From New Geography, March 31:
From the end of World War II until 1970, owner-occupied housing was broadly affordable across the entire country. The standard measure for measuring affordability —the price-to-income ratio— was at about 2.8 in 1950, 2.5 in 1960, 2.6 in 1970, 3.4 in 1980, and 4.2 in 2020. This meant that, to a large extent, factors other than housing, such as climate, amenities, and job and economic opportunities, drove migration, which builders were in a position to respond to. However, as shown in Table 1, a number of met-ros on the coasts now have much higher ratios today, evidence that supply has not kept up with demand.
This book is being published as a series, with permission of the American Enterprise Institute. Each week a new chapter will be published, with links to each chapter.
Click or tap a link below to read or download each chapter. (PDFs open in new tab or window)
Housing Unaffordability: How We Got There and What to Do About It – Tobias Peter and Edward J. Pinto (new this week)
And the rest of the chapters.
