https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/yes-america-has-a-housing-emergency (pago)
Yes, America
Has a Housing Emergency
But Trump will make it worse
(..) We do, in fact, have a housing emergency. Over the past decade home prices have risen much faster than the overall cost of living, so the popular perception that housing has become unaffordable is grounded in reality:
Why has this been happening? The home price surge since 2015 looks very different from the housing bubble of the 2000s. That bubble was largely driven by speculation, with house prices rising much faster than rents. The price surge also bypassed sunbelt cities like Atlanta, Houston and Dallas, where housing supply expanded to meet rising demand. This time, however, we’re looking at a truly national phenomenon. As Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko document in a recent paper, housing prices have risen rapidly, without eliciting a large increase in homebuilding, even in cities that avoided the 2000s bubble.
Back in July, looking at the case of Atlanta, I suggested that we might be looking at the limits of sprawl. In the 2000s cities like Atlanta could add housing by spreading ever further out, adding single-family homes at their edges. At this point, however, they’ve sprawled so far that this doesn’t work anymore. Another recent academic paper, by Orlando and Redfearn, argues that sprawl has been
pushing single-family home builders farther away from the amenities that make these urban areas attractive. Eventually, this progression reaches a limit in which commuting back to these amenities is too costly. At this point, the greenfield land is effectively “built out.”
The obvious answer is to turn inwards — to build more housing by increasing population density, in particular by building multifamily housing. As I noted in my Atlanta piece, sunbelt cities still have extremely low population densities compared with blue-state cities:
Which brings me back to Bessent saying that we have a housing emergency. What will he do about it?
Another man, in another administration, might go YIMBY — “yes in my backyard” — and try to tackle the political obstacles to housing construction. But take a look at Mandate for Leadership, the manifesto issued by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. It’s all for deregulation when it comes to things like pollution controls. But when it comes to housing, it goes full NIMBY:
Congress should prioritize any and all legislative support for the single-family home … American homeowners and citizens know best what is in the interest of their neighborhoods and communities. Localities rather than the federal government must have the final say in zoning laws and regulations, and a conservative Administration should oppose any efforts to weaken single-family zoning.
So no, the Trump administration won’t do anything to expand housing supply, which is the only way to make housing more affordable. (..)
