The US housing shortage is likely to worsen, experts predict | Hacker News Reader

The US housing shortage is likely to worsen, experts predict

usatoday.com

10 pointsaruanavekar9 comments

Interesting world where the experts would not immediately go to Home Depot and pick up a nail gun. It does feel a bit like that sci fi book I am blanking on the name of where the whole world is just academics writing about the decline of productivity instead of, you know, being productive.

Troubles.

You have to get hookups for utilities.

Worry about construction quality. Durability in a storm.

Architecture. Will the house fall down?

Material quality. Is the wood good?

Electrical wiring. Is it up to code? Will it burn the house down?

Plumbing. A leak can destroy a home.

Mold. Moisture ingress. Bugs. Termites.

Foundational stability. Water drainage.

You can get it all apparently right only to find your home is worthless or can't be lived in after a decade.

All of this is before the regulatory issues, permits, taxes, insurance, and so on.

It's nowhere near as simple as picking up a nail gun.

A shed with a compost toilet is immune to pretty much all of this and low risk if you are wrong on something. The problem is of course the Nimbys in houses that exhibit all the problems you described.

The average person should not live in a shed with a compost toilet.

When I and many people I know wanted to live this way or other simple ways we ended up with mandatory 3 bedroom apartments and the decision of whether to navigate roommates or leave a lot of space vacant to get a single accommodation. Those apartments would be available in the market to people that need them, so we were prevented from living how we wanted to keep those prices up.

Things are rarely so simple as "all it takes is for you to do it yourself." For instance, I'd been looking at land to build my own house on, since housing prices are extortionately high. The land to build on is seemingly even-less available, the material cost of building a house are quite high, and the mortgage rates to fund the materials and labor are astronomical. It's an unfortunate potpourri of poor circumstances.

> a bit like that [thing] ... where the whole world is just [office workers] writing about the decline of productivity instead of, you know, being productive.

Hacker News?

The Case-Shiller home price index seems to indicate otherwise recently:

https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/indices/indicators/sp-core...

If the bottom of the housing market experiences a drop in sales, then the result would be that the median price would indeed appear to continue increasing for some time unless you are matching past sales to present sales using comparable houses. Maybe that is what's happening here?

This hurts:

>> Also, the median sales price for homes in the U.S. was $384,800 in September, an 8.4% spike from the $355,100 price tag in September 2021 as prices climbed in all regions, the association reported.

>> Assuming a 10% down payment, the monthly mortgage is $1,000 higher than a year ago, Evangelou said.

Low inventory, and even lower seeing how construction is not keeping up with demand, is keeping housing prices up. For someone like myself who owns but wants to move to a bigger house, I cannot because the interest rates are so high. This locks up the market even more.

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