Category Archives: Housing

The YIMBY movement argues that people who oppose densification of their single-family neighborhoods are racist. But race has nothing to do with it. A new paper by Wharton economist Joseph Gyourko and Brown University economist Sean McCulloch finds that a 1/2-unit per acre increase in density imposes a loss of $9,500 per home in single-family neighborhoods. Moreover, the loss is significantly larger if the increase density is in the form of multifamily housing or rental housing.

What Gyourko and McCulloch really found is that people are willing to pay more to live in low-density neighborhoods, and their willingness to pay for a home drops when the neighborhood is densified. This means densification is effectively a taking of private property, which the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution suggests should require compensation. Continue reading →

Japan’s population is roughly equal to the five most-populous states of the U.S. — California, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas — concentrated in a nation that has approximately the land area of Montana, which is only about a fourth as large as those five most-populous states. Moreover, well over 40 percent of Japanese live in the Tokyo-Osaka corridor, which is considerably smaller than the Boston-Washington corridor yet has a greater population.

Single-family homes in Japan.

Despite this concentration, most Japanese live in single-family homes. While that percentage has been declining, in recent years that decline has been due to the rise in people living alone. In major urban areas, single-family homes are often on small lots, but they are on large lots in smaller towns and rural areas. Just as in the U.S., most Japanese families aspire to live in a single-family home. Continue reading →

If you are thinking of moving and plan to live in an apartment, Marietta, Georgia or Tallahassee, Florida would be good places to consider. The average apartment in both cities is more than 1,000 square feet, and new apartments are even larger than that, according to a new report from RentCafe, a web site that focuses on apartment life.

Many people in high-tech cities such as San Jose and Seattle are working at home, but it is hard to fit a home office into a studio apartment. Photo by Charles & Hudson.

On the other hand, unless you are a claustrophiliac, West Coast cities are terrible places to search for an apartment. Seattle apartments average less than 700 square feet and apartments built in the last 10 years are even smaller. Worse, apartments now under construction in Seattle average just 430 square feet; only San Jose is building tinier apartments at an average of 423 square feet. Portland and Los Angeles also have smaller-than-average apartments and the ones being built in those cities tend to be tiny: 553 square feet in L.A. and 606 in Portland. Continue reading →

Most major cities that were unaffordable in 2022 became even more unaffordable in 2023, according to Wendell Cox‘s latest annual report on international housing affordability. The major exception is in New Zealand, where land-use reforms have led to a home construction boom and increased housing affordability.

Click image to download this 3.3-MB 33-page PDF.

He has been doing these reports since 2005 so this may be his 20th report (though he may have missed 2021). This year’s report, which is based on data from the third quarter of 2023, examines affordability in 94 housing markets in eight English-speaking countries: Australia, Canada, China (Hong Kong only), Ireland, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Of these 94 markets, the least affordable are Hong Kong, Sydney, and Vancouver while the most affordable are Pittsburgh, Rochester, and St. Louis. Continue reading →

Taxpayers spend billions of dollars a year subsidizing so-called affordable housing, but much of that money is wasted, says a new report from the Cascade Policy Institute. Affordable housing being built today actually costs much more than market-rate housing, and most of the benefits from building such expensive housing are captured by the developers, not low-income families who need housing.

Click image to download a 3.0-MB PDF of this report.

The report, which was written by the Antiplanner, reviews hundreds of housing projects built in the last 35 years to show that the nature of the typical project has changed from inexpensive low-rise apartment buildings to mid-rise and high-rise apartments that cost several times as much to build per square foot. The result — as noted in an Antiplanner post last December — is that the number of housing units built has declined despite a doubling of money spent subsidizing affordable housing. This has effectively cheated both taxpayers and people dependent on affordable housing. Continue reading →

In what could be considered an April Fool’s joke, the Montana state legislature passed several laws mandating densification of cities. Apparently, the legislature believed the nation’s fourth-largest state, with the third-lowest population density, was running out of land and could only accommodate growth by building high-density apartment buildings in all major cities.

In a failed effort to make housing more affordable, Bozeman has subsidized the construction of four-story apartment buildings such as this one. Similar buildings would be mandated in other Montana cities if the laws challenged by this lawsuit go into effect.

These laws were passed in response to a “housing crisis” that resulted when Bozeman (Gallatin County), Kalispell (Flathead County), and Missoula (Missoula County) passed the functional equivalent of urban-growth boundaries, making housing in those counties unaffordable (value-to-income ratios greater than 5 in 2022). Billings (Yellowstone County), Great Falls (Cascade County), and Helena (Lewis & Clark County) have not, and housing in those counties remains affordable (value-to-income ratios below 5 and mostly below 4). Continue reading →

In December, I pointed out that Silicon Valley’s transit system was designed for the 1910s and suggested a way to redesign it so that it would serve a 2020s urban area. Last month, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) announced that is attempting the exact opposite strategy: it wants to turn Silicon Valley into a 1910s urban area.

Planned high-density developments aim to turn San Jose into a Greenwich Village lookalike. Source: Republic Urban Properties.

Last week, a Silicon Valley group called Opportunity Now published my assessment of why this strategy is bound to fail. Instead, it will waste a lot of tax dollars and enrich a few property developers without making the region’s housing more affordable or helping regional mobility.

The Divided We Fall web site has posted a debate over the housing crisis between the Antiplanner and former U.S. Ambassador Charles Ray. The debate covers some important issues, but I had hoped that my opponent would be a card-carrying member of the Affordable Housing Industrial Complex. Instead, Ray and I ended up agreeing on more issues that we disagreed about.

Affordable housing project in Salt Lake City. Source: Google street view.

I wanted to make the debate about the billions of tax dollars being spent building not very much housing. But it turned into a debate over housing affordability in general, which is both a completely different issue and too broad to cover in 1,000 words. Continue reading →

More than 650,000 Americans, nearly 2 out of every 1,000, were homeless in January 2023, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Homeless Assessment Report, which was released last week. This is a 15 percent increase since 2019 — but less than a 1 percent increase since 2007, when HUD first attempted to count the homeless.

Homeless in Denver. Photo by Jeffrey Beall.

New York state has the highest rate of homelessness at 5.2 per 1,000 residents, followed by Oregon at 4.7 (using 2022 population estimates). At the other end of the scale, Mississippi has only 0.3 homeless per 1,000 residents. Continue reading →