Category Archives: Housing

Oregon’s new governor, Tina Kotek, has made housing her top priority and has proposed a number of unrealistic and idiotic remedies to high housing costs and homelessness. For one, she wants spend $54 million to house 1,200 people for one year. That’s $4,000 a month per person. Of course, a lot of that is probably going to go into various housing bureaucracies.

Someone’s idea of affordable housing Portland, because everyone knows that people move out West so they can live in a cramped apartment.

Kotek’s long-term goal is to see 36,000 housing units built per year in Oregon, which five times more than has recently been built. The state has not built 36,000 housing units for 50 years, which by an extraordinary coincidence is when the legislature created the state’s land-use planning process that restricts rural development. Continue reading →

High housing prices induced by state and local anti-sprawl regulations are the main cause of growing wealth inequality, contributed to homelessness, and forced hundreds of thousands of people to move from beautiful but highly regulated states such as California to more affordable but frankly bleaker states such as Texas. Now we can also blame recent labor shortages on high home prices.

An analysis published last week found that people of all ages responded to the pandemic by leaving the labor force, but most of them returned, and the ones who did not were almost all in the 60-and-above age classes. Moreover, the ones who didn’t return to work were mainly from states where land-use regulation has pushed up housing prices. Continue reading →

After spending more than 25 years opposing central planners who want to densify cities, I’ve been dismayed to find I also have to oppose people who claim to support free markets who want to abolish single-family zoning. I’ve made the best case I can for single-family housing in an article in Liberty Unbound, the on-line version of what was once Liberty magazine.

My argument is simple. Around 80 percent of Americans want to live in single-family homes, but most urban planners think that well over 20 percent — some plans even call for more than 50 percent — should live in apartments. Any policy that reduces the supply of single-family homes in order to increase the supply of apartments therefore supports the goals of the central planners, and true libertarians should oppose such policies as they undermine consumer preferences. Continue reading →

“One of the first things you learn in the Army,” wrote Stephen Ambrose after 9/11, is “don’t bunch up,” as dense groups make “tempting targets.” The once-feared Russian army is still learning this lesson.

“After strikes [by Ukraine] on large ammunition and fuel depots, the depots
were being dispersed in order to avoid a large loss of materiel in the event of strikes,” thus reducing losses, wrote one Russian. Yet the army failed to disperse personnel, and a New Years Day strike by Ukrainian HIMARS missiles on a single building killed hundreds of soldiers. Apparently, the Russian army had not only brought those soldiers to the building, it also stored ammunition there, making the destruction that much worse. Continue reading →

An on-line site called the Dumber, er, I mean Intelligancer says that, for cities to survive, developers must be allowed to convert office buildings into housing. There are a lot of problems with this recommendation.

Your former office today. Photo by Tomi Knuutila.

There are a lot of problems with this recommendation. First, both people and jobs are moving away from the cities, so who is going to want to live in former office buildings anyway? Second, office buildings are not designed for human habitation, so converting them will be expensive, probably far more expensive than the single-family homes people are moving to. Third, if cities allow such conversions, and they don’t happen, you know what the next step will be: cities will begin subsidizing such conversions. Continue reading →

Yesterday, Tyler Cowan mentioned in the Marginal Revolution blog that he wished books on urban areas “would spend more time discussing whether dense urban areas are simply a fertility trap.” I’m not going to write a book about it, but it may be one more reason why planners’ mania for density is a bad idea.

There appears to be a correlation between state fertility rates and land-use regulation aimed at increasing urban densities. Click image to go to a Wikipedia article on fertility rates by state.

A fertility trap, sometimes called a low fertility trap, is a situation where a nation’s birth rate has declined below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. Within a generation, this leads to a reduction in the number of young people working, which means — in a country that has a social security system, as most developed countries do — the number of older people that each young person must support increases. Continue reading →

Alert the FBI! Someone has stolen and hidden away most of the land in the United States. At least, that’s the message I get from a recent Wall Street Journal article that claims that “the U.S. is running short of land for housing.”

More than 600,000 acres of land like this can be found outside of San Jose. It isn’t prime farm land, nor is it too steep to build on. Yet San Jose has some of the most expensive housing in America because almost no one can see that this land is available for housing.

According to a 2017 land inventory by the Department of Agriculture, the contiguous 48 states have about 1.9 billion acres of land. Of these, about 116 million have been developed (including rural developments such as roads and railroads). Another 406 million acres are federal. The USDA doesn’t say so, but about 70 million acres are state land. An unknown number are county or city lands, but it is probably under 50 million acres. Continue reading →

“Wall Street is snapping up [single-] family homes,” reports the Economist. This isn’t exactly news. A year ago, CNN reported the same thing. Two years ago, the New York Times reported a “$60 billion housing grab by Wall Street.” Three years ago, the Atlantic announced that “Wall Street is your landlord.”

Wall Street’s or your street? Photo by isipeoria.

These articles are often accompanied by an implicit accusation that Wall Street speculators are responsible for housing becoming unaffordable. Sometimes the accusation is more explicit. A year ago, Tucker Carlson claimed that the “phenomenon of skyrocketing house prices is being driven by Wall Street outbidding normal Americans trying to buy homes.” Earlier this week, HousingWire.com claimed that “Institutional purchases are . . . making houses less affordable.” Continue reading →