Just Building More Won’t Solve All Our Housing Woes

The housing issue is complex. So is the homeless issue. Both of these things are more complex than most people believe. I will leave the homelessness issue for a future post. But it should be said that while we absolutely 100% no question need to build A LOT of housing, barring a hell of a lot more regulation about the type of building, all the building isn’t going to solve these problems. That’s because we allow these developers to work within a capitalist system of profits that is also buffered by how capitalism has developed buy-in among individual people due to their investment in their own homes. In short, developers are going to build high end, small apartments because the profits are greater. This leaves a lot of housing unacceptable or unaffordable for large swaths of the population, such as people with children.

All this might make you think millennials have moved to cities permanently. But as they get older, the number of urban children has continued to drop. Lower birth rates are part of the story, but economists say the strong correlations with population shifts strongly suggest that “out-migration” of cities explains a big portion of the loss. In other words, millennials now in their mid-30s and 40s with young kids have started decamping for suburbs to raise their families.

Some older adults nod smugly, seeing these suburban migration patterns as proof that there was never any meaningful difference between their preferences and that of millennials at all. Millennials did not start the trend of moving to cities in one’s 20s: Plenty of baby boomers and Gen X moved to urban areas in young adulthood, and then back to the suburbs to raise a family once they coupled up and needed more space.

And certainly some millennial families really do crave the kind of lifestyles found in suburbs: the bigger houses and lawns, the schools, and safety.

But for many other young people looking to start families, the choice to stay in the city or move to the suburbs doesn’t feel much like a choice at all. There simply aren’t many family-oriented housing options in cities, let alone ones young couples could afford.

For years now the shortage of housing, and the dearth of new housing built to accommodate a growing population, has been getting more attention. But only more recently have people started to discuss that, even in places that have loosened their zoning rules and authorized new housing construction, the overwhelming majority of new units are studios or one- and two-bedroom apartments, built with singles, childless couples, and adult roommates in mind.

Advocates for more housing say they’re aware that cities are losing families with kids, even in areas that are adding new units to the market — and they argue that it’s one reason why reforming zoning is only the first step toward building cities that house more people.

“Yes, there’s been a ‘build baby build’ attitude because we’re so far behind, but there are big asterisks and caveats to that,” said Matt Lewis, a spokesperson for California YIMBY, a pro-housing group. “If you just do zoning, you will end up with a whole lot of one- and two-bedrooms.”

Now, I grant you that this is also conditioned by people’s preferences that children never share bedrooms anymore, which is definitely a newer phenomenon. But still, the larger point is that these housing issues are complicated and we need complex responses to them.