5 ms·

It's jarring to see "record high housing starts" and "dropping home prices" presented as bad news. Fascinating piece, thanks for sharing.

• jjoonathan 4y ago
  The world is run by asset holders who want to pump their assets at your expense. It's not just houses, either.
• treis 4y ago
  Because we really don't want the home building industry to stop building homes. The lack of new construction post 2008 is one of the reasons home prices are as high as they are.
  • effingwewt 4y ago
    The only homes being built at all since 2008 are expensive single family homes. They need to drop. They need to be decoupled from wealth and investment. Multi-family units need to be built, not more mcmansions.
    • sershe 4y ago
      Single family homes are quiet cheap in most of the country, especially McMansions. How much more expensive it is to build a house vs an apartment building, especially per sqft?
      • effingwewt 4y ago
        'Single family homes are quiet cheap in most of the country, especially McMansions' - Citation needed. Aside from price per square foot, a single family dwelling has room for a single family. That same space could be built upwards for multiple families, but NIMBYS stop it every single time. Just like the post about Marc the other day they cry about quality of life and property values. We have people far more worried about the value of their housing 'investment' than people having homes, then they cry about the homeless people and the problems they bring. Poor people have been priced out of every single place (you mention cheap houses but hardly the case- many millenials have given up on ever owning a house), so what's the only option left, renting until you cant work anymore? Something has got to give.
        • sershe 4y ago
          Example - https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/mortgages/condo-vs-house https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/mortgages/condo-vs-house "According to NAR data, in December 2020 the median price for existing, detached single-family homes was $314,300, while it was $272,200 for condos. " - very little difference. Even less per sqft. I actually agree that zoning and most relevant environmental regulation should be abolished, the govt should stop giving people tools to block development. But that would affect the price of land, not the price of construction. For the rest of the rant - price/income ratio didn't grow THAT much - before COVID spike that is evidently not caused primarily by NIMBYs, NIMBYism existed far longer than that: https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco.... Those who gave up on buying a house should move out of mismanaged coastal cities (I can afford them and yet I certainly wish I did!)
          • effingwewt 4y ago
            So you think someone making minimum wage can afford 270k+? Also those prices are only for existing condos and houses For your second link here's a fact- house prices have skyrocketed for decades now while minimum wage has remained the same 7.25/hr for the same time if not longer. The very link you used shows a huge spike from 5.1 up to 8+ and those are all historic highs. Your data doesn't match your argument.
            • sershe 4y ago
              1) Why would anyone on minimum wage need to afford a median house (or condo)? The person making the least would need to afford the cheapest house, not the median one. 2) No, housing prices have not skyrocketed for decades. It' simply not true, much less a fact. Aside from housing bubble and COVID mismanagement, they were flat-ish for decades in relation to income, only growing slowly. 3) Are you saying the recent "huge spike" over the last few years is caused by single family housing being preferred to multi-family construction? To me it clearly isn't.
              • 4y ago
• bryanlarsen 4y ago
  It's bad news because nobody wants a repeat of 2008. Even with the downturn in prices, prices are high enough that building new homes is very profitable, and we want lots of people to do it. But even if it is theoretically profitable, if stuff takes too long to sell builders can become bankrupt anyways. And if builders go bankrupt, the number of starts will go down very quickly. And then just like 2008 caused the 2022 crisis, the 2022 crisis may cause the same problem to repeat in a decade or two.
• ryathal 4y ago
  It's not really even news arguably. The rates have more than doubled in less than a year. That simply removed about 100k of buying power from anyone getting a mortgage.