Comment by underlipton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by underlipton | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy it. One thing that stands out to me: he has a ton of charts, but this crucial bit:

>But, since 2008, vacancies have been declining steeply.

is missing one. It looks like this statement is based on his estimates. So... original research. I'll leave it to an actual statistician to analyze his methodology, but that statement doesn't jive with my experience.

I continue to suspect that the "housing shortage" (similar to the "labor shortage") is due to a mismatch between the value that industry expects and what are actually the rates necessary to support the population. Powerful institutions representing wealthy individuals and groups, and large swathes of people, like the status quo; it is, in fact, fundamental to their lifestyle, their finances, the overall economy, and they will (and have) done everything they can to keep prices and the perception of scarcity high. The situation doesn't seem rational from an inventory/demand standpoint because it isn't; there are enough house, and they should be worth less and more affordable. But we won't return to reality until the privileging of incumbents ends.

The "housing shortage" is due to a shortage of housing. This is entirely self-inflicted by various cities that have illegalized all the easy ways of increasing density (see San Francisco for the reductio ad absurdum case), at the prompting of deeply NIMBY voters who oppose anything that will increase construction regardless of claimed political beliefs.

There are housing shortages in localities due mostly to distribution issues. Nationally, the number of housing units exceeds the number of households (families). In theory that market should correct this by causing places (San Francisco, in your example) to be less attractive and people will choose other places to work and live.

You may have noticed a broad swell in house prices across the nation as the pandemic freed folks to work remotely.

10% vacancy is generally considered ok. 5% is what New York state defines as an emergency. Even Buffalo is at 4.9%.

The shortage is real.

The work from home trend didn’t last and was largely unrealized. No, you can’t work from Butte, you need to be back in the office in Seattle.

Buffalo has about half the population now than it did at its peak in 1950. They just tore down housing because they could not afford to maintain them, and before they would fall into disrepair and became dens for crime and rodents. Similar de-housification is also occurring in Detroit, the market adjusts one way or the other.

Yep, the tear downs are happening all through the rust belt and Appalachia.

There are about 140 million units and about 15 million vacancies. Seems that nationally there are vacancies around 10%.

https://gigafact.org/fact-briefs/are-there-more-homes-people...

I'm not an expert, so forgive if this is a stupid question...

What you just said might be absolutely true in the US. However, housing is at historic levels everywhere in the developed world. How do you explain that? Surely not all cities in the world made the same mistakes?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHVRUSQ156N

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RRVRUSQ156N

Your links don't measure underutilised and vacant property (e.g. AirBnBs and second homes, or land banked properties).

From the links:

The homeowner vacancy rate is the proportion of the homeowner inventory that is vacant for sale.

The rental vacancy rate is the proportion of the rental inventory that is vacant for rent.

So essentially this is a measure of how many properties are vacant and available for rent or purchase.

You are correct, here is a better statistic: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EVACANTUSQ176N

Thanks.

So with a population of 340m, 15m vacant properties, and an average household size of 2.5 we have 15,000,000/(340,000,000/2.5)= 0.11, or a possible vacancy rate of 11%. That seems like a lot.

I'm not sure why you'd want to include AirBnBs and second houses in your measurement vacancy measurement — they aren't available for rent.

Because usually when people talk of an accommodation crisis they are referring to a shortage of homes available to be used as a primary residence. It makes sense to consider holiday homes and such as contributing to this problem. Just ask anyone in Majorca for example.

Sometimes people refer to underutilised properties rather than vacant properties for this reason.

I am very interested to know what happens to the proportion of underutilised properties during an accommodation crisis. The most recent linked chart in this thread is very interesting - what caused the steep increase leading up to the GFC (i.e. during a boom - often associated with a 'shortage')?

Another point overlooked is that the main focus of the article cites fewer people per household, then discounts things like AirB&B, which directly contributes to this statistic. It seems like a casual dismissal of the statistic, painting it as simply no one having children.

Short Term Rentals do not help, but ... as someone who has been doing housing stuff for a few years now, they're one of several bogeymen that people want so badly to be 'the real problem'. But they aren't. It's your neighbors who show up to oppose housing, like this crowd at a hearing I attended to support some apartments: https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-housing...

That's 40 homes (aka 'units') that are not built, and it's not because of STR's, foreign buyers, Blackstone or whatever other bogeyman.

That happens all over the place, every single day.

I don't think he's saying it's the cause, just a contributor. I would group them in with the "status-quo likers" I talked about, which also includes NIMBYs. The root remains an unwillingness to tell these people, "No, you had enough/had your chance. We're opening the spigot, and we're not predicating it on your getting rent."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com