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How many homes must the United States’ expensive coastal cities build to become affordable for middle-class and working-poor families again? Over the past few weeks, I asked a number of housing experts that question. I expected a straightforward response: If you build X units, you reduce rents by Y percent—which means that Washington, D.C., needs to build Z units to become broadly affordable again.

I did not get such a simple answer. “That’s a difficult question with a lot of moving parts,” Jenny Schuetz of the Brookings Institution told me. “Are we assuming that all of these homes drop out of the sky today?” asked David Garcia, the policy director at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley. Chris Herbert, the managing director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, gave me a long response involving land prices, rental affordability, household formation, and building trends.

Still, all agreed that whatever the number is, it’s enormous. “All the numbers we have that address this question are huge. They’re massive,” Garcia said. “And they’re all a massive undercount.”

That strikes me as a problem. No one can say just what it would take to make Brooklyn affordable for workers who don’t have a college degree, render San Francisco accessible to families with kids and elderly couples on fixed incomes, or allow extended-family members in Boston to buy apartments within a few blocks of one another. That means we have no policy vision of how to make our biggest, most productive places affordable for all, and no plan to get there.

This is not just unfair to Americans who want to move to these places. High rents and sale prices in major cities are a policy choice, one that puts gates around many of our most wonderful places and taxes the folks lucky enough to live there. And it is unfair to all of us. A United States with more abundant housing in its big cities would have a more productive, vibrant, and dynamic economy too.

The best evidence for how much housing we need to build lies in the prices that people pay today. Nationwide, the share of renters who are considered “burdened”—spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities—has climbed to 47 percentone in four renters—about 11 million—spend more than half their income on shelter. Renters today spend about 10 more percentage points of their earnings more on housing than they did in the 1970s. Meanwhile, rising prices have also forced millions of younger Americans to delay homeownership, making it impossible for many to buy their way onto the property ladder, particularly in California and New York.

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People make painful choices: To keep their housing costs in line with their income, millions of families do not live where they want to or in the kinds of homes they want to or with the people they want to. When the mortgage on a townhouse is too costly, families keep renting their run-down apartment. When a third bedroom costs too much, parents give up on having a third kid. This is a public-policy catastrophe too.

The problem is largely, if not exclusively, the result of the country not permitting enough homes where people want them. Although some communities in the interior of the country, especially in the South, have allowed housing construction to keep up with rapid population growth, the superstar metro areas of the Northeast and West Coast have not. “The reason California has the affordability problems we have now is because we did not build,” said Garcia, of the Terner Center. “In the 1960s, 1970s, even into the 1980s, we built between 200,000 and 300,000 homes per year. In our most recent economic boom, we were building 100,000 a year.” He added: “That is the start and the end of the story when it comes to California.”

 

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