Comment by maratc
4 months ago
Every time I read about a purported "housing shortage" I'm reminded that there are about 140 million housing units in the US[0], with an average of 5.5 rooms per unit[1], or about 700 million rooms, all that for 350 million of population, or about 2 rooms per person.
This doesn't look like "we have a housing shortage". What we do have is a shortage of affordable housing in the megacities, and "it’s a rampant problem" in all the megacities.
[0] https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/time-series/demo/popest...
[1] https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-questio...
Sorry, are you suggesting that the solution to housing shortage is to move into an existing building with strangers?
If I'm reading myself right, I'm suggesting that there's no need to "the solution to housing shortage," since -- with more than 2 rooms per person on average -- it's not a problem to begin with. The problem frequently called "the housing shortage" is a problem of "housing affordability in the megacities," and we should call it by its real name.
How are those rooms distributed? It's not like they are individually moving parts.
People buy a house big enough to hold their kids, then they age and the kids move out, and there's lots of fully owned homes with empty rooms, but no places for the now-adult children to live, until a prior generation dies.
> "the housing shortage" is a problem of "housing affordability in the megacities," and we should call it by its real name.
Housing affordability problems are driven by a single thing: shortage of housing. Refusing to call the shortage a shortage and instead only referring to the symptom, inaffordability, rather than the cause, shortage is willful deception to prevent action on the cause.
This is not a problem just in megacities, it's spreading everywhere else in the country as the problem gets worse and worse. It showed up first in the most in-demand cities but as remote work increased let people spread out more, it affected more and more locations. Meanwhile, people living in the highly economically productive areas with the greatest housing shortages say there's no need to allow more housing to be built because remote work solves the problem. They speak out of both sides of their mouth though, as a few short years ago they denied that shortage caused the affordability problem, but when there's something that can be used to lessen the shortage (remote work, banning AirBNB), they grab on eagerly to the the shortage explanation for housing affordability.
The story of the housing shortage in the US is people desperately, by any means they possibly can, avoid addressing the shortage and being realistic about it.
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