Land for sale. Photo: appaloosa (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)Two teams of researchers recently released estimates of the U.S. housing shortage - and they differ by a factor of five. Is the national shortage 20 million homes or just 4 million? With a range that big, both published by pro-housing groups, … [Read more...]
Long-term renters ARE short-term renters (maybe)
One reason local governments are often hostile to Airbnb and similar home-sharing websites is that politicians believe that the interests of short-term renters and long-term renters are opposed- that is, that Airbnb wastes housing units that could be used by long-term renters. This claim is of … [Read more...]
Review: Homelessness is a Housing Problem
In Homelessness is a Housing Problem, Prof. Gregg Colburn and data scientist Clayton Page Aldern seek to answer the question: why is homelessness much more common in some cities than in others?They find that only two factors are significant: 1) overall rents and 2) rental vacancy rates. Where … [Read more...]
Reasons to be a Census skeptic
Over the past week, the press was chock full of 2020-style headlines like "Census Bureau Confirms Pandemic Exodus from SF." That's because according to the Census Bureau, virtually every urban county in the U.S. (even urban counties in growing metros like Dallas and Atlanta) lost population between … [Read more...]
Do HOAs justify zoning?
At a recent webinar, Prof. Christopher Serkin of Vanderbilt Law School made an interesting argument. He pointed out that a) Sun Belt cities tend to have less restrictive zoning than northern cities; b) Sun Belt cities also have more homeowners' associations (HOAs) with restrictive rules; and … [Read more...]
Where investors invest
One argument I have run across recently is that the high cost of housing is caused by mysterious corporate investors are buying up real estate and forcing up the cost.The stupidest version of this argument is that investors are hoarding all the real estate. Why is it stupid? Because … [Read more...]
More information about NYC “Billionaire’s Row”
A recent Youtube video on New York City's "Billionares' Row" (a smattering of very expensive buildings at the northern edge of midtown Manhattan) has received over six million views. Much of the video is rather propagandistic: it uses perjorative terms like "loopholes" to describe how the … [Read more...]
Financialization and housing costs
One common explanation for high rents is something called "financialization." Literally, this term of course makes no sense: any form of investment, good or bad, involves finances.But I think that the most common non-incoherent use of the term is something like this: rich people and … [Read more...]