The Housing Shortage: How Bad Is It?

Washington Post - America faces a serious housing shortage, one that Moody’s estimates would take more than 2 million new homes to resolve.

But over at Goldman Sachs, analysts put the number at 3 million. Zillow’s estimate tops 4 million, while Brookings projects 5 million, and McKinsey says 8 million. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans insist the shortfall is closer to 20 million.

Then there are the economists who contend there’s no shortage at all.

The disparate projections reflect the challenge of quantifying the nation’s housing needs, a puzzle that rests on assumptions about how much a home should cost, how many people it should hold, and how big a footprint it should have.

With housing affordability a crucial political issue and increasingly out of reach for many Americans, determining the nation’s needs is not merely an academic exercise but is key to devising policies that will solve the problem.

The U.S. has 146 million homes, Census Bureau data show. Of those, 8.1 million are “doubled up” households, meaning people are sharing space with non-relatives. Zillow’s housing estimate assumes most of those people would prefer having their own place. There also are 3.4 million vacant homes available to rent or buy, the real estate website says. So Zillow economists subtracted the number of available homes from the number of doubled-up households and concluded that the nation needs 4.7 million more homes. MORE