Category Archives: Housing

“After a decade of building 8,000 apartments in Oakland, market rate 1-bedroom units are now affordable to low income people,” says a Bay Area writer named Joshua Davis. The implication is that the 8,000 apartments had something to do with Oakland become more affordable. It didn’t.

Cities all over the country are building apartments, many of them subsidized with so-called affordable housing funds. The mid-rise and high-rise apartments that aren’t subsidized aren’t going to rent for affordable prices because they are far more expensive to build than single-family homes. Continue reading →

Here’s evidence, if anyone needs it, that rent control contributes to housing scarcity: a new report says that more than 13,000 rent-controlled apartments have been vacant for at least two years. Nearly 90,000 rent-controlled apartments were vacant in 2021 and more than 60,000 were still vacant in 2022.

Manhattan apartment building. Photo by David Merrett.

When people leave a New York City rent-controlled apartment, landlords are allowed to raise the rent for the next occupants by $89 a month. Too often, that’s not enough to pay for the repairs and other work needed to make the apartment attractive to new renters. As a result, the apartments sit vacant, waiting for the owners to sell or, less likely, for the rent control law to be repealed. Continue reading →

A math-challenged report finds that homes in the San Francisco Bay Area are still selling above their asking price despite census data showing that the region’s population is declining. The report says that Vallejo (which is part of the San Francisco Bay Area but the Census Bureau counts as a separate urban area) “is the number one metro area for selling homes over the list price,” followed by San Francisco and Rochester, New York.

This 1,020-square-foot house on a 4,800-square-foot lot is offered for sale in Vallejo for $499,000, but if recent experience is any guide it will actually sell for around $536,000.

The report says that homes in Vallejo typically sell for 1.07 percent more than their asking price and homes in San Francisco sell for 1.03 percent more than their asking price. However, this is wrong: what the report means is that homes in Vallejo sell for 1.07 times their asking price (which is 7 percent more) and homes in San Francisco (meaning the San Francisco-Oakland urban area) sell for 1.03 times their asking price (or 3 percent more). Continue reading →

Due to the large number of people seeking to move during and after the pandemic, the number of severely unaffordable housing markets quintupled between 2019 and 2022, says a new report from demographer Wendell Cox that traces the changes in housing affordability in 174 major U.S. housing markets. Of those 174, Cox classified 44 as affordable in 2019, but only 11 were still affordable in 2022. The good news is that’s a slight improvement over 2021, when only 9 were affordable.

Click image to download a 3.1-MB PDF of this 28-page report.

Cox measures affordability by comparing median home prices with median household incomes. This is slightly different from the Antiplanner’s comparison of median home prices with median family incomes. Both of us consider housing to be affordable when median prices are less than three times median incomes and severely unaffordable when median prices are more than five times median incomes. Continue reading →

The news media is discovering something that the Antiplanner has been saying for years: so-called affordable housing isn’t affordable. The federal, state, and local governments spend tens of billions of dollars a year subsidizing supposedly affordable housing, yet few people who need such housing get into the projects and many of those who do can’t afford the rents that are charged.

104 of the 116 units of the Alameda View Apartments in Aurora, Colorado are dedicated to people earning up to 60 percent of median income, which in the Denver metro area is $75,300 a year. That means average monthly will be as high as $1,883 a month.

As a recent article in the LAist points out, more than 450,000 households in Los Angeles have incomes low enough to qualify for affordable housing, yet fewer than 50,000 such units have been built. One project that opened in 2022 received 7,500 applications for just 65 apartments. Continue reading →

Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, knows what her priorities are. With her endorsement, the state is spending billions of dollars to deal with its housing shortage. Thanks partly to that housing shortage, homeless camps can be found all over the state, from Portland to tiny Sisters, a city of 2,000.

“Unmanaged” homeless camp in Portland. Photo by Graywalls.

Some of that money is supposed to be used to create managed homeless camps, where homeless people supposedly will have access to “food, hygiene, litter collection and treatment for mental health and substance abuse.” However, Governor Kotek recently informed officials in Bend, central Oregon’s largest city, that they would not be allowed to have a managed homeless camp outside of the city’s urban-growth boundary. “We must exhaust every possible option within the UGB for shelter sites,” she said. Continue reading →

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 →