Housing shortages are making homeownership unaffordable across the U.S. | Hacker News Reader

Housing shortages are making homeownership unaffordable across the U.S.

npr.org

28 pointspaulpauper13 comments

It's weird to write an article about the housing crisis without mentioning the artificial scarcity caused by the foreign speculators and domestic monopolists like Blackrock buying up all the houses.

In my experience it's been very difficult to find any singular piece of writing that talks about all the angles. It's a complex issue, but each of the complexities matters and they affect one another.

BlackRock does not buy houses

https://www.blackrock.com/us/individual/insights/buying-hous...

They invest in new construction and hire management companies to rent out houses. I would argue that spending money to acquire a new house is “buying a house.”

The US hasn’t done jack shit for the supply lately.

The doom cycle of the last 50 years:

- Fed lowers interest rates to increase demand. Prices go up, only the most well off can afford.

- Fed goes back to increasing rates again. Demand goes down. Prices generally don’t decrease all that much really, they just stop going up, and higher interest rates are what stop more from getting a house.

Literally nothing for supply side. Our society has decided to leave housing up the The Fed to tweak demand.

Well, private property matters in the United States. "The government" can't just decide to bulldoze everything and start over. And seeing as how this isn't going to change, it's possible that not much can or should be done about it. Zoning is a tool that municipalities have at their disposal, but local government officials represent the people in their jurisdictions, often property owners--who pay significant taxes--so chances are they won't vote against their own interests.

I'm afraid there really aren't any good answers to these problems.

> Zoning is a tool that municipalities have at their disposal, but local government officials represent the people in their jurisdictions, often property owners--who pay significant taxes--so chances are they won't vote against their own interests.

One possible solution is for states to limit the zoning authority of high-demand municipalities that fail to produce housing. This is basically the idea of RHNA[1, 2] in California, although the process didn't have much teeth until recently.

[1] https://abag.ca.gov/our-work/housing/rhna-regional-housing-n...

[2] https://abag.ca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2021-06/Co...

But the US government can do something. They could pass a bill that allows a progressive tax write-off for builders who build X units. More write offs for redeveloping houses older than a hundred years.

Instead of all the tax cuts, borrowing and money printing done since trump era, we could have incentivized builders to build more.

The problem is so clear, but the NIMBYs still vote and increased interest rates may make this worse.

NIMBYs aren’t making this better for sure. But the bigger problem is with local policies that allow unlimited commercial real estate and there is a ton of vacancies right now. However these townships don’t want to rezone them for residential use or to at least temporarily house the homeless. Instead they just blame and the get pitchforks for the folks that either got - they came a long long time ago or for the honest hard working folks that paid for it - property taxes and all and hence expect something in return.

Please educate people and vote for rezoning empty commercial real estate blight - this is the one that will have the highest impact. Even offices that are occupied have 10-15 occupancy rate because of covid.

There is enough housing if you don't mind the long commute. It's more like a shortage of homes in desirable areas. Suddenly adding more homes or packing in more people will make some of these areas less desirable and hurt existing homeowners.

I doubt it. I recently moved to Olympia, a city of 50k people an hour south of Seattle -- two hours with normal traffic. According to Zillow the typical home is now $540k -- up 18% from a year ago. Up from $340k two years ago. How much further do I need to drive? How much less desirable does the area need to be?

>There is enough housing if you don't mind the long commute. It's more like a shortage of homes in desirable areas

It would be so cool if this was true, or even remotely close to true.

Here's the middle of the desert, 2 hours east of San Diego, where you can see prices double in the last 2 years (just like, surprise, everywhere else!)

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3526-Country-Club-Rd-Borr...

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