Robert Dietzwho travels the country as chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders, warned of that confluence of problems before the pandemic.
“For the past four or five years, everywhere I go they call it substructure,” he said. The exception is communities that have suffered population loss (although they may also need new or renovated housing to replace homes that are becoming uninhabitable). “Everywhere,” said Mr. Dietz, “it was just a matter of degree and scale.”
There are more homes under construction across the country today than anytime since the 70s, when many baby boomers formed households (today’s large construction numbers reflect in part that it takes longer to build a home amid pandemic supply chain delays). But rising interest rates and fears of an impending recession mean homebuilders are already beginning to pull back, said Mr. dietz. And even at the current pace of construction, it would take years to make up the country’s deficit.
So what would it mean to reimagine the housing shortage as a national crisis – perhaps with national responses and changing politics? Housing researchers from the libertarian-oriented Mercatus Center have often raised the issue with conservative politicians.
“Before Covid-19, you talked to people in Utah, in Tennessee, and they said, ‘Oh yeah, this is a blue state problem, Democrats don’t know how to run their state, we don’t have that problem here. ,’”said Nolan Graya former city planner and Mercatus affiliate who is now a graduate student at UCLA “And, of course, starting in 2020, I’m getting more and more frantic calls from people in states like Utah or Montana, or Florida.”
In a new book criticizing zoning, Mr. Gray describes how, beginning in the 1920s, the federal government encouraged local communities to adopt zoning plans. It’s only fair today, he argues, that the federal government is helping to reverse zoning plans that have made homes more expensive.