Category Archives: Housing

The Washington Post has discovered that there are “inefficiencies” in the nation’s affordable housing programs, including its largest one, low-income housing tax credits. Due to these inefficiencies, one non-profit developer in DC is spending up to $1.3 million per housing unit. Another developer spent $800,000 per unit, while right next door the very same developer built market-rate housing for just $350,000 per unit.

Ontario Place, a so-called affordable housing project that is costing $1.2 million per unit.

Ontario Place, the project pictured above, “will include a rooftop aquaponics farm to produce fresh fruits and vegetables for its tenants,” which contributed to the $1.2 million per unit cost. Another expensive project found by Post writers, which cost “only” $815,000 per unit, “includes a fitness room to encourage physical activity, a library, a large café with an outdoor terrace, a large multi-purpose community room with a separate outdoor terrace, an indoor bike room, on-site laundry, lounges and balconies on every floor.” Continue reading →

Portland, Oregon is suffering from the “worst housing crisis outlook” in the country, according to a study published last week by LendingTree.com. The study compared housing prices with household incomes and current vacancy rates to conclude that Portland and three other cities in the Northwest — Boise, Spokane, and Salt Lake — are four of the five worst housing markets out of the top 100 metro areas.

While I appreciate anything that knocks Portland, I have a lot of quibbles with this study. The researcher used data for metropolitan areas, which are political units (being drawn on county boundaries), instead of urban areas, which are economic units (being drawn based on population densities). The researcher compared median housing prices with median household incomes, while median family incomes make more sense because non-family households (such as college housemates) rarely buy homes. Continue reading →

Oregon housing prices are “soaring.” Homelessness is increasing. Not having anything else to do, homeless people turn to drugs, aided by city and county programs giving them free syringes and other paraphernalia.

This map shows homeless camps identified by the city of Portland. Colors indicate the risk of crime each camp supposedly poses to nearby neighborhoods.

This leads to conflicts as people who actually have homes find their neighborhoods invaded by homeless people and their tents (given to them by the county government), drug dealers, and associated problems. This has Progressives looking around for someone to blame for all this other than themselves. Continue reading →

Housing in Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Singapore was slightly more affordable in 2024 than it had been in 2023. Wendell Cox’s latest assessment of housing affordability, when compared with last year’s assessment, shows that housing became slightly less affordable in Ireland and the United Kingdom, while affordability remained unchanged in Australia and the United States.

Click image to download this 3.0-MB report.

Of course, these country-wide trends hide changes, both up and down, in individual housing markets. Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose all became slightly less affordable while Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio all became slightly more affordable between 2023 and 2024. In at least a few cases, including Portland, affordability probably improved mainly because people were moving out; certainly, Portland’s housing supply did not appreciably increase between 2023 and 2024. Continue reading →

Californians are being subjected to some of the worst tyrannies found in the former Soviet Union, according to Los Angeles attorney Chris LeGras. His recent articles, California Tyranny Part 1 and Part 2, show that efforts to build high-density housing in cities is harming people and the neighborhoods they live in, all under the name of YIMBY.

See any similarities?

YIMBY advocates “could not care less about housing affordability, much less about quality of life,” says LeGras. Instead, they want dense housing and revile single-family housing. They claim that advocates of single-family housing are racists, even though 16 million Latinos and 2.2 million blacks live in their own homes in California, and millions more live in single-family homes that they rent. Continue reading →

On her first day in office, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed an executive order calling for the construction of 36,000 new homes per year. She was especially hoping for lots of new apartments because, as everyone knows, driving is evil and people who live in apartments drive less than people who live in single-family homes.

Source: CoStar via Willamette Week.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who understands how well central planning works that apartment construction in Portland, where close to half of Oregonians live, is now at its lowest level in more than a decade. There are several reasons for this, but among them are several idiotic government policies that have discouraged more construction. Continue reading →

A YouTube site called “Oh the Urbanity!” challenges the “myth” that five-stories is the “optimal” height for residential buildings. I would agree, except Oh the Urbanity! thinks that taller, not shorter, is better and criticizes other urbanists who are satisfied with “only” mid-rise buildings.

I’ve got news for Oh the Urbanity! Most Americans (surveys say 80 percent) wouldn’t want to live in your towers even if they cost no more than a similarly sized single-family home. They especially don’t want to live in mid-rise or high-rise buildings that cost a lot more, per square foot, than single-family homes. Continue reading →

Matthew Yglesias recently tweeted,

That’s a nice hypothesis, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. As noted in this article, “Who Owns the U.S. Housing Market,” some 68 percent of the 146 million homes in the U.S. are single-family homes, and less than 4 percent of single-family homes are owned by “institutional investors” who own at least 100 homes. Those same investors own about 40 percent of multifamily housing. That means all institutional investors combined, of which Blackrock is only one, own about 20 million homes, or about 14 percent of housing. Continue reading →

The number of homeless people in the United States has grown by 33 percent since 2020, according to a report released last month by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). A chart on page 2 of the report (shown below) indicates that the number of homeless people was gradually shrinking between 2007 (when the annual homeless census began) and 2016, but then started rapidly growing in 2019 and even more rapidly growing in 2022.

Click image to download a 5.0-MB PDF of the report from which this chart was taken.

In the 1980s, groups and agencies worried about homelessness began programs aimed at treating drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, and other conditions that led people to become homeless. More recently, low-income housing groups have advocating increasing spending on housing subsidies to provide shelter for homeless people. These two alternatives are known as “Treatment First” and “Housing First.” Continue reading →