The strangest thing happened to me over the last few days. I stumbled on an analogy that I hadn’t considered as particularly relevant, but now discovering how relevant it really is.
Last Friday, I wrote an article in which I made the case that our nation’s steady slide in decreasing household size, evident for more than 60 years, plays a key role in our current challenge with housing supply and affordability. I noted that the nation’s average household size fell from 3.38 persons in 1960 to just 2.55 persons in 2023, according to the U.S. Census. I follow that up by saying that housing supply hasn’t kept pace with changing demand. Here’s a take from that article:
“I’d say the nation is still overproducing homes for the traditional family arrangement that characterized American post-WWII society, and underproducing homes for the smaller families, singles, couples, and others who want homes scaled to their needs. I mean, that’s at the heart of NIMBYism and the YIMBY response, right?”
Then, I went even further, comparing today’s housing shortage with the decline of the auto industry’s Big Three in the latter third of the 20th century:
“Just as there was a time when Detroit was overproducing Chevys when the nation was transitioning to buying Toyotas, the nation is still overproducing 4-bedroom, 3,000 square foot homes as the nation transitions demands smaller, more adaptable and more flexible living spaces.”
The analogy became clearer after reading The Future of Where's Bill Fulton piece on the simultaneous shortage and glut in the U.S. housing market:
“Here’s a paradox that pandemic revealed: We have a shortage of housing in the United States and housing prices went up a lot.
But at the same time, it turns out that we have a lot of extra bedrooms. In fact, we have 137 million extra bedrooms.
But we’re not using the bedrooms to house people. We’re using them as storage, as guest rooms, and increasingly post-pandemic as home offices.”
I’ll spell it out. Shifts in preferences among auto and housing consumers dramatically altered demand, but supply took much longer to keep pace with the changes. The oil shocks of the 1970s encouraged auto customers to take a hard look at fuel-efficient Japanese cars, while American automakers continued to build large gas guzzlers. Housing buyers and renters have increasingly expressed an interest in finding places that fit their size, location, amenity and contemporaneous needs, but home builders continue to produce more of the large single-family housing stock they’re accustomed to. Overproduction of one type of product, and underproduction of another.
Now, I’ve always been a bit of a YIMBY skeptic, for a number of reasons. Not because I’m a card-carrying NIMBY, opposed to any housing that’s not single-family and deeply concerned about traffic and parking concerns. I’m a strong believer in the kind of dense, walkable, mixed-use development that’s at the heart of the best cities, and want more of it. However, I’ve always been skeptical because I view upzoning as being fraught with unintended consequences that we still aren’t able to mitigate.
Starting as far back as 2014, I’ve always felt we have enough housing in the U.S.; it’s just not located where it’s most wanted, nor easily accessible (financially, physically) to those who need it. Fulton’s article noted ApartmentList.com's research on the matter and we arrived at similar conclusions. (Note: the same could likely be said about the nation’s office and retail markets).
Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.
Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.
Photo: Public Domain, via pxhere.
Email this Story
