"Housing Situation": Problem in 1919 and in 2019

"Build! Build! Build!" (October 1st, 1919)

An interesting chart came across the twitter the other day. It shows that a little before the Great Recession - but also clearly a precursor of it - in 2005 housing starts fell off the table and we haven't caught up.

New housing still hasn't caught up to 2005 levels
(Housing was Undersupplied
during the Great Housing Bubble)

On FB in discussion of the City's proposal to create single-lot or other micro-Urban Renewal Zones as a way to use tax increment funding to spur more affordable housing, some people remarked that there were already a lot of large multi-family and single-family developments in the works, and we should wait to see if this new funding concept was actually necessary.

Housing deficit of "207 acres...for multi-family housing"
(Housing Needs Analysis)

The Housing Needs Analysis suggested we needed another 200 acres for multi-family housing and that we had a surplus of land zoned for single-family housing. There's been a flurry of approvals and aren't we nearly caught up, they seemed to ask.

Statewide deficit of 10,000 homes per year since 2000
(Housing Underproduction in Oregon)

This may not be concrete enough. It may be that we need a number, a count, on the shortage of homes, a count of new homes, and a ratio of new homes to population here. Acres might be too abstract.*

And, anyway, what matters is not rezoning, or new developments approved. What matters is houses built. The Fairview project is large and has many approvals, but still in absolute numbers there are few homes there.

And even if it were all built out, it might be equivalent to only one year's deficit.

We have many years of deficit to catch up! A modest boom for two or three years might seem like a lot, but given the magnitude of the historical deficit, it's nowhere near enough.

Housing slowing down (City Manager's Update)

And if things seem to be slowing again, this is not something to be complacent about.

Housing policy is not a central thing here, and you may be able to refine or correct details here. But in Our Salem and in debates over development, there's too much "do you want an apartment complex next door to you?!?!?!" and not enough, "here's how many new homes, at a broad range of prices, we need to build annually if we want homes for everybody who wants one."

The streetcar-era grid in 1917

And because concentrating on single-family housing on greenfields near the urban growth boundary at the edges of the city just digs in on mid-century autoism and all its ills, including more greenhouse gas pollution, we have give stronger consideration to infill and redevelopment on the streetcar grid and close-in neighborhoods. It's just not going to be possible to "preserve neighborhood character" unchanged.

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* The Housing Needs Analysis does say the 207 acres is equivalent to 2,897 homes - but in light of the national chart and the state-level claim in "Housing Underproduction," 2,897 just seems to small. So there are two observations here: We need to talk more about housing starts and the historical deficits in counts of homes, not in acres or other analogues. Then, with those counts, we might start to look more critically at our housing affordability problems and question whether 2,897 more homes in multi-family buildings gets us where we want to be.