Category Archives: Housing

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 →

Last week, the Antiplanner participated in a Federalist Society debate over housing issues, which can now be downloaded as a podcast. Leading off the debate was Richard Rothstein, an NAACP-affiliated attorney whose book, The Color of Law, argued that zoning and lending has historically discriminated against blacks. His presentation claimed that such discrimination continues in today’s suburbs and his solution was to rezone the suburbs to allow lower-cost housing such as garden apartments and townhouses.

Land-use policies that artificially increase housing shortages force more people to live in apartments when they would rather live in single-family homes. Photo by Pubdog.

Next came Vanderbilt University law professor Christopher Serkin, who said that he personally favored higher density development but noted that most Americans did not. He was followed by Notre Dame law school professor Nichole Garnett, who was also a little skeptical about planning for density. Continue reading →

Many surveys have found that the vast majority of Americans, including Millennials, prefer or aspire to live in single-family homes. But surveys rarely ask whether they prefer that single-family home to be in a low-density neighborhood or if they would mind living next to a bunch of apartment buildings.

Would you want one to move next-door to your single-family home? This is real affordable housing, by the way: one of these condos is currently selling for $527 per square foot.

However, a polling firm called YouGov recently asked Americans whether they thought low-density neighborhoods were better than high-density ones. Specifically, they were asked whether low densities meant more or less congestion, more or less crime, and were better or worse for the environment. Planning advocates, of course, claim that high densities mean less congestion, are better for the environment, and have less crime because there are more “eyes on the street.” Continue reading →

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 →