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Population of the US is effectively flat over the last two years. In California it actually declined. And new home construction is at an all time high. Scarci
by adam_arthur 5y ago
Population of the US is effectively flat over the last two years. In California it actually declined.
And new home construction is at an all time high.
Scarcity of inventory is not at all the same thing as scarcity of housing. This has been a powerful narrative in driving FOMO buyers though.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNDCONTSA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNDCONTSA
- epistasis 5y agoPopulation may have flattened, but a toooooon of people were looking to move suddenly to new areas, which is another way that scarcity is created. Your chart is the number of units under construction, but that high number doesn't translate into more new homes than ever before, because completions have been massively delayed. So there's a lot of homes sitting half finished as they wait for supply chain crunch's to resolve. And to compare this to numbers from the 80s means normalizing for length of construction, something which is getting delayed more and more. Overall, construction has massively constructed since 2008, and even before that it had been trending down for a long time.
- aperson_hello 5y agoAlso a lot of those homes are tear down/replace vs. net new