Category Archives: Housing

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 →

Urban journalist Henry Grabar thinks he has found “one solution to America’s housing crisis”: convincing boomers to rent out their spare bedrooms to Gen-Zers. According to one review of census data, he says, the U.S. has 137 million spare bedrooms, more than enough to house all of the people now looking for affordable housing. Apparently, Grabar thinks that every child in America dreams of growing up to move out of their parents’ spare bedroom and into some stranger’s spare bedroom.

Photo by Curtis Adams.

I have bad news for Grabar: all of those spare bedrooms are being used. Just because they are called “bedrooms” doesn’t mean that’s their only possible use. They are home offices, libraries, dens, sewing rooms, hobby centers, home theaters, and so forth. Some of them are even used as guest bedrooms. It is rather arrogant of Grabar and others to think that, just because census data calls something a “bedroom” means that is the only use of the room. Even if those rooms were truly vacant doesn’t mean that anyone really wants to spend their lives in someone else’s spare bedroom. Continue reading →

Nearly two years ago, Oregon’s Governor Tina Kotek set a target of increasing the number of homes built in Oregon each year from 22,000 to 36,000. At the time, I argued that the subsidies Kotek was proposing wouldn’t work, partly because builders would respond to new subsidized homes by reducing market-rate home construction.

Click image to download a 3.4-MB PDF of this report.

A recent report from the state’s office of Housing and Community Services finds that the situation is worse than I thought. The state and local governments have spent $2.2 billion subsidizing new housing, mostly since 2020. Yet the most recent data indicate that the number of new homes constructed each year is no greater than it was before. Although demand for housing has fallen because so many people are leaving the state due to high housing prices, housing is considerably less affordable today than it was in 2020. Continue reading →

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 →