I'd bet that Miami is just a few years ahead of it (entering serious decline) and within a decade Austin will be seen as an obvious-in-retrospect cautionary tale.
Austin population cratered and it still has not recovered to 2020 level. That's why the housing costs there decreased.
In other words: force citizens out of your city, and the price will fall.
"Over the last 50 years, America has kind of told them, 'You can't have both'."
I'd go past that and say you probably can't have a home over 3 bedrooms without already being in an upper income bracket.
So no large families (to offset population challenges). No extended families to help the existing family. No space to help relatives relocate.
No homes for four income earners in a 4-income economy.
Edit: Since HN contrarians who'd never want their children living in some particular conditions find it so confusing how others might not too:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01452...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3805127/
Overcrowded living quarters is a well known vector for a huge array of problems. Academic underachievement, sexual abuse, substance abuse, mood disorders, abusive relationships, the list goes on. Even after controlling for socioeconomic status!
… traumatizing (e.g. kids growing up in households where adults would have sex in the same room have all sorts of problems
Oh my god yes, and we’re doing such a great job of that aren’t we? We have gratuitous violence on demand now.
Public hangings are fine compared to what I see on TV/Netflix.
Putting aside how true such a claim is... just because something was a thing for most of human history doesn't mean it doesn't cause issues.
The house had been built before 1920 when expectations were less grand; those rooms were much smaller than nearly any home I've been in built after 1980. When my grandpa came to visit each summer, it meant all five boys in one room, the two youngest in sleeping bags and occasionally getting stepped on in the middle of the night when one of my older brothers would get up and forget we were there.
There was also no air conditioning, nor ceiling fans. My parents had a box fan in their bedroom window during the summer. It was a big deal when the bedroom I shared with my next older brother got a box fan too; that was in high school.
We shared EVERYTHING. And strangely, it didn't kill us! In fact: it just motivated us to go to sports and clubs and stay out of the house.
Obviously less extreme, but I do not understand this "every child must have their own room" thing. They don't! And I grew up in an incredibly poor rural area, imagine living in a city where there was actual shit to do.
We all shared rooms and had less than a few square meters to ourselves. It was fine. People these days are too attached to the idea they need massive homes to live their lives.
This is a bit of segue from where we were. To brings us more in line with the topic: In the early 20th century, large and extended families lived in commonly built row housing.
Their roomier accommodations were one piece of communities that were more affordable and an overall better fit for larger groups & families (than modern housing and communities).
Less than 1% of houses are accessible and that is a problem with aging boomers, SIL bought a home near parents to support them but when the stroke and dementia hit, the parents couldn't move in because no bedroom and only a powder room on the main floor, and they couldn't make it up/down the stairs anymore, and the parents house was too small to move into.
Lots of ways to get money from the table.
There are lots of reasons we're not having large families, but this doesn't seem like one of them. Average family size has shrunk dramatically while houses have gotten bigger. Lots of familes of 6 or more shared 1000-sqft bungalows in the past, with 2 or 3 kids in a room, so this doesn't jive.
> I should start by saying this: Jane Jacobs is right about almost everything. She was right about what makes cities vibrant and vital. She was right about the ballet of the sidewalk. She writes brilliantly about needing to treat cities as living things, that if you try to centrally plan them and assign all of their functions, it doesn't work very well. They need to evolve over time. They need a diversity of peoples, of uses.
She was right about all of that, and she sees great menace in the urban renewal schemes of the time, where the experts of her age looked at cities and saw disorderly places that needed rationality. In all of that, she was exactly right, but her solution was to reassert the original right of communities to define their own boundaries.
She said individuals, activists should have the right to veto new developments in their neighborhoods. And so you get the sort of endless processes of community hearings and reviews, and she's quite explicit that the goal of these reviews is not to gauge the actual opinions of the neighborhood or to balance the good of the community, but to empower activists like Jacobs to step in and say “no.”
She wants “right-thinking people” like her to be able to stop the government from doing bad things. It is a revolt against government from the left, and it is amazingly effective. But the new rules don’t just get exercised by right-thinking people, and one of the things about right-thinking people is they're often wrong about the things they're thinking about. And so, she imagines this as the ability to veto lots of destructive changes. But in practice, it emerges as a simple collective veto of almost all change, and it has had tremendous costs for Americans as a whole.
Blaming housing investors for housing affordability is like blaming gold market speculators for gold being expensive. If the price of gold comes down, the speculators lose money. Same with housing.
This is not true. The art market is financialized and tends to go up over time, but this does not result from art scarcity. You can make a market go up by making huge institutional cash buyers 30% of the buyer's market, and by getting even independent sellers to collude on price. Independent buyers in that market are irrelevancies, because they bought on credit borrowed against a house at an artificial value.
Also, that little property bubble we had in the first decade of the 2000s was not a result of a sudden population increase.
edit: also, it's important to mention that "if housing tends to go up over time" is within a window. It can lose all of that false value in a day, and the government will respond by directly subsidizing all of the institutional losers, and their stockholders.
I think you can also mention that with both parts of a marriage need to have jobs to pay the bills, moving is not just one getting a good deal in a different city, then the other part has to find something as well and wants something better or at least not worse. so two good offers is needed.
I also wonder what the timescale is.
I would presume this started as a factor of the industrial revolution. when people had farms and worked farms, I think moving about was less common as well.
When the man was
In the early to middle 20th century, you probably didn't have that. Most people lived in rural areas and you needed to move to get that job at Acme Steel Co.
When I was a kid in the late 60s through the 70s, we moved every 2 or 3 years. And this was generally not because we needed to move. It was because my parents decided they wanted to move somewhere different. From Seattle to the gulf coast of TX when I was 1 because my dad wanted to live somewhere sunny & warm. From TX to the Oregon Coast when I was 12 because my parents missed the PNW. Of the several moves in between I can only think of maybe 3 that were for jobs - but even then, it was generally by choice more than necessity.
As a percentage, how big do you think the home ownership problem is? Guess: 10? 15?
If I told you that home ownership is un-moveable would you believe me? That the percentage is less that 6 from peak to trough?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
63 percent of US households owned the home they lived in in 1960, we peaked around 2008 at 69 percent and are about 65 today.
Home ownership is functionally an un-moveable number.
But the housing problems, corporate ownership, rent prices, young people can't afford houses....
These things aren't housing problems. They are social ones.
First, we are using housing much differently: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q... -- Lots of us are living alone, including the old. The boomers aren't moving in with the kids, or to homes, or shacking up together (the Golden Girls is a quaint bit of history that does not happen today). This has created a massive amount of pressure on the housing stock we have.
And that Corporate ownership problem: It is hyper local (Atlanta, Phoenix, Tampa are major markets). One would think that these things being a local issue would have local resolutions. Except the biggest predictor of voting is "home ownership" and the biggest predictor of turn out is "anything that harms the price of homes". There is simply no political will locally to change this.
But the bulk of Investor Owned Properties aren't corporate, they are people with 2nd homes. These aren't "places people could live" they are homes in markets that only exist as tourist destinations. The condo in Florida for snow birds, The house at the beach, by the lake or in the mountains for a weekend getaway.
One of the largest factors in run away cost is where the money is. I hate to say this but that older generation that isn't moving in with kids, or shacking up like golden girls... they have ALL the cash. You don't have to believe me but as these people pass things will change and it has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wealth_Transfer
And yes, lack of mobility, the missing middle, zoning (back to that pesky voting things contribute) aren't helping. And so do tenants rights (the parts of these that helped end shared living situations from house mates to boarding houses).
Do we have a housing problem, Yes. The real fixes are going to be unpopular because the facts are in conflict with how people feel
Wouldn’t measuring dynamics of home ownership using a unit “households” cause all sorts of problems? Consider two people who would get married and become a “households” except they’re too poor to live together so they each cohabitate with their parents. Every household in this example that owned a house in 1960 (the two sets of parents) still does, but the example shows a pretty serious housing problem.
I had the same impression at first as well. But a household is a household is a household. That massive increase in people living alone follows the same 60/40 split on ownership that more "traditional" married couples would.
The affordability of housing has changed since the 60's, 70's and 80's. And it's what your intuition is picking up on. And it does relate to what is a household, but not because it's a poor measure but because the housing stock we have no longer matches how we use housing.
If you go back to 1985, the boomers were in their prime years and housing was much more affordable than today. The greatest generation was dying off, and in their golden years they lived together (The literal plot of golden girls), in homes or moved in with kids.
The boomers are NOT doing that. They are occupying multi bedroom housing stock, as couples or alone. This has created much of their wealth and lots of price pressure on younger generations. The millennials will tell you "housing was worse for them" and it was: the two large cohorts competing for the limited supply, and one was deeply entrenched already.
Do note that boomers aren't the only ones "living alone more" its a fairly equal distribution but they have the first mover advantage, historic pricing advantage, and tend to be the ones occupying multi bedroom housing alone creating the utilization pressure.
And the Golden Girls type living situations are unviable today for legal reasons. Overly broad tenants rights have killed the concept of co-habitation (roomates/housemates) turning 2,3, and 4 bedroom houses into single family homes, and zoning + tenants rights have finished off the boarding house (there might be hand full left in the US, this was the plot of another 80's tv series).
Telling The boomers to move in with the millennials is going to be massively unpopular with both groups. Telling renters that "you get less rights" is going to be politically impossible (even if it is only for 'housemates' situations). Death or a major change to Americans political will are the only fixes that we are going to see.
When I was a kid (in the late 60s and through the 70s) we moved every two or three years on average. And these weren't just the move across town kinds of moves - a lot of them were half way across the country. When I was 1 we moved from Seattle to the TX gulf coast because my dad wanted to live somewhere warm and sunny. Then to SoCal then back to TX then back to SoCal and again back to TX and then to the Oregon coast. I was thinking the other day that people don't move like that anymore - in most of those moves my parents didn't have work lined up, they just moved and found work. When I was about 12 we moved from TX to the Oregon Coast because my parents were missing the PNW - my dad had just gotten his teaching degree and he figured he'd just move up to Oregon and find a teaching gig, which turned out to be quite hard in the mid-70s. Basically, he sent out a bunch or resumes to Oregon school districts just prior to leaving. They had subscribed to a newspaper from the town they wanted to move to and then signed up for a rental house sight unseen (that was the return address for all of those resumes). We pulled into town with a U-Haul and TX plates and within about 15 minutes 3 different people screamed at us to go back to where we came from (ahh, Oregon in the 70s). I don't think people make a move like that nowadays. I thought it was fairly normal then, but there's no way I'd do that now and in fact we haven't moved in 15 years and that was just a move a few miles away.
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