How private equity is changing housing

> The United States is short 4 million housing units, with a particular dearth of starter homes, moderately priced apartments in low-rises, and family-friendly dwellings

The number cited links to here:

https://upforgrowth.org/apply-the-vision/2023-housing-underp...

Which has this as the report:

https://upforgrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/2023_Hous...

The number is driven by this definition:

> Missing Households. Households that may not have formed due to lack of availability and affordability, e.g. households with children over 18 years of age still living with their parents or individuals or couples living together as roommates at levels exceeding historical norms.

Did you intend to add something after the definition? For better or worse, "moving out once you reach 18" is widespread enough of an expectation that it can be used as a yardstick for housing shortage.

I think it's interesting how "shortage" is defined across different products.

From an economics standpoint, "shortage" isn't a useful word, unless it's applied in the extremely unlikely scenario where there nothing is available at any price. Generally, this is because price dictates supply.

"Shortage" for the current housing market is generally used to mean, "relative to historic trends, many people want houses who can't afford the current prices."

Let's be honest, it's not even that.

It's more like "relative to historic trends, many people want houses [in desirable areas] who can't afford the current prices."

Building tons of new houses outside of the hot areas that all these people want to live would still elicit cries of a shortage and an affordability crisis. Because there are currently affordable places outside of hot areas, but not very many takers.

It's a really tough nut to crack. Because how do you reorient the demand to those areas that have the supply? It's not easy. We can't seem to do it currently, and there's no real plan to do it if even if we could somehow build even more housing. We'd have to build lots of housing only in hot areas. Which sounds easy enough until you realize the economics don't make sense and even on the off chance that you could, it would only generate more demand.

First order of business however should be to find a clever way to stop abuses like the ones outlined in the article. The housing that would free up in the hot areas would not be near enough to meet the demand, but if we stop that nonsense at least we're not "digging the hole deeper" so to speak.

Exactly this. There's something about housing which causes so many people to think its an easy thing to solve by just building more and that's not actually true

You know ... building more where people want to live would really helped.

Building houses in places 3 hours away from closest job wont.