Most of your "Housing Inaccessibility" cities are now also "Housing Shortage" cities.
The mortgage crackdown in 2008 hit hardest in cities where incomes tend to be lower. That decimated the single-family construction market in most of those cities. Prices collapsed because families were blocked from mortgages, but rents skyrocketed.
Just since 2015, rent (after adjusting for inflation!) in Atlanta, Orlando, and Charlotte are all up 30%-40%.
They look affordable if you just look at prices, because prices collapsed when mortgages were cut off. Rents have finally risen enough that the previously niche build-to-rent single-family segment is rising up to fill the gap. Those new houses will be built when the price of existing homes finally recovers enough to make building new homes economical, but the rents required to make that happen are MUCH higher than they used to be.
Going back to 20th century mortgage standards will be MUCH more helpful in those markets than rent subsidies, etc. will (though of course, there will always be a need for some of that).
The probability of banning the new rental markets appears to be higher than fixing mortgage access.
But, my more basic point is that most of those cities had moderate construction activity before 2008. Since then they have had construction activity and rent inflation more akin to the shortage cities. They are, unfortunately, shortage cities now.
In most of the housing accessibility cities, if you fix crime and schools, you fix the inaccessibility issue. Cheap housing is a function of crime and poor schools in such places; the houses themselves are often fine.
Except for the ones that got their wiring and plumbing stripped by thieves. Lot of that has been going on for a long time. Long enough it was mentioned on The Wire and (I think) The Sopranos.
Nope. I live in one of the more unsightly houses in a neighborhood near quality public schools. I actually can't afford to live here, and I personally make ~60% more than the median household income in my area. There is barely any crime. This is considered a very nice street to live on, that is falling into disrepair as people age in place without the means to do neccessary repairs. My husband and I moved in to this place on work trade, so that we could have a place to live as he repaired the back bedroom which had nearly collapsed, and a garage that had nearly collapsed. He also does work on many homes with deferred maintenance. The houses are not fine.
Not really as it seems like you never owned a house. Major appliances aren't cheap and these older home tend to have large numbers of problems from having to replace knob and tube wiring, forty year old furnaces with a replacement value of the entire house, slate roofs, now the lawn, etc. Just because I can afford to buy a rathole in the ghetto on my minimum wage job doesn't mean I can afford to maintain it, much less fix it. .
Nolan to what extent does this take into account homes being bought up by Airbnb for short term rental purposes? I’m curious if that creates an impact.
This has been studied extensively and it’s fairly minimal on the margins. In areas with high tourist demand, you’re just putting regulatory barriers in place that benefit existing B&Bs, hotel chains, and grey-market agreement e.g. under-the-table short-term rental agreements. The recent example of NYC is instructive.
This is one area where the vibes are more negative than the reality. If you really want to tackle this, it makes more sense to take a step back and holistically focus on all non-owner-occupied housing units; you could tweak incentive structures (including through the tax code) such that the opportunity cost of non-owner-occupied housing becomes higher, and that would affect both short-term rentals and market pressure from institutional investors.
Likewise taxing vacant properties higher. Here in Hawaii a lot of East Asians hide their money in Hawaiian property as it effectively has zero property tax and as a result many of the condos have a vacancy rate exceeding 50% and for years. Hawaii could fix it's housing shortage overnight by simply tacking on a 20% property tax to unoccupied units (owner or renter irrelevant as like as occupied) and simply implementing a 5% property tax rate period would drive down prices as it would stop the artificial price race up given there currently is no cost to inflated housing prices.
The thing I don't like about owner occupied, like the mortgage tax deduction, is it punishes renters. I'm not convinced property/ land ownership is a positive public policy goal. There is nothing wrong with renting your entire life, we just don't have a society structured to support that. Should we punish vacant yes, should we punish renters, no.
Definitely see your point of view, but I think in general much of the political energy around this topic is around rhetoric of homeownership, i.e. that becomes a key condition of political success. In addition, I think it is slightly easier administratively to implement a tax change focused on non-owner-occupied housing versus vacant/nonvacant distinctions.
Either way if one wants to, it could be made entirely revenue-neutral by redistributing the funds raised from such a tax directly to affected renters. Thereby the nudge becomes purely Pigouvian, you’re simply realigning incentives without trying to bankrupt sympathetic people, etc
It most certainly does as does the purchase of SFHs by internationals, investors i.e. people with excessive wealth using these structures as money machines, tax havens, etc. which essentially prohibits community driven enclaves which fosters cohesiveness, long term stability, security and safety.
I just saw an analysis that indicated this is a tiny, negligible part of the market overall. I can't find it or I'd link it.
Of the 40+ airbnbs I've stayed in all over the US, they were almost all owned by the local homeowner. A few, in very touristy towns, were owned by a local group that had a handful of homes.
I study housing markets for a living. A couple items to add to the discussion:
1) There was a spike in the number of college age people in about 2020. The number of students will decline unless colleges change their admission standards. I would be really careful about investing in student housing right now.
2) You seem to have pre-determined that all the statistical areas necessarily have some form of crisis. There doesn't seem to be any sort of crisis in my town, but you have coded it as a "housing choice crisis."
3) People vastly underestimate how much construction cost plays into housing costs. At a housing conference a couple years ago in Colorado they went over sources and uses for a few recent apartment complexes in non-urban areas. The construction cost figures were $20 million for 80 units. That's $250,000 per unit, and that's /just/ materials plus labor for construction (i.e., doesn't include land, professional fees, or site improvement). When you put some profit on that and add in interest and insurance, you quickly get to the point where the rent isn't going to be affordable to a lot of people. Since we're not even including land, zoning isn't a factor. Zoning might make things worse some places, but construction is still really expensive, and no changes to zoning will make /construction/ appreciably less expensive.
4) You, like many planners, seem to think that people would walk or bike more if only that were an option. You're wrong. People like to drive. I walk the dog every morning past the school. There are a lot of families that live close enough to walk, and we have good sidewalks, but there is only one family that does walk. There's nothing stopping people from riding a bicycle to get to downtown from many neighborhoods, but no one does.
Last May we took an Alaska cruise. You'd think if bicycles would work anywhere it would be Seattle. They have dedicated, separated bicycle lanes and they even have separate traffic signals for the bicycles. We were there on Thursday and Friday before the ship left on Saturday morning. We did a lot of walking. I saw ZERO bicycles making use of the bicycle infrastructure. There were some (not many) electric scooters in the bike lanes (mostly kids), but no bicycles. That's on two weekdays and a weekend. And the weather was perfect.
5) Something I learned selling my Dad's house. You can only sell a house that's move-in ready. His house needed carpet and paint, but was otherwise fine. We figured it needed about $15,000 to fix up, so we discounted it $30,000. No one was interested. After the contract expired we took it off the market, spent $15k, increased the price $30k, and had it sold in a month.
Could not agree more with this observation. I live in a well-to-do town in central NJ. We have a strong mix of single family houses, condos, apartments, and townhouses. We also have a ton of walking and bike paths all over the town, which are only ever used by people walking their dogs, not by students to get to school, or people to travel to work or to go shopping. It's an in-demand town because peple love its commuter accessibility and great schools. Buyers want single family houses with land, not the many available low-income housing condos, and townhouses that they can afford. This is especially true of early millenials. There are plenty of single-family homes available, but no where near affordable to them, and those that are, need work, something that they are unprepared to do on their own or it will be too expensive to hire someone to do the work for them. As you mentioned, they want houses fully updated previous to purchase. Also, as you mentioned, building materials are insanely expensive, which detracts from the desire to build or update.
I don't think it's that they want a fully updated house, it's that they assume, and probably rightly so generally, that you aren't discounting the repairs properly and lots of hidden undisclosed faults since you couldn't be bothered to maintain the property in the first place hence the more it's "fully updated" the less stuff you're hiding.
Not recognizing your name here, I clicked in expecting to be annoyed with an article trying to explain that really, it’s BlackRockStone and landlord greed really driving the housing crisis.
Very happily surprised and discovered a great article with a lot of nuance!
Can you double check the CT data? I am very surprised to see the state falling under "inaccessibility" given the definition is "housing is cheap by national standards" while CT has some of the highest home prices in the country. Is accessibility defined as what percent housing costs are of household income? I could maybe see CT offsetting prices with higher income.
I think with the way things have been going in the New England market, outside of Fairfield County CT is relatively affordable (NH now has a higher median home sales price statewide). Renting is another story I'm sure, I'm not sure how CT compares as I don't have great insight there. I was also surprised though, because the "inaccessibility" category is stated to be due to "low incomes", but this absolutely isn't the case in CT, at least on the basis of medians.
In 2022 CT had the best ratio of median income to median home price in the country, which in my mind means (relatively) more affordable, so I think the data in this category is missing something.
Pretty interesting seeing Knoxville, TN in the green and not red or blue. A couple years ago our rental vacancy rate was 1.4% and had the second highest rent increase in the country! The state is having the University of Tennessee rapidly increase enrollment so you’ve got a lot of out of state kids (particularly northeast) moving down so green definitely makes sense, AND there’s a lack of options like the blue! The worst example I’ve seen here is a neighbor of a friend bought what used to be a quadplex in a historic part of town that has plenty multi family, but the zoning laws wouldn’t let him keep it a quadplex after demo/rebuild! There goes three homes 🙃
I actually live in SW Chicagoland's Palos Park, which is shown in your "yellow" high-opportunity suburb category on the map above. I live 500ft away from the regional Metra "commuter" rail but there are problems here with the state road IL-7 that separates my residence from the train station (I can see the train station from inside my house, yet it is dangerous to walk there due to the "Legacy Highway" that splits this residential lined area). Constant speeding cars and crashing at a place where it should be safe to get to the Train station, but it is NOT safe or walkable (people do anyway though because the area is real nice - except for the roadway infrastructure)...this is due to the presence of an unmarked, misaligned intersection/crossover which is the only Pedestrian Access Route in the immediate area...but...I think it's only a matter of time before they will have to fix it but for now, it is a glaring deficiency.
Since I am a Civil Engineer I have been "rattling cages" locally on the issue and documenting the problem here for 4 years now.
Crash / VRU Reports:
MAJOR Community Traffic Hazard Hwy IL-7 at Timber Ln in Palos Park_Current_Volume1_90Percent.pdf
When I looked at your maps, I noticed my rural New York county and the neighboring rural New York county were in different “crisis”groups. Knowing much about the differences between the two counties (such as one being home to a major military post) I can tell you that your research is spot-on. Generally, government reports on our region broad brush-ingly lump us together as having the same economy. Great analysis!
Colleges and universities by and large got out of the housing business decades ago (stopped building dorms). That has had enormous ripple effects, especially in smaller cities. Absentee landlords have bought houses and multi-unit and buildings, affecting entire neighborhoods.
I would love to see this map again, but with climate changes included. Coastal places that will be underwater may no longer have a housing shortage because the available housing has been shredded by hurricanes or, in California decimated by wildfire, and those areas may need to be excluded from suitable building zones, limiting even more the availability of buildable land.
I moved from a red area in California to a green area on the east coast. The house I have now was $800k and I’m not even joking, if this house was in my same neighborhood in CA it would go for over $2 million easily. No question. Maybe even $2.5
Very true, I'm in a green zone in CT with reasonably affordable houses, but the incomes here are low - I really could afford it due to having a remote job.
We also have high property taxes and high utility costs which strain budgets.
If you think any Oregon reforms are going to have an impact on Oregon’s housing supply you have no clue about Oregon, or to be more precise Portland. Development is an anathema to the intellectual adolescents running the city and county.
Wrong! Portland has developed many apartments along commercial streets, and pushed in-fill endlessly--I owned a house where the neighbor pushed two new skinny houses on a lot, because Portland supports density. It also allows commercial in many locations, strengthening neighborhoods and walkability. For a supposedly restrictive city, it's density standards push a lot of development.
Thanks Nolan. Maybe be careful with headlines like this: folks that just read headlines will think this justifies their denial.
Perhaps next time give it a “The United States doesn’t Have a Housing Crisis. It has three of them” or something
Great post.
But I'm going to push a little bit, Nolan.
Most of your "Housing Inaccessibility" cities are now also "Housing Shortage" cities.
The mortgage crackdown in 2008 hit hardest in cities where incomes tend to be lower. That decimated the single-family construction market in most of those cities. Prices collapsed because families were blocked from mortgages, but rents skyrocketed.
Just since 2015, rent (after adjusting for inflation!) in Atlanta, Orlando, and Charlotte are all up 30%-40%.
They look affordable if you just look at prices, because prices collapsed when mortgages were cut off. Rents have finally risen enough that the previously niche build-to-rent single-family segment is rising up to fill the gap. Those new houses will be built when the price of existing homes finally recovers enough to make building new homes economical, but the rents required to make that happen are MUCH higher than they used to be.
Going back to 20th century mortgage standards will be MUCH more helpful in those markets than rent subsidies, etc. will (though of course, there will always be a need for some of that).
The probability of banning the new rental markets appears to be higher than fixing mortgage access.
But, my more basic point is that most of those cities had moderate construction activity before 2008. Since then they have had construction activity and rent inflation more akin to the shortage cities. They are, unfortunately, shortage cities now.
I agree! Mortgage standards play a huge role in affecting accessibility. And I don't think I made it clear enough how fluid these categories are.
In most of the housing accessibility cities, if you fix crime and schools, you fix the inaccessibility issue. Cheap housing is a function of crime and poor schools in such places; the houses themselves are often fine.
Except for the ones that got their wiring and plumbing stripped by thieves. Lot of that has been going on for a long time. Long enough it was mentioned on The Wire and (I think) The Sopranos.
Nope. I live in one of the more unsightly houses in a neighborhood near quality public schools. I actually can't afford to live here, and I personally make ~60% more than the median household income in my area. There is barely any crime. This is considered a very nice street to live on, that is falling into disrepair as people age in place without the means to do neccessary repairs. My husband and I moved in to this place on work trade, so that we could have a place to live as he repaired the back bedroom which had nearly collapsed, and a garage that had nearly collapsed. He also does work on many homes with deferred maintenance. The houses are not fine.
Not really as it seems like you never owned a house. Major appliances aren't cheap and these older home tend to have large numbers of problems from having to replace knob and tube wiring, forty year old furnaces with a replacement value of the entire house, slate roofs, now the lawn, etc. Just because I can afford to buy a rathole in the ghetto on my minimum wage job doesn't mean I can afford to maintain it, much less fix it. .
Nolan to what extent does this take into account homes being bought up by Airbnb for short term rental purposes? I’m curious if that creates an impact.
This has been studied extensively and it’s fairly minimal on the margins. In areas with high tourist demand, you’re just putting regulatory barriers in place that benefit existing B&Bs, hotel chains, and grey-market agreement e.g. under-the-table short-term rental agreements. The recent example of NYC is instructive.
This is one area where the vibes are more negative than the reality. If you really want to tackle this, it makes more sense to take a step back and holistically focus on all non-owner-occupied housing units; you could tweak incentive structures (including through the tax code) such that the opportunity cost of non-owner-occupied housing becomes higher, and that would affect both short-term rentals and market pressure from institutional investors.
Likewise taxing vacant properties higher. Here in Hawaii a lot of East Asians hide their money in Hawaiian property as it effectively has zero property tax and as a result many of the condos have a vacancy rate exceeding 50% and for years. Hawaii could fix it's housing shortage overnight by simply tacking on a 20% property tax to unoccupied units (owner or renter irrelevant as like as occupied) and simply implementing a 5% property tax rate period would drive down prices as it would stop the artificial price race up given there currently is no cost to inflated housing prices.
This is what I meant by my last sentence, exactly. Tweak incentives through the tax code to raise the cost of non-owner-occupied structures.
The thing I don't like about owner occupied, like the mortgage tax deduction, is it punishes renters. I'm not convinced property/ land ownership is a positive public policy goal. There is nothing wrong with renting your entire life, we just don't have a society structured to support that. Should we punish vacant yes, should we punish renters, no.
Definitely see your point of view, but I think in general much of the political energy around this topic is around rhetoric of homeownership, i.e. that becomes a key condition of political success. In addition, I think it is slightly easier administratively to implement a tax change focused on non-owner-occupied housing versus vacant/nonvacant distinctions.
Either way if one wants to, it could be made entirely revenue-neutral by redistributing the funds raised from such a tax directly to affected renters. Thereby the nudge becomes purely Pigouvian, you’re simply realigning incentives without trying to bankrupt sympathetic people, etc
It most certainly does as does the purchase of SFHs by internationals, investors i.e. people with excessive wealth using these structures as money machines, tax havens, etc. which essentially prohibits community driven enclaves which fosters cohesiveness, long term stability, security and safety.
I just saw an analysis that indicated this is a tiny, negligible part of the market overall. I can't find it or I'd link it.
Of the 40+ airbnbs I've stayed in all over the US, they were almost all owned by the local homeowner. A few, in very touristy towns, were owned by a local group that had a handful of homes.
I study housing markets for a living. A couple items to add to the discussion:
1) There was a spike in the number of college age people in about 2020. The number of students will decline unless colleges change their admission standards. I would be really careful about investing in student housing right now.
2) You seem to have pre-determined that all the statistical areas necessarily have some form of crisis. There doesn't seem to be any sort of crisis in my town, but you have coded it as a "housing choice crisis."
3) People vastly underestimate how much construction cost plays into housing costs. At a housing conference a couple years ago in Colorado they went over sources and uses for a few recent apartment complexes in non-urban areas. The construction cost figures were $20 million for 80 units. That's $250,000 per unit, and that's /just/ materials plus labor for construction (i.e., doesn't include land, professional fees, or site improvement). When you put some profit on that and add in interest and insurance, you quickly get to the point where the rent isn't going to be affordable to a lot of people. Since we're not even including land, zoning isn't a factor. Zoning might make things worse some places, but construction is still really expensive, and no changes to zoning will make /construction/ appreciably less expensive.
4) You, like many planners, seem to think that people would walk or bike more if only that were an option. You're wrong. People like to drive. I walk the dog every morning past the school. There are a lot of families that live close enough to walk, and we have good sidewalks, but there is only one family that does walk. There's nothing stopping people from riding a bicycle to get to downtown from many neighborhoods, but no one does.
Last May we took an Alaska cruise. You'd think if bicycles would work anywhere it would be Seattle. They have dedicated, separated bicycle lanes and they even have separate traffic signals for the bicycles. We were there on Thursday and Friday before the ship left on Saturday morning. We did a lot of walking. I saw ZERO bicycles making use of the bicycle infrastructure. There were some (not many) electric scooters in the bike lanes (mostly kids), but no bicycles. That's on two weekdays and a weekend. And the weather was perfect.
5) Something I learned selling my Dad's house. You can only sell a house that's move-in ready. His house needed carpet and paint, but was otherwise fine. We figured it needed about $15,000 to fix up, so we discounted it $30,000. No one was interested. After the contract expired we took it off the market, spent $15k, increased the price $30k, and had it sold in a month.
Could not agree more with this observation. I live in a well-to-do town in central NJ. We have a strong mix of single family houses, condos, apartments, and townhouses. We also have a ton of walking and bike paths all over the town, which are only ever used by people walking their dogs, not by students to get to school, or people to travel to work or to go shopping. It's an in-demand town because peple love its commuter accessibility and great schools. Buyers want single family houses with land, not the many available low-income housing condos, and townhouses that they can afford. This is especially true of early millenials. There are plenty of single-family homes available, but no where near affordable to them, and those that are, need work, something that they are unprepared to do on their own or it will be too expensive to hire someone to do the work for them. As you mentioned, they want houses fully updated previous to purchase. Also, as you mentioned, building materials are insanely expensive, which detracts from the desire to build or update.
I don't think it's that they want a fully updated house, it's that they assume, and probably rightly so generally, that you aren't discounting the repairs properly and lots of hidden undisclosed faults since you couldn't be bothered to maintain the property in the first place hence the more it's "fully updated" the less stuff you're hiding.
Not recognizing your name here, I clicked in expecting to be annoyed with an article trying to explain that really, it’s BlackRockStone and landlord greed really driving the housing crisis.
Very happily surprised and discovered a great article with a lot of nuance!
Can you double check the CT data? I am very surprised to see the state falling under "inaccessibility" given the definition is "housing is cheap by national standards" while CT has some of the highest home prices in the country. Is accessibility defined as what percent housing costs are of household income? I could maybe see CT offsetting prices with higher income.
I think with the way things have been going in the New England market, outside of Fairfield County CT is relatively affordable (NH now has a higher median home sales price statewide). Renting is another story I'm sure, I'm not sure how CT compares as I don't have great insight there. I was also surprised though, because the "inaccessibility" category is stated to be due to "low incomes", but this absolutely isn't the case in CT, at least on the basis of medians.
In 2022 CT had the best ratio of median income to median home price in the country, which in my mind means (relatively) more affordable, so I think the data in this category is missing something.
Pretty interesting seeing Knoxville, TN in the green and not red or blue. A couple years ago our rental vacancy rate was 1.4% and had the second highest rent increase in the country! The state is having the University of Tennessee rapidly increase enrollment so you’ve got a lot of out of state kids (particularly northeast) moving down so green definitely makes sense, AND there’s a lack of options like the blue! The worst example I’ve seen here is a neighbor of a friend bought what used to be a quadplex in a historic part of town that has plenty multi family, but the zoning laws wouldn’t let him keep it a quadplex after demo/rebuild! There goes three homes 🙃
Yeah, maybe I should use rental vacancies as another shortage flag. I'm less familiar with that data.
I actually live in SW Chicagoland's Palos Park, which is shown in your "yellow" high-opportunity suburb category on the map above. I live 500ft away from the regional Metra "commuter" rail but there are problems here with the state road IL-7 that separates my residence from the train station (I can see the train station from inside my house, yet it is dangerous to walk there due to the "Legacy Highway" that splits this residential lined area). Constant speeding cars and crashing at a place where it should be safe to get to the Train station, but it is NOT safe or walkable (people do anyway though because the area is real nice - except for the roadway infrastructure)...this is due to the presence of an unmarked, misaligned intersection/crossover which is the only Pedestrian Access Route in the immediate area...but...I think it's only a matter of time before they will have to fix it but for now, it is a glaring deficiency.
Since I am a Civil Engineer I have been "rattling cages" locally on the issue and documenting the problem here for 4 years now.
Crash / VRU Reports:
MAJOR Community Traffic Hazard Hwy IL-7 at Timber Ln in Palos Park_Current_Volume1_90Percent.pdf
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S0v8jnJ_pqAwd-JQyqIQz2OGaqXXQFiG/view?usp=drivesdk
MAJOR Community Traffic Hazard SW Hwy IL-7 at Timber Ln in Palos Park_Current_Volume2_90Percent.pdf
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11KXIIzfHFQ_QEjQ1Q0YWH4PZw3zjW3dx/view?usp=drivesdk
Palos Park 2018 Bikeways and Trails Plan
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Gr7vnmnwur3IN0HV7F8WU3_4SF1YaTQQ/view?usp=share_link
CMAP Complete Streets:
https://cmap.illinois.gov/focus-areas/planning/complete-streets/
Cars over 70mph in 40mph Residential Area Near Metra Station, Park, & Two Major Regional Trail Systems
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMfNAGP-iqfjctZ2JAq2MQ4X3Gqch2tG3
Cars Racing In Residential Area
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMfNAGP-iqfhIdd_slxdvUSsNglyBJF_T
Crashes / Collisions
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMfNAGP-iqfhSodZr8JiSf3PlVNbPeP0m
Kids Crossing SW Hwy
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMfNAGP-iqfiC8j0o4t-C1b6D0-AnlpEZ
Kids & People With No Safe Sidewalks
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMfNAGP-iqfiZtumbPzkIUyndNiGewLmt
Walkers & Joggers Crossing SW Hwy
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMfNAGP-iqfhMHPnXuD1FJmg4FFnCDRNI
Cyclists Crossing SW Hwy
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMfNAGP-iqfiXKag2SIgr6--a3ZPk0rIt
Cars Who "Punch It" Aggressively After Having To Wait Behind Turning Cars Due To No Turn Lane
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMfNAGP-iqfiKOcXHbEEV-T7aU5q2P0Lf
Metra Commuters Crossing SW Hwy
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMfNAGP-iqfi4fgcd0lpf7B5G4PEv6O5Z
Cook County Safety Action Plan w Interactive Hazard Areas Map:
https://engage.cmap.illinois.gov/cook
When I looked at your maps, I noticed my rural New York county and the neighboring rural New York county were in different “crisis”groups. Knowing much about the differences between the two counties (such as one being home to a major military post) I can tell you that your research is spot-on. Generally, government reports on our region broad brush-ingly lump us together as having the same economy. Great analysis!
Colleges and universities by and large got out of the housing business decades ago (stopped building dorms). That has had enormous ripple effects, especially in smaller cities. Absentee landlords have bought houses and multi-unit and buildings, affecting entire neighborhoods.
I would love to see this map again, but with climate changes included. Coastal places that will be underwater may no longer have a housing shortage because the available housing has been shredded by hurricanes or, in California decimated by wildfire, and those areas may need to be excluded from suitable building zones, limiting even more the availability of buildable land.
Outstanding stuff. Housing value must match the underlying economic reality and the local labor market. Nowhere in America is this true.
I moved from a red area in California to a green area on the east coast. The house I have now was $800k and I’m not even joking, if this house was in my same neighborhood in CA it would go for over $2 million easily. No question. Maybe even $2.5
Very true, I'm in a green zone in CT with reasonably affordable houses, but the incomes here are low - I really could afford it due to having a remote job.
We also have high property taxes and high utility costs which strain budgets.
If you think any Oregon reforms are going to have an impact on Oregon’s housing supply you have no clue about Oregon, or to be more precise Portland. Development is an anathema to the intellectual adolescents running the city and county.
Wrong! Portland has developed many apartments along commercial streets, and pushed in-fill endlessly--I owned a house where the neighbor pushed two new skinny houses on a lot, because Portland supports density. It also allows commercial in many locations, strengthening neighborhoods and walkability. For a supposedly restrictive city, it's density standards push a lot of development.