The Daily Parker

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Americans and apartments

Tuesday, 21 March 2023 15:59:36 CDT David-Braverman General, Geography, Politics (1)

A few large US cities have seen housing prices rise much faster than inflation, particularly in higher-density areas. Eric Levitz explores some possible causes:

The United States is very good at sabotaging itself through policy errors. But few of our nation’s governing failures are as simultaneously needless and detrimental as our inability to build housing.

There are between 1.5 million and 6 million fewer homes in the U.S. than there are households ready to occupy them. The proximate cause of this mismatch isn’t hard to discern: Over the past ten years, the number of housing units per 1,000 people in the U.S. has actually fallen.

By itself, a rising ratio of people to units would be sufficient to put pressure on housing supply. But since the pandemic, the number of discrete households in the U.S. has also spiked. This phenomenon has multiple causes. One is that much of the millennial generation is aging out of its roommate-tolerating years en masse and starting separate households.

Another is that the rise of remote work has led many Americans to seek more personal floor space, whether by ditching roommates or upgrading from, say, one-bedroom dwellings to two-bedroom ones so as to make room for a home office.

[But] what is it about living in an English-speaking country that turns people against high-rises?

Speaking English probably didn't cause the housing crisis, but the correlation is hard to miss.

Comments (1) -

  • David Harper

    3/22/2023 7:41:49 AM +00:00 |

    Here in Britain, many high-rise apartment blocks were built in the 1950s and 1960s as a solution to the post-war housing crisis.  Often, in cities such as London, entire neighbourhoods of low-rise housing were levelled and replaced by concrete tower blocks.  This later came to be viewed as a bad mistake -- witness novels like J.G. Ballard's "High-Rise" and movies such as "A Clockwork Orange".  There were also tragedies such as the collapse of the Ronan Point tower block, caused by poor construction methods and materials.

    More recently, the reputation of high-rise tower blocks suffered another blow as a result of the Grenfell Tower tragedy of 2017 in which 72 people died in a fire that was accelerated by external cladding.  A subsequent survey of hundreds of similar tower blocks across the country revealed that many of them had similar cladding, and occupants of some of them have been forced to move out after local fire brigades declared the buildings unsafe.

    Perhaps this goes some way to answering Eric Levitz's question.

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