CityLab Daily: The U.S. Doubled Down on its Housing Crisis
Also today: Paris will keep its Covid-era cafe terraces, and four ways transit can lure back commuters.
Single-family homes go up in Irvine, California. A hot market only exacerbating existing housing shortages in 2020.
Photographer: Bing Guan/Bloomberg
Despite a homebuilding boom in the U.S., the nation’s housing shortage has only worsened — from 2.5 million units in 2018 to 3.8 million in 2020. A new Harvard University report on the state of housing affordability in America paints a troubling portrait of how the pandemic exacerbated underlying inequities and widened longstanding racial and generational gaps in homebuying.
Affordable housing and starter homes remain in limited supply as home prices soared in many of 100 largest metro areas, Patrick Sisson reports. That helped create wealth for existing homeowners while further excluding less-affluent buyers and and first-time buyers from the market. And at the same time that millions of households — many of whom are low-income earners and people of color — are struggling to make housing payments due to job loss and financial stress related to Covid-19, rent is rising again. Today on CityLab: The U.S. Doubled Down on its Housing Problems During the Pandemic