The U.S. housing affordability crisis has both intensified and spread significantly in the last decade: once largely confined to the coasts and the Southwest, it now extends to nearly every state. The number of metropolitan areas that underproduced housing rose from 100 to 169 between 2012 and 2019; nationally, underproduction nearly doubled in the same period, from 1.65 million to 3.79 million units.
These numbers, released in the recent report “Housing Underproduction in the U.S.” by Up for Growth, a Washington-based nonprofit research and policy organization, garnered attention in the New York Times and elsewhere, painting a sobering picture of the challenges the nation faces in meeting the demand for housing. People are devoting more of their income to housing costs and driving greater distances to reach their jobs, exacerbating sprawl and traffic congestion. “The core of the problem is a supply issue,” says Christopher Ptomey, executive director of the ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing, who contributed to the report an article about a ULI study panel’s recommendations for addressing Boise’s housing shortage. “We still don’t see very many cities where production is catching up to demand.”
Up for Growth’s report sets out three criteria to identify locations to build housing: those in the top 20 percent of economic mobility, those that have a ratio of two jobs per housing unit, and those that are in the top 20 percent of walkable places or that have a high-frequency transit station within half a mile.
The authors award the highest ranking to locations that meet all three criteria, proposing a 40 percent increase in homes there, compared to a 30 percent increase for areas meeting only one of the criteria. “It’s not just about the number of homes we’re building,” Ptomey points out. “It’s about what are you building and where. These things affect the cost and who can live in that housing, which affects a variety of other environmental and quality of life issues.” The report also acknowledges racial discrimination’s longstanding role in causing the housing shortage and highlights ways to undo the damage of urban renewal, exclusionary zoning, redlining, and racially restrictive covenants.
Ptomey sees a ray of hope amidst the current housing crisis. “The cost of housing is not just something that people on the very lowest of the income scale are dealing with,” he says. As rents rise and the millennial generation seeks to buy homes, “policymakers and public officials are hearing about it, and they’re being forced to grapple with development in ways that maybe they haven’t before.”
ULI Resources:
- 2022 Terwilliger Center Home Attainability Index
- Hotel-to-Housing Conversions Proliferate
- 10 Principles for Embedding Racial Equity in Real Estate Development
