Saturday, December 14, 2024

The U.S. is facing a severe housing shortage. Will Trump's proposals help? (Tonya Mosley; Fresh Air podcast)

Heading into 2025, housing remains one of the most important issues on the minds of millions of Americans. For many, the dream of owning, or even renting, a place of their own is in peril. In some cities, people are paying $1 million for "starter" homes, while about half of renters are spending more than 30% of their income on housing.

Ben Keys, an economist with the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, characterizes the current market as "deeply unaffordable." Keys traces some of the current problems back to the financial crisis of 2008.

"We saw a collapse in construction, and so we just stopped building houses, we stopped building apartments for a few years there," he says. "Now we're seeing estimates of as much as four million houses that we're short."

Keys notes that new construction is occurring "at a snail's pace," due, in part, to the high cost of labor and materials and the difficulty of financing large projects. He says that zoning laws and land use restrictions can also contribute to a housing shortage: "[These] policies create a lot of hoops to jump through and make it challenging for developers who would like to build at the scale where they would like to build."

President-elect Donald Trump has suggested opening up federal land for development, but Keys questions the practicality of the plan.

"When we're thinking about this federal land out west, I'm pretty skeptical that we're going to see, you know, cities spring up out of whole cloth," he says. "Federal land seems promising, but as a solution to our affordability crisis, I just don't see it."
Interview: 

 

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