Eye on Housing

Just as an FYI: > Information obtained from the US Census Bureau’s Survey of Construction (SOC) and tabulated by NAHB, shows that the rising trend of single-story homes reversed in 2021. The share of single-story homes decreased in 2021 and the share of two or more stories homes started was greater than one story homes. This is in line with recent NAHB analysis of new single-family home size trends. https://eyeonhousing.org/2022/07/share-of-two-or-more-stories-new-home…

> According to NAHB estimates, the total count of second homes was 7.5 million https://eyeonhousing.org/2020/10/nations-stock-of-second-homes-2/ > The United States had an official resident population of 331,449,281 on April 1, 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/2020/data/apportion… I'm not saying 7.5M isn't a market that might be worth chasing, but at the same time, I would hardly call 2% of the population "extremely high".

I'm glad you've found something that works for you (really!) but you're cherry-picking. The key problem is this: > 5 minutes walk or 1 minute drive to a shop for groceries, hardware, lumber, restaurants, kid parks. This might be true for you but that's probably because your income is much higher than the median where you live such that you can afford just off Main St is whatever qualifies as central where you live. By definition not everyone can do that. And I say by definition because: - Average walking speed is about 5 feet per second - 5 minutes to just one of the destinations you mention puts you at at radius of 1500 feet - The average supermarket size is, say, 40,000 square feet [1] - Let's assume an entry on each side and a square footprint of 200x200. That doesn't include parking - It seems ~150 parking spaces per acre is a good estimate [2], putting the space for each at roughly 300 square feet - I can't find any stats or the average number of parking spaces for a supermarket so let's go with 100 for 30,000 square feet bringing out supermarket footprint to 70,000 - Assuming these things are circular (best case) and you can walk in straight lines (best case) the radius of the store is 112 feet. The parking lot eats another 38 feet of that - So the circle for being within 5 minutes is 112 feet + 1500 feet - 70,000 square feet, which we'll call ~8 million square feet. - Average lot sizes are harder to figure out. There's data like this [3] but that includes…

Middle class families can, but young families just don't now. Median homebuyer age is now 56, up from 31 decades ago: https://x.com/heimbergecon/status/1943925791055917417 As for how it all happened, I don't have a comprehensive exploration of this to share, but look at interest rates and house sale prices: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS Sale prices begin rising immediately once interest rates dipped to the lowest ever (borrowers could "afford" more principal - sale price - for similar monthly payments). Combine that with houses making up a significant chunk of balance sheets for the US, and we (collectively) are loathe to let prices fall: https://eyeonhousing.org/2024/02/homeownership-is-key-to-household-wea…

In 2023, 54% of the housing units in the US were single family detached, https://eyeonhousing.org/2024/10/owner-occupied-single-family-housing-… I guess some of those could not have yards, but that is pretty rare to not have any sort of yard in a single family detached home. 2/3 of home buyers have single family detached as their preferred housing, so more people want to live in that type of housing than currently do so.

I don’t think we’re ever going to build houses again at the rate we did before the 2008 GFC. A substantial portion of people who work in construction are undocumented (and will be targeted for deportation by this admin for the remains of their term), zoning remains a challenge, cost of materials continues to inflate. How many years would it take to get back up to speed? 5? 10? What does the economy look like then? Will enough young folks go into the necessary trades to meet the demand for this labor? We might keep building along at the anemic pace of today, but I argue we’ll never build again at the rate we did pre GFC. https://eyeonhousing.org/2020/01/a-decade-of-home-building-the-long-re… https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-the-land-stupid-how-the-homebui…

> Land acquisition costs were so high that it precludes building anything that can offer that <USD3000 a month price tag "The median time for securing approval to build in San Francisco is 627 days" [1]. Land-development loans cost between 8 and 12% [2]. The financing cost alone of that delay thus adds 15 to 20% to the cost of any housing in San Francisco. At the median. Add the risk of not getting approved and the cost of the lawyers and lobbyists and I wouldn't be surprised if these officials bump real estate costs by 50%. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/sf-housing-devel… [2] https://eyeonhousing.org/2023/05/rates-on-development-and-construction…

Home ownership[0][1] is pretty much on par US vs EU. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ownership_rate [1]https://eyeonhousing.org/2015/06/a-cross-country-comparison-of-homeown… A lot of myths in this whole thread.

Given that the median age of a home in 2019 was 39, that puts half of today's housing stock as being built in 1980 or before. So most of "today's houses" are literally the same houses that were present in 1989, just with three decades of additional depreciation. This is even worse in older, populous parts of the country like California and the Northeast that haven't built as many new homes as in the Southeast. In California and New York, for instance, people are squabbling to pay $1m+ for 43-60 year-old homes. People today are paying more, and getting less for their money. https://eyeonhousing.org/2021/03/age-of-housing-stock-by-state-3/

No, the Northeast. A general rundown that mentions the post-2008 building shortfall: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/29/1089174630/housing-shortage-new-home-co… This one's older (from 2020) but digs into details by area of the country: https://eyeonhousing.org/2020/01/a-decade-of-home-building-the-long-re…

I think we would have an a lot larger issue if the 2.8 million immigrants who work in construction[1] suddenly fell away. Even if it would potentially (but probably not) relieve demand a tiny bit. [1] https://eyeonhousing.org/2021/03/immigrants-in-construction-rising-num…

Here you go, same info for crawl spaces as well. > 30 percent of new single-family homes started in 2013 have a full or partial basement, 54 percent are built on slabs, and 15 percent have a crawl space. https://eyeonhousing.org/2014/10/what-foundations-are-built-across-the… I think you are looking at a small subset of data.

According to the U.S. census the US is building houses at the fastest pace since 2006. About 1.74 million housing units per year. https://eyeonhousing.org/2021/04/housing-starts-spring-forward-in-marc…

The US has insulation requirements, it varies a lot state to state but new housing generally has at least decent-ish insulation. The main issue is that there is a lot of very old housing stock in the US. As of 2015 the median house was 37 years old and 40% were over 45 years old. In the area I live the vast majority of the houses were built in the 40s or 50s, though most people have done some amount of insulation retrofitting. http://eyeonhousing.org/2015/08/the-aging-housing-stock-2/

> takes years to build It only takes about a year in the US: http://eyeonhousing.org/2015/08/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-an-apar…

One of the problems is that the average size of a new single family home has been increasing for decades: http://eyeonhousing.org/2014/01/average-size-of-new-single-family-home… According to data from the Census the Quarterly Starts and Completions by Purpose and Design survey, the average and median size of single-family homes that began construction rose during 2013. For the third quarter alone, the average single-family square footage increased from 2,646 to 2,701, while the median rose from 2,446 to 2,491. In the 1950s, average size of a new home was less than half that, at around 1200 sq ft. It also held, on average, more people. I strongly suspect this is partly driven by tax incentives that are aimed at upper class families and help create or fuel a growing divide between the Have and Have Nots.

> And secondly... Are the second vacation homes really the problem? I'd guess the problem begins around 3rd or 5th, not the second one, which is a fairly common and usually also a good thing to have - for both the owner and the society. I'm not sure if you mean owning one primary home and two vacation homes, or one primary home and one vacation home when you mention a "second vacation home," but either way this strikes me as out of touch. In 2024, US home ownership rate is 65.6%. (https://www.bankrate.com/homeownership/home-ownership-statistics/) In 2022, 4.6% of housing was comprised of second homes. (https://eyeonhousing.org/2024/09/the-nations-stock-of-second-homes-2/) 4.6% of 65.6% is 3%, meaning at most 3% of Americans own a second home (but this doesn't account for citizens that own 3 or more homes, so the actual percentage is even lower.) I don't consider that to be common. I also wonder: why is it a good thing for society (or even most homeowners?)

> House prices have grown much faster than inflation even if you introduce a fudge factor 2. No prices have grown a lot in major metros where Software people work. I’m sure SF is insane. But also NYC according to the article has “only” grown by 200% - so it’s literally cheaper on a household level if you include wage growth (assuming you go from single income to double income), and I’m sure Cleveland has a lot less growth. According to (1) housing has only grown 150% nationwide. It’s not “eat cake”. Houses have grown bigger over time. They gained electricity and running water and 2 car garages and high efficiency water heaters. But people also replace their now 2 car often and buy new iPhones and stream high qualitymovies from their large high def TVs. At some point houses don’t need to get bigger and theirs no more room in Silicon Valley for single family homes but there’s always room for more consumerism delivered faster priced cheaper and plenty of businesses who will deliver. Proof is that housing is becoming a smaller part of the GDP (0) despite becoming “unaffordable expensive”. As a bonus, according to this article (2), houses are 150% larger and rentals are 200% larger since 1970s. So I guess you get what you pay…

I guess it depends on what part of the 1900s... I grew up (also in the 70s&80s) as a "latchkey" in an area that was built in the 50s and 60s and had the same experience of walking and riding to school. This seems like a "reality TV" phenomena of the last 25 years. Certainly, there are suburban deserts that are completely unwalkable, but most housing is not like that (certainly not "affordable" housing) simply because it was built earlier. Of course this is almost entirely dependent on where you live. https://eyeonhousing.org/2018/08/half-of-us-homes-built-before-1980/ High growth Tech areas like Seattle, San Jose, Austin, Phoenix are ~10x bigger than they were ~40 years ago. So those are much more likely to have this low density housing than Boston, SF, NYC. What I find weird is that even completely walkable schools/neighborhoods have parents that almost all drive kids to school every day. Parents legitimately worry about being labeled as endangering their kids, if they don't drive them. Interestingly for me this is more acute for immigrant families, who are worried about fitting in, than local families who will tell the vice principal to "shove it" when warned about the dangers of walking to school.