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In the United States, 13 million households are currently behind on their rent or mortgage and 600,000 people are homeless in this country. The number of homeless Americans has dramatically increased in the aftermath of Covid, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Millions of people simply do not make enough money to consistently afford market-rate housing.
Americans are being told that the solution is for there to be more houses. The Biden Administration, state governors, along with think tanks are promoting the virtues of building more housing.
However, these government subsidies and tax breaks for housing construction are making real estate developers wealthy beyond belief. Banks, realtors, and corporate builders prosper from new construction, too.
And yet there is a surplus of housing units in the U.S.. Many of these housing units are unoccupied.
In a recent Barron’s article, two housing experts, Schwartz and McClure, decided to look past the housing-supply hype and crunch the numbers. Those numbers show that 21st century housing construction has produced a surplus of 3.5 million units, including a surplus in virtually every metropolitan area. New York, for example, has a quarter-million more units than are needed to house its population.
What doesn't help is that a great deal of new housing construction is luxury priced.
So the problem is not a lack of houses. The problem is a lack of houses that Americans can afford.
RELATED LINKS:
A Lack of Supply Isn’t Causing Our Housing Crisis (Common Dreams, 8-13-23)
More Americans Are Ending Up Homeless—at a Record Rate (The Wall Street Journal, 8-14-23)