Construction Physics
The housing shortage in the US is a perennially popular topic of conversation for the urbanist crowd (which online includes basically everyone.) The basic argument is that housing starts collapsed after the financial crisis and have never truly recovered. This, combined with restrictions on building that limit the supply of housing in many cities (San Francisco and New York are almost always the culprits here), has left America with a housing deficit that's driving up housing costs.
But this argument isn’t convincing to everyone - folks like Kevin Drum point out that, barring a blip between 2010 and 2013, housing units seem to have consistently tracked population and household growth for the last 20 years:
How do we square this with the claim that the US has been consistently underbuilding for the past decade, and now has a huge housing deficit? Let’s take a look inside the housing and homebuilding numbers and see if we can unpack this issue a bit.
We’ll start with some context - the US has roughly 330 million people living in roughly 141 million homes, or about 0.42 homes per person. This puts the US slightly below the OECD average of homes per capita [0]:
.png)
