It predicts movement in policies. As neighborhoods get wealthier, they trend toward regulatory capture. Zoning laws get more onerous, building codes get more restrictive (ever wonder why you don't see 25 story condominium complexes for example?) and the cost of entering the neighborhood is artificially inflated as a result.
They correlate, but it itself is not the cause in the sense that income levels directly cause housing prices to go up. What they do enable though, is as folks become wealthier they tend to also spend more time lobbying for these types of city regulations to preserve their home values. They spend more time on this as the income bracket goes up. Couple this with the fact that wealthier home owners tend to be older, they often have more time relative to others in many respects to lobby consistently for the status quo.
The issue I have with the report is it takes none of that into account, and instead takes the correlation (that income rising === higher home prices) without looking more closely at what happens as the income trend goes up.
>It predicts movement in policies. As neighborhoods get wealthier, they trend toward regulatory capture. Zoning laws get more onerous, building codes get more restrictive (ever wonder why you don't see 25 story condominium complexes for example?)
This. Once people are rich enough to have no real problems the setback of someone else's shed on someone else's land and the spacing of outlets in the walls of other people's houses suddenly start looking like things worth caring about, all of which drives down the efficiency by which dollars can be converted into use of land.
>and the cost of entering the neighborhood is artificially inflated as a result.
Worse, it's a feedback loop. High cost of entry means only more of the same will enter
>This. Once people are rich enough to have no real problems the setback of someone else's shed on someone else's land and the spacing of outlets in the walls of other people's houses suddenly start looking like things worth caring about.
Worse yet, the seeming backbone of the US real estate market is that homes are your biggest investment. They're seen as both a place to live and an asset that is a portion of your net worth.
For it to be both, means owners will always incentivize the asset increasing in value and as we see, the result is most home owners will fight zoning de-regulation tooth and nail. Its worth noting that this is true regardless of which political party is in power locally, assuming we're talking about the US.
As a result land use reforms are some of the hardest to get through legislatures in the US. For example, it took years for California to pass a law that simply allows people to rent secondary dwellings on their property, and this was heralded as a big deal because it usurped local regulations banning such practices. Keep in mind, this does relatively little to move the needle on real estate pressures (there's only so many places that have excess capacity of this nature to begin with and there aren't a ton of incentives to create more, as the law is still limited in a variety of ways). This took many years to get through, and its a very very very small reform!
I am both a land owner (I have a niche farming operation, but don't live on that land) and a home owner, and I find this obsessive behavior among other land/home owners to be misguided at best and appalling at worst.
The simple truth is it can be either an asset or a commons good, but it really can't be both. Thats a major part of the issue to begin with, and why I'm an advocate for the Land Value Tax
Productivity goes up → income goes up → real estate prices go up -> existing home owners and realtor organizations (at minimum) lobby for regulations to keep those prices up -> stricter zoning laws and build approval processes get passed -> demand isn't met as housing supply is artificially constrained to protect existing owners over new entrants, including new housing styles that maximize land usage (e.g., multi story condominiums or dense town house projects)
What should happen is:
Productivity goes up → income goes up → real estate prices go up temporarily -> new builds to meet current and future demand go up (as you would see in any other type of marketplace) -> housing prices come down as there is always going to be incentives to maximize land value in desirable places in a myriad of ways, and doesn't always mean building cookie cutter single family homes as we often see now (due to the aforementioned regulatory constraints that zoning regulations impose)
There is an artificial cap on how it works, and its done through zoning laws and other build regulations that make it anywhere from onerous to illegal to build housing in a maximally efficient way, all in service to protect existing owners home values as much as possible, at the expense of anything else.
This is why I will always advocate for a land value tax. Because it acts as a forcing function: you either pay the tax (which gets higher as time goes on) or you maximize the value of the land (which usually means selling off parcels to meet the tax obligation / lower future obligations, and/or building something to utilize the land, of which the most straightforward is often more housing, and denser the better as it increases utilization)
No, seriously. I am a landlord. How do I set rent? I ask myself: "How much do people around here earn?" And I set my price at ~30% of that.
I am currently selling a house. How do I set my price? I ask myself: "What salary would someone moving to this area likely be making?" And I set my price accordingly.
Literally none of the zoning laws are necessary. This method is how price is set in 100% of real estate transactions in 100% of localities, regardless of any other regulations.
FWIW I'm also an LVT zealot. Have you read Progress & Poverty yet?
Setting rental rates at 30% of median or average income for the area is the wrong way to think about it.
Setting rental rates at 30% of "What the average renter makes" is more reasonable.
This is the issue. There is no "what the market can bear". It is all "that's the way it is".
Every year there is a new excuse why prices go up (covid, fires, elections) but the numbers don't seem to align.
Also, I am not talking about SF or Bay area...the bad math has spread across the country.
Edit: And yes...my area has many vacant homes and even more commercial buildings. They are building high rise towers which people purchase and leave vacant. They buy houses that used to be rentals and tear down the entire neighborhood and leave it that way for years...further pushing out the rentals.
It is sad to watch the town I love destroy itself from the inside.
I would have been part of a development project that had it been approved[0], would have been involved in selling a high rise of condos, and the question that kept coming up for me is: "how hasn't someone undercut this market yet?" which is why I pursued it.
Because for instance, you'll rent at 30%, but if there was honest market pressure (and lets face it, there isn't) why wouldn't someone else rent at 28%? Or 25%? etc.
Zoning has real hidden costs, as do all the review stages etc.
Whats funny is how stable all this has been for landlords, builders (to some degree) and realtors. If an area is desirable to live in, you would see economies of scale trickle in - like I mentioned in other comments, why do you think we don't see 25 story condos in desirable areas? Thats zoning in action. You literally can't build it even if you had all the money in the world, because the local laws won't allow it[1]
>Progress & Poverty
The Georgism book? I have read it, been some time since I have and should really revisit it.
[0]: fellow local citizenry ultimately rejected my proposal - I knew it was likely but I had to try. Thats why I have a niche business on that plot now.
[1]: and I have some first hand experience here, its what I originally wanted to do with an aforementioned plot of land that is now a niche little farm growing speciality apple varieties
> Because for instance, you'll rent at 30%, but if there was honest market pressure (and lets face it, there isn't) why wouldn't someone else rent at 28%? Or 25%? etc.
They do! And then like all other markets, equilibrium is found, and that equilibrium point is what moves up as incomes move up.
They don’t though not really. We didn’t allow housing to have the same elastic market fluctuations all other markets do.
Yes, there can be minor variations in prices (especially with renting) but the fact of the matter is unlike any other market there is artificial scarcity up and down the chain with real estate
> there is artificial scarcity up and down the chain with real estate
Which, according to this analysis, does not actually significantly affect prices relative to other factors.
I understand your theory and I intuitively don't find it "wrong" per se, but you're staring at an analysis that shows you otherwise. Your critique of it not factoring in things like policy is explicitly wrong: all of those factors are fully accounted for in the ultimate supply elasticity.
So if policy is accounted for (it is), and your theory doesn't hold, it's time to either come up with a different critique of the study or acknowledge it as clear evidence against your theory.
No, those policies only matter, definitionally, in so far as they actually affect the elasticity of supply. The elasticity of supply is what they measured and found it does not matter, ergo those policies (and all related hypothetical supply-elasticity-affecting forces) effectively do not matter relative to other factors (well, one factor in particular: income).
This is discussed elsewhere but "market prices" are a distribution of bids and asks. A buyer or seller can be on the high or low end of that distribution, which does not change the fact that the distribution itself moves up as local incomes go up.
No. It’s a given that people without the incomes to afford housing won’t enter that locality, but many could remain from before it was a popular place to live.
Gentrification actually only affects a very small percentage of people who end up refusing to sell and holding out until they cannot afford anymore.
But the point remains that a 90 year old living on Social Security could potentially own a million dollar home.
> Gentrification actually only affects a very small percentage of people who end up refusing to sell and holding out until they cannot afford anymore.
In California, gentrification almost never affects long time homeowners. Once you pay off your mortgage, your only housing costs are maintenance and property taxes which are highly subsidized thanks to Proposition 13.
However, renters who make up 44% of all California households very often do experience increasing housing price pressures which drives them to move to lower cost (and lower opportunity) areas. Some municipalities have tight rent controls, but most do not. There's a state law which prevents rent increases in older units above 5% plus inflation but that is still an allowable rate which quickly outpaces income growth.
I happen to like some rent controls but I'm not saying that universal rent controls are a solution here. There just has to be some explanation for why housing construction costs seem to grow just as fast as housing prices in general. If housing prices are growing faster than wages and the producer price index for materials then it cant just be construction labor and materials!
What I am alluding to is that there is simply a lack of locations which are able to be developed into new housing. Sometimes that's onerous land use constraints, very long project entitlement and permitting timelines which increases financing costs, local taxes/fees or exactions on development, or some combination of all of these!
A new construction unit is always going to be priced higher than a similar sized and located unit that is older. This should not be surprising.
The claim that housing supply advocates make about affordability is not that new units will be most affordable than but that older comparable units will become more affordable due to the increased competition. The people who’ve been bidding up the prices on older rental and resale homes will choose the newer housing instead because they are able and more willing to. The older stock becomes more affordable. Time goes on and even newer buildings cause what was once new to become a more affordable option. It should eventually get to a point where nobody would ever choose the older (again, similarly sized and located) units with poor amenities because it’s not worth it compared to newer options that are a better value. And those get replaced with new construction. That’s how a housing market should function.
But instead we have housing that is over 100 years old going for ever increasing prices even without modern renovations. Thats a broken market.
That's not broken. That's location, location, location.
Also, your average 100 year-old house is a much higher quality structure than your average new house. And 100 years old is about the pinnacle of craftsmanship.
Higher location values are supposed to lead to more intensive land use (more dwelling units per acre) but we don’t tax land enough for this to work properly. I’d still consider a housing market without land value tax to be fundamentally broken. Adding on arbitrary constraints on building (eg, beyond health and safety regulations) makes it si much worse.
As for 100 year old houses being considered high quality… there’s definitely going to be a survivorship bias for such buildings that didn’t get replaced while they could (prior to mass downzoning on the 1970s) but they literally didn’t have building codes back then. Lots of money needs to be spent to retrofit old buildings for modern seismic and energy standards.
Also — not saying you’re guilty of this — there is a lot of racial prejudice when folks criticize the “poor craftsman” of modern construction workers compared to those of past generations, as they more often tend to be Latino workers these days.
> "there is a lot of racial prejudice when folks criticize the “poor craftsman” of modern construction workers compared to those of past generations, as they more often tend to be Latino workers these days."
This is nonsense. The reason people say nearly all modern construction and manufacturing sucks is because the primary focus is on reducing costs and increasing production efficiency/speed. Something that needs to be replaced sooner is also seen as a benefit rather than a problem - planned obsolescence.
“Modern craftsmanship is shit” mainly comes from using things like OSB and laminated beams. Anyone who actually studies modern building techniques realizes that modern houses are significantly better than old ones in many many ways - perhaps the only one they’re not being that they’re not using old growth lumber.
Where I live there is a separate tax on land and structure. But my understanding is we're unusual that way.
Land tax reform is debated amongst economist. It is a form of wealth taxation, and in America we generally don't tax wealth. And even if we did, unlike having $1 million in the bank - which is a known amount of wealth - the value of land is rather hard to quantify. You could arbitrarily say that all land in the city is taxed at $10 a square foot per year. Clearly that would be inequitable by some land is worth considerably more.
Land, unless it's farmland, generates no income and our tax policy is generally based upon income income tax.
Your average surviving 100 year old house, maybe. I’ve seen enough of them to realize that though they may be build out of wood that is old and hard and thick, they’ve tons of issues that just pile up over time.
Perhaps it is different in temperate climates, but old houses can be an absolute hassle.
Wood isn’t used because it will last forever - brick and stone are better for those purposes. Wood is excellent, just not the best. It’s much more efficient though.
That’s probably a big part of it, but of course making anything stand the test of time is extremely difficult.
Maybe you live in a tropical climate but wood can last 100s of years as long as the roof is maintained. Unless it is a timber house the outer walls will need replacement every 100 years though.
>But that would require builders to build affordable homes, which is the same effort and lower profit than building luxury.
This is only true because they can't build homes in significant volume in most localities due to land use and zoning regulations. It took 3 years in my former neighborhood to build 20 houses, because of the review and public comment period. This is the same story I've read about across the country: any locality that is desirable to live in has had increasingly strict regulations and processes that artificially constrain the building of housing inventory of any type.
Given this, if you can only build 20 units instead of 2000, you'll end up building in the luxury category, as its the only way to maximize any value of the build without other incentives.
If instead they could 2000 or 20000 homes that meet building code, builders could not only compete in earnest but you could do things like selling units at lower prices per unit but its made up in volume, or each housing unit could be denser (like town houses, condos etc).
You can't overlook these aspects. Real estate is not a functional marketplace and should be seen as the definition of government regulation overreach in many respects, but home owners tend to vote in blocs, so politicians won't touch it
Even in places where there’s infinite land literally you can buy 50 acres and develop it tomorrow and people are building it. They’re only building high-end luxury homes. Even the cheapest smallest townhomes are definitely into the low luxury area.
If they wanted to, they could build them much more affordable and save 30% off the total price, but nobody does it. Why not? It takes the same amount of time and you might as well build the more expensive one because someone will buy it and you get a percentage of the sale price.
Builders are building and the houses are selling; in suburbs all over the country. I presume the people buying them desire them, they're spending close to half a million for them.
The builders get approval from the county if outside a city, or the city if inside one, or build a new city.
This doesn’t answer my question. Where is it both highly desirable to live and lots of land to build on? And what are there zoning and building regulations?
“All over the country” isn’t a specific answer to the question at hand
Good catch - I definitely should’ve pointed out that I was referring to owners only. In that sense, it’s somewhat of a transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor.
For renters though, you’re absolutely right that they suffer much more directly.
> Gentrification actually only affects a very small percentage of people who end up refusing to sell and holding out until they cannot afford anymore.
Not quite just those who refuse to sell — because housing costs impact the cost of every other local service, maintenance in a gentrified area often becomes unaffordable for those who hold out, and then they can’t afford it. Roof replacement is the classic example. Another example (though not as relevant to the 90 year old on social security) is childcare costs.
Correlation != causation. The lack of factoring these locality inputs means they lose the broader context of their conclusion and that’s what makes it incomplete to me
No no, you're misunderstanding. The study did factor locality-specific inputs like the ones you're describing. In fact they included all of them by measuring the actual realized supply production for each locale.
They do matter a lot. I disagree with their conclusion that they don’t matter.
There is plenty of available evidence that when zoning laws are less restrictive and buildings get faster approval the overall cost of housing comes down over time in significant ways.
The way income factors into this tends to be driven by the fact that the weather the neighborhood the more time that is spent at city hall by residents lobbying for regulations to preserve their market values in their neighborhoods in order to achieve artificial local scarcity which drives the home values up.
One is in regards to the lasting effects of Houston's 1998 zoning reforms[0]
Another looks more broadly at patterns of regulations and how they affect the market[1]
Bloomberg also did some nice reporting in this space[2] as well which goes over many cases of attempted land use / zoning reform and various outcomes, most notably that trying to only single out 1-2 regulations is at best token reforms and more meaningful comprehensive reforms are needed to zoning and land use laws.
This is simply what I have easy access to at the moment, but there is more out there that studies housing as an ecosystem and they all seem to be converging on similar conclusions: the real estate market (housing in particular) is functionally broken around the country
In my experience, a huge number of people spend the most they can on housing. So the local price level is set by the local income distribution. Their observation lines up perfectly with my experiences.
This also suggests two solutions that are bound to be unpopular:
* To make housing prices more reasonable, give everyone a pay cut.
* Trying to set a "living wage" is futile since boosting income will feed right through to the price of housing.
Why doesn't it feed through to the price of food? Of vehicles? Of energy?
It only feeds through to the price of certain classes of goods: housing, healthcare, education.
Those are also "markets" that are artificially supply-constrained, through zoning, the AMA, and accreditation.
To be clear, I'm not saying that we should get rid of zoning, the AMA, and accreditation—but we should be much more careful to avoid use of those tools to curb supply.
Kidding aside, most people looking for housing aren’t buying land, they’re buying housing — which absolutely does not have elastic supply by policy, not by natural law.
Well, they are buying land because housing exists on land. As discussed elsewhere in the thread, if you make the housing upon that land more elastic (e.g. by loosening zoning restrictions), that elasticity pretty much immediately gets baked into the price of land itself.
This is so significant an effect that there is a highly lucrative business in simply buying low-density zoned land and going through the entitlements to turn it into a high-density zone. This does not just generate a free lunch for a developer to build more units on the same plot of land at the same price, it makes the land instantly more expensive.
> there is a highly lucrative business in simply buying low-density zoned land and going through the entitlements to turn it into a high-density zone
Sure, but this is only a lucrative business because despite the land getting more expensive, the housing units are less expensive—otherwise who in their right mind would pay as much for one unit in a duplex/triplex/etc. as they'd have paid for a single-family home in the same location?
The $/sqft of housing tends to go up as density increases... for the same reason as the article is suggesting: incomes are higher, so people can eat higher prices.
> The $/sqft of housing tends to go up as density increases
This is only true generally, not within a specific neighborhood, and it's because of correlations between demand and density.
If you look at a neighborhood with mixed SFH and condos, the condo $/sqft is lower than the SFH $/sqft. (To be clear: that's $/sqft of housing space not of land).
Having a diversity of density enables home pricing at different points. Looking only at SFH (as this article does) is missing the forest for the trees, IMO.
The most common reason the simple income level of a region changes is that increasing housing costs push lower income people out, meaning the simple income level is only measuring those who remain.
Meanwhile, simple income level does predict the movement of prices.