Category Archives: Housing

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 →

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 →