Category Archives: Housing

Hawaii’s housing prices aren’t quite as high as California’s, but they are close. This isn’t because Hawaii is running out of land; the vast majority of land on each of the main islands is rural. Instead, it is due to a 1961 land-use law and subsequent amendments that placed most of the land in the state off limits to development. One result is that the state’s population is declining as people are leaving for more affordable places.

Governor Josh Green has responded by issuing a proclamation suspending the land-use law and several other laws, including a historic preservation law, for one year in order to allow homebuilders to construct 50,000 new homes in the next five years. Naturally, environmental groups are upset, and it isn’t clear to me that a governor can suspend a law passed by the legislature, but at least it will make people aware of what the real problems are and how to fix them. Continue reading →

North America’s most livable cities are also among the least affordable. At least, that’s my conclusion from the Economist‘s 2023 Livability Index. According to this index, Vancouver BC, which Wendell Cox ranks as the least-affordable housing market in North America, is also the continent’s most livable city.

Click image to download a copy of this report.

Other cities that the Economist ranks high on the livability list include Boston, Honolulu, Miami, Montreal, Portland, Toronto, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, all of which are rated unaffordable (median home prices are at least five times median household incomes) by Cox. The only city that is truly affordable and, according to the Economist, livable is Pittsburgh, and it’s so livable that its population has been shrinking for 70 years. Admittedly, the Economist also counts Atlanta, Calgary, and Minneapolis as livable, regions that Cox says are marginally affordable (home prices 4 to 5 times incomes). Continue reading →

Are we living in a black hole and I just passed through a wormhole into another universe? That’s the only explanation I can think of for a recent New York Times article (no paywall) by Ezra Klein praising a new mid rise in San Francisco “that might be the answer to San Francisco’s homelessness crisis.” Built in three years (half the normal time in the Bay Area) using modular construction methods, the building costs less than $400,000 per unit compared with $600,000 to $700,000 for other similar projects in San Francisco.

The reddish-brown color isn’t paint; it’s rust, or what the architect calls “weathered steel.” That’s just as well in San Francisco’s rainy, salty environment as I doubt many people will want to see this building last for very long. Photo by Bruce Damonte, David Baker Architects.

My first thought was “$400,000 still sounds pretty high for any kind of ‘affordable housing.'” My second thought was, “How big are those housing units anyway?” Continue reading →

Proponents of a bill winding its way through the Colorado legislature assume that increased housing densities will make housing more affordable and will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Neither of these assumptions are valid, according to an article in Complete Colorado. And you know it’s true, because I wrote it.

This chart compared population densities and housing affordability in the nation’s top 100 urban areas.

You may have seen diagrams like the above here before, but I made this one using the latest density data from the 2020 census combined with housing affordability data from the 2020 American Community Survey. Counting the top 50 urban areas, the correlation was 0.85 (where 1 is perfect and anything close to 0 is completely random); for the top 100, it was 0.79; for the top 200 it was still a respectable 0.70. Continue reading →

To help fund the $1.3 billion that Los Angeles’ city council believes it needs to house the homeless, the city decided to impose a “mansion tax” of 4 percent on the sales of any homes or commercial properties above $5 million and 5.5 percent on sales above $10 million. This was projected to bring in $900 million a year, funding most of the homeless program.

This home is currently on the market in Los Angeles for an asking price of $5.667 million. Many homes of this size are available for under $1 million in Houston and San Antonio and few are asking more than $2 million.

The reality is far different because planners, as usual, failed to take into account how their regulations and taxes would influence human behavior. In the month before the tax went into effect on April 1, 126 homes sold for more than $5 million. In the month since? Just two. Continue reading →

A month ago, I commented on Colorado Senate Bill 213, which would allow the state to give major cities housing targets that they would have to meet and require cities to rezone single-family neighborhoods to allow for more density. Some of the worst features of the bill have been deleted, but the bill is still bad.

A 736-square-foot apartment in this Denver mid-rise development costs more to rent than the mortgage on many 2,000-square-foot single-family homes in cities that don’t have urban-growth boundaries, yet the state wants to force cities to allow (and subsidize) more of these as “affordable housing.”

The reason why the rezoning requirement was dropped from the bill was that the cities themselves opposed it — not because they opposed density but because they said they were already imposing density on their residents and didn’t need to be told to do so by the state. Many cities in the Denver metro area are landlocked, so the only way for them to meet state housing targets would be to densify anyway. Continue reading →

A new paper from the Urban Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, is further proof, if anyone needs it, that more planning means less housing. Unfortunately, the authors of this paper failed to get this, as the paper praises states that have the most supposedly pro-housing laws even though those are the very states that have least affordable housing.

Click image to download a 1.6-MB PDF of this 30-page report.

A map on page 6 of the report shows how many laws various states have passed that “incentivize housing.” California, Oregon, and Washington lead the way with more than 10 such laws each. In fact, appendix A reveals that California has passed 56 such laws, far more than any other state. Needless to say, California has the least-affordable housing in the nation. Continue reading →