Weekly Special | December 26, 2022

Can We Fix Housing By 2035?

The National Association Of Realtors has estimated the shortage of single-family and multi-family to be 5.5 million units! The graph of housing starts in the US provides some perspective.

In the graph above, the blue line plots the seasonally adjusted annual housing starts for each year since 1959. The red line shows the level required to avoid the current home deficit of five-and-a-half million homes.

In other words, builders produced the number of homes represented by the blue line, but we needed builders to produce the number of homes by the red line.

In the future, we will need to average roughly 2M housing starts annually to balance the market by 2035.

So long as builder production fails to meet the demands of our growing population, we must anticipate home prices and rents rising at rates higher than the historical norm.

No Small Feat – Get Involved The US housing market is severely short of homes, and the problem is here to stay. Now that inflation has pushed the cost of new construction so high, the homes we need cannot be produced at prices most buyers can afford.

There needs to be concentrated efforts at every local level to produce the shelter we need. The only way we can expect our local governments to treat housing as the problem that it is is by ensuring our elected officials know how disturbing the housing deficit has become.

The original one-page Weekly Special PDF is still available.