Reply to The Daily episode on the housing crisis

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I've wondered this. Most big cities have these massive, ugly, concrete apartments right on the outskirts for low income housing (think Paris or London). We could do this, but...it would tank any school that it's districted to. And then we'd have to throw massive amounts of money at that school to try to raise scores and it would still fail. And then both teachers as well as the county government would be blamed for having these failing schools. Also, when you have that much poverty centralized, it has that section 8 housing effect where a lot of crime moves in (the reason most US cities moved away from housing like that and give vouchers instead).

Instead they should move to more micro housing projects. Like every 10th lot is a low income apartment (and don't permit more than 1 car per apartment to be registered in the state or parked). Every school would get a certain percentage of failing students and would have more resources to help them. Cap it at 25 or 30%.

Or maybe we could have low income apartment housing but only allow people without children to move in to limit any effect on schools. Massive complexes for those without kids. It would help those with kids too because it would free up other housing for them. [/quote]

Some of these are pretty good ideas.  [b]The issue is that land use/zoning is controlled as such local levels in the US, and housing is a regional issue (and somewhat national, as discussed above).  You have a prisoners dilemma problem when trying to coordinate across jurisdictions.[/b] [/quote]

Researcher here. The bolded is exactly right. [/quote]

Ha well a couple of us commenting here are clearly "in the business"

The other thing I don't see discussed enough is household formation/shrinking household size.  That's what is driving the demand for more units (in addition to immigration, which is relatively low from an historic standpoint, and basically keeping the population stable now that the birthrate is below replacement rate).

The average household size in 1961 was 3.36.  In 2023 it was 2.51.  That may not seem like a lot, but for a stable population of 330 million people (which of course was not the US population size in 1960), that's a difference of 33 million housing units needed.  This change is happening mostly because of demographic shifts- fewer children per family, fewer marriages, more people living on their own.  In a lot of places you will hear calls for "larger family units", but in actuality that's not where the demand is.  But that is why when new apartment buildings get built, they are mostly 1 bedroom and studio apartments- because that's where the actual demand is.  Larger apartments lease up slower and you can't charge nearly as much on a square foot basis.[/quote]

It is specifically discussed in the Daily episode-- how household trends have increased demand for housing because more people are delaying or skipping marriage (and kids) and people want to live alone. Very different from previous trends where people lived with families of origin until marriage or had a Friends-style roommate/co-housing period before getting married. Adulthood just looks different than it used to.[/quote]

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