Quote:
Originally Posted by TakeFive
Dude, you're way too young to use 1972 for comparison. Check this out: - 1975 - 16,543 housing units
- 1980 - 30,129 housing units
- 1985 - 32,824 housing units
- 1990 - 11,897 housing units
- 1995 - 38,622 housing units
- 2000 - 54,596 housing units
- 2005 - 45,891 housing units
- 2010 - 11,591 housing units
- 2015 - 31,871 housing units
Source
You should be embarrassed for trying to deceive us.
Even with a population of 5.7 million people, 56,524 housing units in 2021 is a respectable amount.
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Agent Orange - I was using the census data, it's the only source with a reliable methodology and 40+ years of data. I would lean towards industry data never being reliable and based on feels and marketing, whereas the census data is at least based on a proven methodology of manually calling permitting offices and getting the total number of permits issued for new housing. Unfortunately over the last few years they have removed a lot of the available raw data and tried to make things more user-friendly, but the data points change from resource to resource which makes it harder to find apples-to-apples comparisons. One big problem with their new system is the removal of a lot of the historical metro-level data before 1995, but we can certainly look at the state data and get a good idea of the trends, because Denver has historically made up 50-70% of the construction totals.
TakeFive - 1972 IS a good point to compare data for housing and housing prices because housing prices were increasing but a lower rates through the late 70s
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS Recent analysis has focused at the 1976 change in HUD policy regarding mobile homes with a lot of cost pain in the lower end of the housing market, but either way the fact that there was SOOOO much housing built in 1972 should make it clear that we're still not building enough. With a higher population we should be building more, even if the increase is the same or lower, because older stock needs to be replenished.
And just looking at raw numbers is fine, but really what you want to look at is the number of housing units built compared to population increase and the number of housing units built per total population. I took all these numbers from the historical state data PDF and the population according to the census
Looking at the numbers this way, you can see that we're not building housing at anything close to the pace we used to. In the 70s we built a house for every 2 new people and even more in the 80s, but ever since it has been closer to one for every 3 new people. Considering average family size has also decreased as well makes this even worse. And for total population we're now building a house for every 20 persons, whereas in the 70s it was closer to one for every 8. Even in raw total numbers we built almost as much housing in the 1970s as we did in the 2000s! And that was with 2 million LESS people. The numbers for the last couple of years is promising, but any and all sociological data from 2020-2022 will also always have giant asterisks.
Either way, 50 years ago we were building housing at a much more robust level than we are now, and houses were affordable and attainable by a lot larger chunk of the population.
And the point here is (once again) to do a deeper dive into statistics presented and try to understand what the numbers are telling us. Just looking at the raw number of starts for a single year tells you nothing! But looking at trends and statistics that allow for more relative comparison is really helpful. Not that it will make a single bit of difference to convince everyone out there who has already determined that the biggest issues with our cities are density-driven crime and that housing prices are determined by the prices of new apartments, but