Reason’s Christian Britschgi outlines just how bad the 2010s were for housing construction.
A lot of things happened in the past 10 years. A boom in housing construction was not one of them. The 2010s will go down as a decade of historically low housing starts, resulting in higher home prices and rents for some and longer commutes for others.
Last week, Freddie Mae Deputy Chief Economist Len Keifer tweeted out a graph comparing new housing starts over the past six decades. The results are startling.
In the past 10 years, construction started for 9.8 million new housing units in the U.S. That compares to 15.4 million units in the last decade and 13.7 million in the decade before that. (Keifer notes that those numbers don’t include manufactured housing, a traditional source of low-income housing. It increased a little, but not enough to change the pattern.)
The national numbers match what we’ve seen in some of the highest-cost housing markets in the country.
Read more here.
