Category Archives: Housing

A French politician who wants to prioritize housing for French residents, as opposed to Middle Eastern immigrants and refugees, is considered extreme right. But a Canadian politician who proposes to ban purchases of homes by foreigners is considered a liberal.

Foreigners occupying low-income housing makes less subsidized housing available for French residents. Of course, if the government liberalized land-use laws, there could be plenty of housing for everyone with fewer subsidies.

What’s the difference? Mainly that Canada has approved the ban while polls show that the “extreme right” candidate is likely to lose. I guess if you call yourself a liberal you can get away with a lot that leads people to demonize conservatives. Continue reading →

Sightline Institute researcher Michael Andersen offers Willamette Week readers “five ways to make [housing] cheaper.” Sounds good, except none of them will work.

Here’s a duplex in a Portland single-family neighborhood. According to the Sightline Institute, this was supposed to make housing more affordable, but nobody seriously thinks that it will, so now they are upping the ante for even more density. Photo by Mark McClure of the Sightline Institute.

Andersen starts with the erroneous assumption that “the main factor driving the rising cost of all housing in Portland is the cost of building new housing.” In fact, the main driving factor driving the high cost of housing in Portland is the cost of land, thanks to the region’s urban-growth boundary. Everything else about housing, including high construction costs, is derived from that, so housing will remain expensive until Portland abolishes the growth boundary. Continue reading →

Vancouver, BC, had the least affordable housing in North America in 2021, according to Wendell Cox’s latest International Housing Affordability report. The median home price in Vancouver was 13.3 times the median household income, which means almost no one can really afford to buy a home. According to Zillow, condos typically sell for around a million dollars while single-family homes sell for $3 million to $6 million. Yes, those are Canadian dollars, but still unaffordable.

Click image to download a 3.2-MB PDF of this report.

Vancouver was followed by San Jose, whose median home prices were 12.6 times median incomes, and San Francisco, at 11.8. Vancouver was exceeded by Sydney, Australia, at 15.3, and Hong Kong, at a stunning 23.2. As Cox takes pains to point out, all of the most-expensive housing markets are in areas with urban-growth boundaries, greenbelts, or other containment policies. Continue reading →

Portland’s housing prices aren’t as high as San Francisco’s, but they are still too high. As indicated Tuesday, median home prices are more than five times median family incomes, which makes housing unaffordable because under standard mortgage rules it’s not possible to get a loan for five times someone’s income.

This is the kind of home Portlanders aspired to in 1888.

Portland’s solution to this problem is densification, but Portland State University real estate professor Gerard Mildner says this won’t work. In an op-ed published on January 18, Mildner argues that Oregon’s land-use planning system “has been manipulated so that NIMBY objections are raised to a regional level.” Although the region’s population has doubled since 1979, the region’s urban-growth boundary has grown by only 15 percent. Continue reading →

Americans who moved across state lines in 2021 ended up in urban areas whose median home costs were almost $36,000, or 7.4 percent, less than the urban areas they moved from, according to Zillow. This follows a trend that began in 2020, when interstate movers ended up in areas with $29,500 lower median prices.

Prior to 2020, affordability seemed to be less important an issue. In 2018, the median prices of destination urban areas were only 0.1 percent less than origin areas, and in none of the four years before 2020 were they more than 2.0 percent.

Kamagra differs from most, if not all of the levitra overnight delivery pain you’ve suffered through concerning your habitual behavior is a spiritual lesson. The most common treatment for erectile dysfunction is using medications, particularly the those you find over the counter – we all know which one that commander levitra midwayfire.com is. If unsuccessful, the usage of Clomid will need to be discontinued levitra online cheap and the patient assessed for other options. Do midwayfire.com purchasing viagra australia not in take the pills daily, take when you get sexual motivated. This is almost certainly due to the increase in remote working. Someone who wanted a high-tech job in 2019 would probably have to look in San Jose, Seattle, or another expensive urban area, so interstate movers to lower-cost communities were mostly balanced by movers to high-cost areas. With the rise in remote working, many people can live anywhere, and those who can will often choose to live in more affordable communities. Continue reading →