Category Archives: Housing

The Wall Street Journal reports that the “latest urban trend” is “less elbow room” as measured by an increase in accessory units and additional homes built on the lots once occupied by only one home. To illustrate this “trend,” the Journal had to travel to Vancouver, BC, which Wendell Cox ranks as second only to Hong Kong as the least affordable urban area in the English-speaking world.

That lack of affordability, in turn, can be traced to the region’s mindless pursuit of densification via urban-growth boundaries. In other words, this “trend” may actually be just a response to planning-induced housing shortages, not to any real desire of people to double up on individual home sites.

Consider, for example, some other evidence: the Census Bureau says that the average size of homes built in 2012 reached a record 2,340 square feet. More than 40 percent of homes are now built with four bedrooms. Even new condos have reached a record average size of more than 1,400 square feet. The average size of rental apartments, however, is a paltry 1,110 square feet.

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“The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit,” says the Washington Post, and some people fear that will lead to another housing bubble. In fact, there are going to be more housing bubbles; the Obama administration is contributing to them; but not through policies promoting subprime lending.

Neither subprime lending nor other federal policies caused the housing crisis that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Too few people understand this because they still view U.S. housing as a single market. But unlike labor or food or cars, housing is not something that you can easily pick up and move to somewhere that may place a higher value on it. Oil can be easily and fairly cheaply transported, so there is a world oil market; but housing markets are strictly local.

Nearly eight years ago, Alan Greenspan famously said the United States was not suffering from a housing bubble. He has take a lot of heat for that, but he was right. His exact words were, “Although a ‘bubble’ in home prices for the nation as a whole does not appear likely, there do appear to be, at a minimum, signs of froth in some local markets where home prices seem to have risen to unsustainable levels.”

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The Bipartisan Policy Center released an “infographic” arguing that there is an imminent shortage of rental housing. “Five to six million new renter households will form over the next ten years,” says the “graphic” (quotations used because it really isn’t that graphic), but a “slowdown in new construction . . . means rental market conditions are tight.”

Click to download the entire infographic.

The group buys into the notion that an increasing number of people want to rent rather than buy. Yet it is more likely that the sagging economy combined with housing prices that are still too high in many states are preventing people from buying even though they would prefer to do so.

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San Francisco has approved the construction of tiny apartments as small as 150 square feet. Previous zoning required a minimum of at least 290 square feet. New York City is considering a similar measure.

Tiny houses for sale in Petaluma, CA. Flickr photo by Nicolas Boulosa.

Meanwhile, construction of 200-square-foot single-family homes is growing popular in Washington, DC. Homes of 150 to 200 square feet sell for $20,000 to $50,000, or $133 to $250 a square foot.
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Harvard economists have proven one of the major theses of American Nightmare, which is that land-use regulation is a major cause of growing income inequality in the United States. By restricting labor mobility, the economists say, such regulation has played a “central role” in income disparities.

When measured on a state-by-state basis, American income inequality declined at a steady rate of 1.8 percent per year from 1880 to 1980. The slowing and reversal of this long-term trend after 1980 is startling. Not by coincidence, the states with the strongest land-use regulations–those on the Pacific Coast and in New England–began such regulation in the 1970s and 1980s.

Forty to 75 percent of the decline in inequality before 1980, the Harvard economists say, was due to migration of workers from low-income states to high-income states. The freedom to easily move faded after 1980 as many of the highest-income states used land-use regulation to make housing unaffordable to low-income workers. Average incomes in those states grew, leading them to congratulate themselves for attracting high-paid workers when what they were really doing is driving out low- and (in California, at least) middle-income workers.

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Cornell law professor Robert Hockett has proposed a way out of the “mortgage debt impasse” that he thinks is slowing our economy: have the federal government take all of the underwater homes by eminent domain, paying fair market value for the homes, and then sell the homes, hopefully to the previous buyers. Since the federal government will be able to sell the homes for what it paid for them, it won’t lose money, and fewer residents will lose their homes, so it sounds like a win-win solution.

Although the plan has been endorsed by Yale housing economist Robert Shiller, the Antiplanner is not so enthused. Hockett and Shiller barely hint that it is not exactly a win-win plan, and the big losers will be those who invested in mortgage-backed securities. The forced-sale of the homes backing these securities for less than value of the mortgages means many of these investors will lose their money.

No doubt many will say tough luck. But this attitude has become characteristic of the Obama administration, and it probably threatens our economy more than the “mortgage impasse.”

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