It Isn’t A Difficult Concept
There is no doubt in my mind how to fix the lack of housing. It is as simple as building more.
I just don’t mean affordable, workforce, or attainable housing. We need all types housing… luxury, middle income, town houses, rental apartments, duplexes, and condos. What we don’t need is any more single-family homes. Yet in most of the U.S. outside of the big cities, that is predominantly what one is required to build and live in.
While single-family home ownership was the dream post World War II, a confluence of events made it possible and has continued to do so for the past 75 years. Cheap land around cities, the building of highways, cheap oil for cars and heat, cheap mortgages, and the U.S. at the top of the economic heap. While we are still on the top of the heap economically, all the other factors have changed to indicate a death knell for how many Americans have been living.
When starter homes are now priced over $500,000, how is a young couple going to afford that? How are most people?
Through VA mortgages and cheap farmland near city workplaces, single-family homes for the masses were an idea that government policy chaperoned into existence. Gas at twenty-five cents a gallon allowed people to live farther from their places of employment after World War II. This carefree suburban existence came tumbling down with the oil shocks of the 1970s.
Though by then zoning and development patterns favored single-family homes over other construction. At the end of the war, the U.S. population was 139,928,165. In 1973 at the time of the first oil shock, the U.S. population was 210,284,00. Today the population is 341,571,165.
Our population increased by 130 million between 1973 and today, yet the number of total housing units only increased by 75,000 units. Most of those are owner occupied. The median home price was $32,500 in 1973 while today it exceeds $256,000.
No matter how you slice or dice the numbers, single-family living is no longer attainable for most Americans. Then why doesn’t our local governments adjust to this reality and make it easier for people to have a roof over their heads. It is mostly a refusal by citizens to accept reality.
Multi-family living has gotten a bad rap in suburban towns. Citizens equate it with people moving in that are poorer and not up to the current residents’ economic status. That completely ignores the fact that many owners of existing homes could not afford to buy the dwellings they occupy today.
Each year that we cling to the outdated policy that single-family homes should be the predominant form of housing, more and more find that there is no adequate shelter for us or our children. If you are against ADUs, then your children may take up permanent residence in your basement. Condos and multi-families can easily house more people with a smaller ecological footprint than any single-family residence.
If local government won’t clear the way for a variety of housing types, then it is up to the state governments to do it. As a nation we have to make sure that housing is a right not a privilege. The market is anxious to show us the way. Now we need to remove the restrictions that bind Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand.”
