but employers are used to hard-working immigrants, so you would have to work hard.
Not just "jobs", but intellectually challenging and creatively fulfilling "important" jobs. That's the problem; cities have been the fount of invention and creativity for five thousand years, and that is simply not going to stop because of "GoToMeeting" and "Zoom".
The real problem that the country faces is that the Confederates and their progeny spread all over the south- and midwest don't want the Knee-Grows or the Injuns to get ahead, so they reject the community investments that are crucial to developing a technical economy. Look at this list Kevin posted. EVERY city is in a "Blue State".
Virginia and North Carolina have recognized the value of high quality education and do their best to provide it at the level Blue States do. But Alabama will be DAMNED if it's going to spend a reasonable amount of money on education (except around the Federally supported labs in Huntsville) because the bright kids of the "others" might show little Johnny and Janie up for the slugs they are.
Whoa, just made that comment aussi !
That's not the entire story. Plenty of rural areas have become second home communities, heavy with short term rentals - driving up prices massively. Anywhere remotely desirable to live has met that fate.
I concur, cause I live in one of those areas. There are more STRs here than for sale/rentals, according to Zillow, AirBNB, etc. The incentives and changes the City has produced (and they're significant) have barely touched it. A new 27-unit apt. complex is not bothering to apply for the 8/12/20-year affordable housing property tax waivers; it doesn't need to, market rates pan out better.
Your comments might make sense if Texas and Georgia and N. Carolina did not exist. But they do.
How does their presence make my comments not make sense?
Those are places that have jobs and housing is reasonable.
They are unattractive to many for other reasons, and people migrate there when they really don't want to, people who live in places like Seattle where buying a house is unachievable. (for good or ill most wealth for normal people is your house).
These people personify the KD statement you call ludicrous: "Second, we can wait for people to migrate toward places they don't want to go."
This reality makes your entire comment ridiculous, an example of cherry-picking depressed areas as the only choice people have. You skip over the obvious examples, states that combine available jobs and lots of new building, the places that, despite their unattractiveness to many, are growing.
Broadly speaking red states are more pro-growth, and the reality that many blue states pinch you really hard unless you make tons of money. This is a deep failure on both a political and human level. It is part of why 'Democrats are the party of working people' rings hollow for many voters. Voters who do not like Trump but voted R anyway.
This is the case in most countries though. Half the population of many European countries lives in a single metro area. Canada has like 5 cities in which 90-95% of their population lives, including Toronto where almost half the population lives. Australia is the same: 4-5 cities hold about 90-95% of the population. If anything, the US actually has a lot of middle sized urban areas compared to its economic peers, probably because the Senate guarantees smaller states get disproportionate spending to help keep them economically viable. (Most of our peers don’t have as extensive transport networks in the middle of nowhere.)
Urbanization has real economic benefits for households, but most countries can’t afford to urbanize everywhere, so the people end up agglomerating wherever urbanization takes hold. It actually works out fine… as long as the country doesn’t give too much extra voting power to rural people (like the US does)… which is then used by rural people to punish urban areas for merely existing much less doing “better” than they are.
Sure, I’m just saying at the size and population the U.S. we should have a few more large metro areas.
Its kinda happened with Denver and Austin growing into tech hubs, there should be a few more.
About one in four Americans (87 million out of 345 million) lives in one of the 10 largest metros.
One in five people in Great Britain lives in the London metro area.
One in five people in France lives in the Paris metro area.
One in three people in Japan lives in the Tokyo metro area.
Our population is far more spread out than in many, many countries.
Washington, DC is mainly building apartment buildings in its boundaries so there would be like one permit for 100-400 units. My guess is the other major cities are doing something similar as the land is constrained so the number of units is large, but the permits are small.
Good point. If 1 permit = 1 building, obviously the metros are going to have many more units per building, typically, so permits per capita is not that meaningful.
It's still a pretty interesting map though.
So a better map might be based on the number of units being built, not the number of permits. Unless it actually already is.
Would permits taken out but not started be driving markets, inflating prices, manipulating supply?
This is per capita. But family sizes are smaller, and people wait longer until getting married. Net effect--more people want housing, esp. in hipster neighborhoods.
Another good point. Each housing unit has fewer people in it than they did in 1950. And each unit - at least single family houses - is also twice as big as they were in 1950.
Really good point.
Family size is roughly 6% smaller than in 1980.
The rise of Airbnb is probably another 1% of houses.
The chart shows what...an 11% increase in housing since 1980? But over half of that is eaten up by the changes listed above.
This seems like critical data, but Kevin never includes it. Conclusions are very incomplete without good data.
"Someone's going to end up unhappy, and the only question is who."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment#2020
+2 TX
+1 FL
-1 CA, MI, IL, NY
Projections for 2030:
https://thearp.org/blog/apportionment/2030-asof121923/
+4 TX
+3 FL
-4 CA
-3 NY
-2 IL
(In both cases I left out swing states)
So yeah. gonna be some people landing up unhappy! Including, I suspect, Kevin...
Now if we were to shake things up by 2030, by adding PR as state, along with Greenland and Mars, the details might change in some unexpected ways...
Projections say the Texas and Florida will grow to be larger than California in 50 years or so. Which may or may not happen. But a few things:
* What impact will have climate change have on that projected growth?
* What happens to politics in those states? Do they tip blue or stay red?
* How much of the growth is immigration? How much is migration from other states?
I'm in California and would welcome more growth in housing. There's plenty of development in my corner of L.A. But there are obstacles. Geography, for one. You can't continue to built out forever. We have mountains. The YIMBY solution is to build up. Which is being done, to a point. If everybody stayed home, that would help. But people try to go other places all the time. So the problem isn't just housing, but housing + transportation, and the second part of that takes a lot more money and a lot more time than putting up new houses and apartment buildings.
Well, if things keep going the way they have been (and the incoming administration is not exactly going to help) Florida will be composed of some small islands in 50 years. But that will be the least of our problems.
OTOH if Trump actually gets the US army going on deporting ten or twelve million people housing prices should come down. Along with a lot of other kinds of things coming down.
Indeed. No projections have factored in Trump 2.0. Expect changes to your forecasts.
The South is the region projected to have the fastest population growth in coming decades. The South is also the region that will become increasingly uninhabitable in other projections. All those projections cannot be true.
Thanks for the stats.
The growth areas states have both good jobs and reasonable housing. Kinda makes Kevin's point.
Yes
Weird that people want to live in areas with strong job markets and economic opportunities.
Even remote workers want arts & culture, not to mention robust grocery and restaurant options. It's more than just jobs.
Clearly sending lots of people to college starting with the WWII GI bill was a big mistake. Too many of them took Art History or Film Studies or something.
We're already doing number 2.
You know, that map is a bit misleading. Naturally, metro areas will have fewer approved permits per 1000 persons, given the likelihood of large multifamily structures in areas where land is expensive and allowable heights are over 100'. In this case, one would want to track new units built per 1000 persons.
And your conclusion -- we can force big cities to approve a lot more housing that they don't want -- makes no sense.
It is rare that a building permit is blocked. Usually, there are delays with redlines of drawings and/or missing information, conflicting data, etc., which then might put you in the back of the queue again.
Maybe you meant that our national policy should be to force cities to eliminate single-family zoning? If that's the case, I believe all three states on the west coast have already done this in recent years.
Or maybe you meant to say that states ought to force cities to eliminate neighborhood reviews which can often stop projects from moving forward? Or likewise, eliminate design review, which can force costly design changes based on who's on the design review board?
WA has eliminated single-family zoning?
My house is SF5000. I suppose you could claim that since it is easier than before to permit an ADU (accessory dwelling unit) single-family was "eliminated" but that is stretching words.
In fact it is possible to build ADU's but the permitting is slow and there are a lot of requirements that could be relaxed.
Seattle could in fact change zoning and staff up and there would be a lot more building. I backed off doing a project this year not because the permit woud be "blocked" but because the whole proccess would slow and onerous and life is too short.
They don't let you do over the counter if you follow prescriptive code and walk reviewers through all the notes that cover it?
RCW 36.70A.635 pretty much eliminates single-family zoning.
How do you feel about the national building codes heading towards net zero construction? That's going to incrementally add costs to building structures, in particular residential, through 2030 or so.
There's still a lot of construction going on out in Seattle and the Eastside. Focus has shifted to building a lot of new apartment complexes along the light rail corridors. In fact, I read recently in the Seattle Times that they may need to add a lot more park and ride space. I hope they built the parking towers with sturdy foundations in case they really do need to add a lot more floors.
There really is a lot of new construction. The light rail line through S. Seattle has long stretches, new townhouses more than apartment buildings.
Yet housing remains super-tight. We need lot more, like 100,000 units. I can vouch that building in Seattle is harder than it needs to be. In the meantime people who move here are hard-pressed.
On my modest block in S. Seattle (less fancy part of Beacon Hill) houses are $800K - 1.2M. Who can afford that?
Map of lead water pipes in New York,
https://nylcvedfund.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/342497b697cf4994ab64652e4dbdc4fc
A significant proportion of new homes are 2nd or 3rd homes built for the wealthy.