It was typical of the presidency of Joe Biden that, when he faced a difficult problem, he would take the cynical approach of an atoring goat to blame while making a promise that he never intended to maintain.
His response to the housing affordability crisis last year was a textbook case: to blame the owners of “rent” and greedy real estate agents, make the false promise that his administration would build 2 million new homes through a weaker expense, and I hope that nobody asks questions, a safe bet, considering the incurious means that surrounded him.
“People are tired of being played for fools and I am tired of letting them play for offspring,” Biden said in a campaign speech that hit their scapegoats last year.
Having promised to reduce the duration of housing costs.
Duration of its presidency, the cost of a medium price house duplicated, and the rentals rose to register maximums, according to a document from the Heritage Foundation, “headache of the Biden housing.”
In several cities, it is needed more than the average household income after home taxes to pay an average price house.
Poor housing adults
Almost a third of American adults are “poor in housing”, who spend 30% or more of their income in a place to live.
The result is that Americans “live more and more outside their cars because they cannot afford housing.”
Some cities have exclusive reserves parking tasks for homeless workers.
The young people have renounced the American dream of the property of their home that their parents and grandparents achieved.
“The Biden administration has transformed the house supply into a luxury out of reach of the middle class,” the authors wrote.
It shouldn’t be so.
But Damian Eales, the CEO of Realtor.com (a News Corp. company), has a plan.
Its “Let America Build” campaign launched this week identifies changes in urgent policies that would increase the supply of housing and make housing property affordable.
For example, relaxing zoning restrictions around transit centers to allow the development of multifamily housing would greatly contribute to solving the problem of 4 million “missing” homes.
“I because the United States builds more homes,” says Eales.
“The real reason why housing is unaffordable are not real estate commissions. It is a lack of supply and that is a political problem.”
In his last “Housing Report Ballot”, Realtor.com has identified states that are successfully with the demand for housing and those who are failing.
It is not surprising that New York arrives in third place with a F rating, worse than California.
The average price of the list of a house in New York is $ 664,622, while the average family income is $ 81,057.
In South Carolina, the most affordable state, the median price of the list was almost half of $ 354,429, while average family income is $ 64,898.
Eales points out that Texas, the third most affordable state with a medium price of price at $ 370,663, has only 9% of the population of America, but represents 15% of the new houses built.
On the contrary, California (medium price of listing $ 756,185) has 12% of the population of the nation, but only builds about 7% of its new homes.
“In other words, he is taking more than he is giving and the result is that he is exporting people to Texas,” says Eales.
New York is equally worse: with 6% of the population, it reacts only 3% of the new houses built.
Perverse incentive
Housing in the last half century have become a wealth construction vehicle that requests values to increase significantly over time, a perverse incentive achieved only by limiting the supply.
According to the statistics compiled by the Atlas National Zoning for Realtor.com, 170,000 New Yorkers live with family or friends because they can afford to buy their own place.
“There is a demand for more housing units in the metropolitan area that could be building more, but there are simply not enough homes to meet the need,” Sares Sara Bronin, founder and executive director of USE ATLAS, Inc.
With a complex construction code of more than 1,000 pages, “zoning significantly limits housing production in the state of New York,” she says.
For example, in Westchester County, multifamily homes are allowed in only 5% of the land, and is allowed very little around traffic stations.
Westchester is exceptionally well attended by the Metro-North Railway, which connects directly to the Grand Central Terminal, so it relaxes the zoning laws around the stations, as has happened in New Rochelle and White Plains, would promote the housing supply and stimulate local economies while preserving the semi-rural atmosphere of the rest of the rest of the county, where half of the earth is divided by 1 acres.
Bronin has registered zoning conditions for each transit station in the state of New York, and discovered that only a handful allows multifamily development.
“Much of the Earth around traffic stations is owned by state or independent authorities,” says Bronin.
“I am a great admirer of the idea that the state of New York should consider the traffic -oriented zoning legislation that requests all the jurisdictions with train stations to build multifamily homes around it. We are not talking about the fact that you despise a grouped to a tracker to a profitability at a time at the same time at the same time to a pity Craperos of reluctant
Property developers are not investing in multifamily projects in New York City because “the cash and time costs associated with the reception of the city’s approval and the restrictions around what can be built is to slow down the inventory of housing in the metropolite.” ”
In other words, the flavors of accommodation of politicians have not increased housing prices to “scarcity manufacturing”, to borrow a phrase from the new book of the Democrats, “abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
Blue status shortage
The authors point out that housing scarcity is more acute in the richest cities of the blue states governed by progressive elites.
Between 1940 and 1950, the United States built 8.5 million housing units, they say.
But at the end of the 1970s, housing construction begins to fall behind the population growth rate, and the cost of housing in relation to salaries began to increase.
“After the great recession, the real estate market crashed and the construction of housing in the 2010 was erased.”
“Today, the average number of housing by thousands of people in the developed world is approximately 470, according to the OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development]. France and Italy have almost 600. Japan and Germany have around 500. The United States only has about 425 … The result is a housing crisis or interctions of internships. ”
It means that residents of the blue states and cities vote with their feet.
In 2023, New York lost 284000 more residents than he won.
“Young families leave large urban meters so fast that several counties, including those who meet Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, are in a rhythm of losing 50% of their childhood less than 5″. ”
Michael Bloomberg once declared when he was mayor that housing in New York City was “a high -end product, maybe even a luxury product.”
But that is not a healthy situation, and leads to a city of disparities of fixed wealth where no one is uniform to live.
