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Explaining the Tennessee special election — 36 Comments

1. I keep talking about the “unrealistic expectations of the young”: this would be these twenty-somethings. They move to cities, and think they are going to get an apartment, living alone, and a job that will allow them to have enough free time to hang at the local coffee shop, and hike on weekends, with a high enough salary to shop at Whole Foods and live in those snazzy apartment.

   I feel old when I say what I am about to: Back in my day….

   When I first moved to a Major Metropolitan Area, a young twenty-something with dreams in my brain, I lived in a crappy little studio nowhere near the Bright Lights. I got a crappy job that paid for the rent and little else. It was FANTASTIC for a “twenty-something.” And I have GREAT memories of it. And I really lived my studio apartment, off in the hinterlands. My friends who did live in the Big City shared rabbit warrens of apartments. Which they expected to.

   I had two friends who shared a room in a one of the few rooming houses still left… Because at that point, rooming/boarding house were dwindling few. (At least ones that “nice” people lived in.) Back in my mother’s day… When young people — especially young women — moved to the Big City, they lived in rooming/boarding houses. Think of “Judy Barton” in the film, “Vertigo.” Think of what had once been the Barbizon Hotel for Women in NY. Think of the YW and YMCAs. I know those are gone now… You can still see it in some of the realistice TV shows of the 60’s and early 70’s. (Though Anne Marie’s parents paid her rent. There is no way “That Girl” afforded that place on her own.)

   Anyhow, when we did things, we did very inexpensive things, or we did things inexpensively — there were plays that were small, ULTRA low budget affairs. When we did go out to eat, we shared food. We did a lot of hiking because it was just a ride to the park. The Major Metropolitan City Park usually had something interesting going on. There was a lot to do that didn’t cost much money.

   Anyhow, the twenty-somethings now seem to expect to live like the characters on TV do. (I am addicted to the Dick Wolf Chicago shows, and those Chicago police officers and fire fighters live in TOTALLY UNREALISTICALLY sweet condos and houses. I know the real ones mostly earn more than me, but even so, I doubt the real ones can afford places like on that show.)

   And the twenty-somethings today get seem to get angry about not making big bucks straight out of college. So voting for SOCIALISM will fix those ills! (They clearly haven’t read anything about the Soviet Union…)

   Are the twenty-somethings THAT stupid? I find it hard to believe they are, but they sure seem to be. The only twenty-somethings I actually KNOW are friends’ grandkids. And my friends and their children all grew up pretty grounded in rural, small town American. And those twenty-somethings aren’t that stupid.

2. There is a lot of truth here!

3. I’ve seen (I think from Glenn Reynolds) that although this district was Trump +22 last year it has slightly different lines now and this version was really only Trump +10 so this result may not be as far off as many are saying.

4. Lee Also:

   I was thinking along similar lines. A relative of mine, who has lived in NYC most of his life and is wealthy now, started out for many years of his married life (and this was after getting an MBA and a good job) in an apartment that couldn’t have been more than about 350 square feet. They were there for many years. The kitchen in particular was memorable in that there was no need to move while there – one could reach everything while standing still.

   It seemed fine to us at the time. Actually, it seemed great. I would stay there sometimes on the fold-out couch in the living room, which when made into a bed basically took up nearly the entire room.

5. Expectations for what constitutes an acceptable standard of living are indeed higher, but that does not explain all the discontent. There are things that are indeed harder for today’s young people to accomplish than they were for older folks at the same age, and to some extent older folks are responsible for pulling the ladders up after them. A lot of that is just changing demographics, of course: a society with lots of young people is very different economically from one dominated by older people.

   Housing is the obvious example, but the educational system is worse than it was, and higher education and health care are far more expensive. The abuse of the H1B system means you are competing with everyone in the world for some kinds of white collar work, and illegal immigration does the same thing for some kinds of blue collar work. There are many more issues. Young people did not create these headwinds and never had patience for older people’s stories of walking to school uphill both ways in the snow even when they were actually true.

   Some things old people did when young, like work part-time to pay for college, are practically impossible now and have been for almost 20 years. No young person my age when I bought my house could buy my house at anything like the CPI-adjusted price I paid for it 12 years ago, and they can’t get my 3% mortgage.

6. If you look at the map of the election, the district was entirely red except for the county with Nashville which went over 70% for Behn! Yes the candidate who said she “hated” Nashville. neo is right, it’s the “angry, entitled 20-somethings who know nothing about socialism”.

7. Niketas Choniates:

   I think it depends what era you’re comparing to. When my ex got a doctorate in the mid-1970s, for example (Carter was president), grants had dried up and jobs in his field were very scarce. I couldn’t have afforded a nice apartment in a big city like NY – as I already said in the post, even my relative on a good salary couldn’t afford one (it was some years earlier – I think the late 60s). It took him at least 10 years of work to be able to buy a very small place.

   When I was out of college and grad school, in the mid-1970s, mortgages were very high. See this:

   The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, more commonly known as Freddie Mac, began tracking average annual rates for mortgages starting in 1971. In the first few years of recording, rates started out between 7% and 8%, but by 1974, they climbed up to 9.19%. We finished out the decade by finally entering double digits with 1979’s annual average of 11.2%.

   As we headed into the 80s, it’s important to note that the country was in the middle of a recession, largely caused by the oil crises of 1973 and 1979. The second oil shock caused skyrocketing inflation. The cost of goods and services rose, so fittingly, mortgage rates did too. To jumpstart a flailing economy, the Federal Reserve increased short-term interest rates. Thanks to their efforts, more people were saving money, but that meant it was also more expensive to buy a home than at any point in recent time.

   The annual rate reached 13.74% in 1980, and in 1981, the 16.63% rate was and still is Freddie Mac’s largest recorded figure. Luckily, we’ve generally been on a downward trend ever since that fateful year. The rest of the 80s were a steep hike down from the decade’s peak. We rounded out the 80s just under the last recorded rate of the 70s at a hefty 10.32%.

   College was cheaper, but the percs were very few. I went to a school that didn’t even have a Student Union building, and then another that had a dilapidated one. Meals were awful. Dorms were awful. Sports facilities likewise. And these were elite universities.

   I only knew one person in high school who had a car – a worn-out jalopy. I knew very few people in college with one, either. I could go on and on, but really it wasn’t a hardship because we didn’t expect any of these things. Nowadays, where I live, many 20-somethings have fancy homes I couldn’t afford.

   I think you are correct, however, that 20-somethings are uninterested in the sob stories of previous generations. On the contrary, however, I found my mother’s stories of the Great Depression extremely interesting.

8. neo — my parents were from NY ((Queens and Brooklyn) and when they got married in the late 1950’s, they lived in a studio for several years — even after my sister was born. They moved into a one bedroom place when they moved to Detroit, which was much cheaper than NY.

   Both had lived with their parents until they got married.

9. The country does have a housing shortage by many measures, and many young people are unhappy as a result. Their prescription (more rent control) may be misguided, but the Republicans, starting with Trump, don’t offer anything at all. Tariffs only drive up the cost of building materials (as well as food), and deporting itinerant laborers doesn’t help either. (And a ceasefire in Ukraine, if it happens, will do nothing.) So on this as so many issues, it would be a lot more productive for neo to suggest solutions rather than whining about the awfulness of the people she dislikes.

10. I asked Grok to compare wages to living costs by decade. Yes there are a heap of assumptions, but here’s the breakdown.

    Inflation adjusted to 2025, and Grok used the costs of the The “Big 4” Rule of Thumb (Housing + Healthcare + College + Childcare) as % of Median Income

    [Decade][Combined Annual Cost of Big 4 (2025 $)] [% of Median Household Income] [Verdict]
    [1980s] [~$42,000 – $48,000] [60–65 %] [Affordable for most dual-income families]
    [1990s] [~$48,000 – $58,000] [65–70 %] [Still workable]
    [2000s] [~$65,000 – $85,000] [80–95 %] [First decade many families needed two full incomes + debt]
    [2010s] [~$90,000 – $115,000] [100–125 %] [“Middle-class squeeze” era]
    [2020s] [~$120,000 – $145,000] [125–150 %+] [Worst affordability in recorded U.S. history]

    What Changed the Most?
    Category Increase 1980 – 2025 (real dollars) Multiple of 1980 Cost
    Median house price +130 % – +180 % 2.2× – 2.5×
    Rent (2-bed) +115 % – +150 % 2.2× – 2.5×
    College tuition (public) +300 % – +350 % 4× – 4.5×
    Family health ins. +400 % – +450 % 5× – 5.5×
    Childcare (infant, center) +250 % – +300 % 3.5× – 4×
    Real median wage +45 % – +55 % 1.5× – 1.6×

    Bottom Line – The Decades Ranked by Affordability
    1980s – Golden era for middle-class families
    1990s – Last decade where one income could still buy a house in most cities
    2000s – Bubble masked the coming storm
    2010s – The squeeze became obvious
    2020s – Historically the least affordable decade ever recorded (2020–2025 worse than Great Depression-adjusted equivalents for the Big 4 costs)

11. “it would be a lot more productive for neo to suggest solutions [to the high cost of housing]”

    The solution is simple. Stop making it so expensive to build new housing. Particularly in big cities. Loads of red tape, union requirements, set-asides for low income, on and on. This has been well-known for decades. It’s just not what politicians and “community organizers” want to hear, since there’s no graft involved.

12. Tariffs contribute very little to increased construction costs.

    While tariffs grab headlines, they account for only a small portion (5–12%) of the overall rise in new home construction costs in 2025. The bigger culprits are structural issues like permitting delays, escalating land prices, and chronic labor shortages, which have compounded over years and are harder to fix with policy tweaks. Based on the latest 2025 data from sources like the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), Brookings Institution, and Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC), total construction costs for a typical single-family home are up ~4–7% year-over-year (YoY), with materials inflation at ~5–7%, labor at ~4–5%, and soft costs (e.g., permitting) surging 8–10%. Tariffs contribute ~$4,000–$11,000 per home, but the other factors add up to 2–3x more.

    In addition, in some states new energy efficient requirements plus new building codes have also added significant costs.

13. When we got married, we really had just our clothes and wedding gifts. I was headed to the Navy, Wife stayed and got Grad Degree. She was a Teaching Assistant, and got my $100 allotment, leaving with maybe $25 to $30. I didn’t need much, being aboard ship.
    We bought our first house on the GI Bill, $14,900 in 1973. Wife was a teacher then, making I think 7k a yr. I was making a whole lot less. We got by, and prospered. Hard work.

14. When we got married, we really had just our clothes and wedding gifts. I was headed to the Navy, Wife stayed and got Grad Degree. She was a Teaching Assistant, and got my $100 allotment, leaving with maybe $25 to $30. I didn’t need much, being aboard ship.
    We bought our first house on the GI Bill, $14,900. Wife was a teacher then, making I think 7k a yr. I was making a whole lot less. We got by, and prospered. Hard work.

15. Around my part of CO, just to put a spade in the ground to start building a house cost well over 100k. Fees for Water Tap, Electric hookups, gas hookup, sewer hookup. If there is a Metro District, then another several hundred to $500 month for fees.

16. @neo:I think it depends what era you’re comparing to.

    It really doesn’t.

    Health care has been doubling every 20 – 25 years since 1970. Young people don’t need to use much health care, but they do need to pay premiums for their health insurance, and that’s been rising much much faster than inflation along with those costs, since healthy people’s premiums pay for sick people’s care.

    People don’t go just to college to enjoy four years of perks, they expect to come out with a degree of some kind. The cost barrier to entry is not driven by the perks, it’s driven by the salaries of people who work at universities, more of whom nowadays have little to do with instruction. The cost of college has also been doubling every 20 years since at least 1970. A public in-state university education is 25 times more expensive than 1970, tuition alone. This is not the cost of going to college, since you also need to be housed and fed.

    Good luck buying “a worn-out jalopy”. Have you priced them? Prices of used cars have tripled since 1980. True we are getting much better cars, but the low end of this market that you had when you were young has disappeared. Those worn-out jalopies are long gone. The “worn out jalopy” of 1960 might have been 20-30 years old: the equivalent today would have been made from 1995 – 2005 when even low-end cars had a lot more safety features and bells and whistles and there was starting to be enough electronics in them that working on them at home was not practical. In my neighborhood there’s two families with well-cared for Volkswagen Beetles* from the 1970s but that’s not enough for all the young people, and there’s not much else from that era to be found.

    How about a crappy studio apartment in the neighborhood you lived in when you were young, have you checked? When I was in college 20 years ago I rented a crappy one-bedroom for $400 a month. I just checked now, one bedroom apartments in that area go for $800 – $1500.

    *One is a Super Beetle really…

17. Brian E:

    I don’t know what Grok is smoking.

    It is not worse now than the Depression. From Google AI:

    Great Depression

    – Poverty rate: An estimated 78% of the population was living in poverty in 1932.
    – Unemployment: Peaked at 25.6% in May 1933.
    – Income: For those still employed, wage income fell by 42.5% between 1929 and 1933.
    – Social programs: Virtually no social programs existed to help the poor, unemployed, or elderly.

    Today

    – Poverty rate: The official poverty rate in the U.S. was 14.5% in 2013, with other measures showing similar or slightly lower rates.
    – Unemployment: The unemployment rate peaked at 14.7% in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the highest since the Great Depression, but still much lower than the Depression-era peak.
    – Social programs: Numerous government programs and policies exist to protect vulnerable populations, such as social security and unemployment benefits, which help prevent mass starvation and extreme deprivation.
    – Income and economy: Personal disposable income per capita is over six times higher than it was in 1930.

    And see the chart here about the percentage of Americans owning homes. What’s more, even when I was a kid, homes were generally small and shared bedrooms for children were standard even in middle class families. See this for a chart about that.

    College tuition has definitely risen more than incomes have. But guess what? Far fewer people use to go to college in the first place. See this chart.

18. Niketas:

    See my response to Brian E above this.

    And if cars are so expensive compared to when I was in college, why did almost no one at my fairly elite school own one, whereas most kids do own them nowadays?

    From Google AI on car prices: “The average new car price in 1965, which was around \(\$2,650\), would cost approximately \(\$25,240\) in 2020 or \(\$41,088\) in 2025 when adjusted for inflation.”

    Also, you can still get very cheap cars that are a mess – like those “old jalopies” were – which were actually more unsafe. (Actually, looking at these cheap cars, they look to be in far better shape than the ones teenagers owned in my youth, and $2K is equivalent to $200 in 1965.)

    I don’t know where you were getting housing 20 years ago for $400. But that was highly unusual back then, even for a “crappy one-bedroom.” I’ve lived in many places in the last 50+ years, both urban and suburban and rural, and nowhere was there anything like a one-bedroom for $400 anywhere – except much much earlier in time than 20 years ago. I believe you when you say you rented for that, but I think it would have been unusually low and perhaps in a somewhat depressed area that may have later improved.

    In NYC, looking it up just now, it says that in 1960 (the sort of year I’m comparing things to) the average rent for a 1-BR apartment was $359. It says that is the equivalent of $3995 today. And funny thing, looking it up, it also says the average price of a 1-BR apartment in NY today is $4026 to $4300. Not so very different.

19. What’s significant, to me, is that Democrats have no ideas which will reduce the cost of living. Their only idea is forced redistribution of wealth. Apparently young people have been persuaded they can get something for nothing. It won’t work, and if Democrats take over the national government again, they will make things worse, just as they have in the past.

    This is not to ignore the failings of Republicans in Congress. It’s just that Dems are worse.

20. Grok didn’t include unemployed people in it’s analysis. So you’re right about the decade of the 30’s.

    Also it used some wrong data in the 30’s since the government data didn’t become a thing, such as BLS data until the late 40’s.

    It redid the averages for the 80’s through 2020’s and it slightly affected the percentages (adding unemployment), but in general the 2020’s have created a dynamic where wage growth didn’t keep up with price inflation.

    If we were to include government direct payments through covid, it would probably influence wages, but in general, shutting down an economy was probably the greatest mistake that could have been made.

21. Party leadership is a big part of election success.
    The GOP in California has been inept for at least 20 years. Democrats have a Super Majority in the Legislature and all Constitutional offices.

22. The Internet says the average, single family home in the U.S. now is 2,200 sq. ft.
    I don’t think I set foot in a home that large until I was 20 years old.

    A fair amount of boys in my High School had cars (I did not), but most all of us were also working at least 20 hours a week and those cars were death traps, by today’s standards. Old, constantly breaking down. And us teen-agers were capable of keeping them repaired and running.

23. @neo:I don’t know where you were getting housing 20 years ago for $400. But that was highly unusual back then, even for a “crappy one-bedroom….”I think it would have been unusually low and perhaps in a somewhat depressed area that may have later improved.

    Nope, none of those things. It was a very small town with a very large college, it’s not any different economically than it ever has been (I do visit it from time to time) and that rent certainly was not unusual there in the late 90s and early 2000s as only about 25% of the population lived there full time. But since then it’s doubled. I do live near a big city now. The value of houses like mine is doubled since I bought ten years ago even after adjusting for inflation.

    And if cars are so expensive compared to when I was in college, why did almost no one at my fairly elite school own one, whereas most kids do own them nowadays?

    Well, this is your memory of your specific experience, like my rent in college was. There’s a lot of variation in experience, of course.

    When I was at a big state university in a small town, my memory is that most students didn’t have cars their first year but many, not most, had them by their second or third especially if they had moved off campus, but I could not tell you the percentage. You didn’t need a car to get around town, but you did in order to leave town, and the vast majority of students were not from the area. (Few small towns of that size have that degree of public transportation available.)

    I don’t have reliable stats on what percentage of people by age own a car–there are stats on what percentage are buying a new car, or registering a car, or hold a drivers’ license, etc. But this is what I did find:

    According to Consumer Affairs the cost of owning a car–not buying one, but all the costs of car ownership–have risen 50% since 2003. According to a very old Pew Research article, in 2001 72% of households headed by people younger than 25 owned a vehicle and by 2013 this was only 66%. I don’t know what it is now but without some statistics I would not be prepared to accept that it has increased given that the costs of ownership have increased so much over that time.

    And while it’s great that you found some used cars for under $10,000, a) there’s not enough of them for most young people to do that and b) the cost of owning a car is more than the price of buying the car. The cost of auto insurance is on average 100% higher than it was in 2015, in real terms that’s a 47% increase.

    At any rate, the costs of housing, health care, higher education and car ownership have all increased at rates in excess of inflation, health care and higher education much more so. And it’s not 25 year olds who are getting priced out of these things, which wasn’t surprising when you were young and I was young, but now people in their 30s. The things that worked for young people when you were young were beginning to close off for my generation and are now less available for young people starting out today.

    Real median household income has increased by about 30% since 1985 according to FRED. Meanwhile, the cost of medical care has increased 500% over the same time period, in real dollars 70%.

    These costs add up.

    It’s a bit like how a high minimum wage is better if you have a job but makes it less likely to have a job: yes the cars are better, the houses are bigger, but they are objectively less affordable and available for people starting out nowadays. This is not their imagination and a lot of it is due to changes in the rules that older people made.

24. @Rufus T. Firefly:A fair amount of boys in my High School had cars (I did not), but most all of us were also working at least 20 hours a week and those cars were death traps, by today’s standards. Old, constantly breaking down. And us teen-agers were capable of keeping them repaired and running.

    Yes, as a teenager, presumably living at home using their dad’s garage and borrowing his tools. Not as someone in their 30s, sharing an apartment with strangers, who needs their car to get to work, has nowhere to work on it, no tools to work on it with, and too much of it is software, which is increasingly common. I remember having to fix my car sometimes when I was a young adult in an apartment, and if my car broke down I was out of work. I was lucky in my extended family and couldn’t have done it without them, and by my 30s I made enough money I could by a reliable car, though not a new one.

    Incidentally, 20 hour-a-week jobs for teenagers are one of those things that are also less available. The combination of higher minimum wage, tighter child labor laws, and illegal immigration have seen to that.

25. Niketas:

    The average price of a 1 BR apartment in the US in 2005 was about $800. In 2025 dollars, that is $1327 in today’s dollars.

    Rent rises have been very uneven in different parts of the country. I was surprised to find that, adjusted for inflation, renting in NYC was just about as expensive as it is now, according to the figures I found.

    About the cars – I am much older than you. I was comparing today to car ownership at a campus in the 1960s, not now. Plus, different schools had different rates of car ownership. If a person went to school in a very small town – such as some of the all-boys colleges back when I was young – and social life with girls was entirely dependent on having a car, a lot more people had cars. But the cars that they had tended to be in poor shape and most likely would not even be allowed on the road today.

26. @neo:The average price of a 1 BR apartment in the US in 2005 was about $800.

    That’s interesting, but not very applicable to my situation. Have you got the standard deviation handy? I didn’t live in the average 1 BR US apartment in 2005. I lived in a specific crappy apartment building mostly inhabited by college students living off campus, 20 yards from a bus stop, in a small town with a large state university.

    Of course over the years I lived in more than one off-campus crappy apartment. Most people found $400 too steep and split a $600 2BR or a $750 3BR.

27. I should also probably acknowledge that in 2005 I did not pay the US average price for my used car (my uncle traded two bottles of whiskey for it), I did not make the US average income and I was not the US average height or weight, and I did not buy gas at the US average price. All those things were different from the US average for me, as they were for hundreds of millions of others.

    One thing I find frustrating about the kinds of statistics you can find online is that they rarely have the standard deviation or any other metrics besides the mean and median.

    That said, it doesn’t really matter to my point what my rent actually was, as what the percentage increase has been. Since 2005 nationally rent has doubled, which I noted and reported as my own experience. In real terms, this was a 20% increase.

    20% more for rent, 15% more for owning a car, 70% more for health care, against a 30% increase in real median wage. The traditional hallmarks of adulthood are demonstratively and quantitatively less attainable for more young people today than they were 20 or 30 years ago. Food and electronics are for the most part cheaper, which is good. The cars and houses and health care are better–if you can get them.

28. NIketas:

    I added to my comment above yours, on some related topics.

    However, of course I don’t have the figures one would need to really make the comparison, plus it varies a great deal by location and type and size and condition of apartment.

    I am extremely familiar with crappy apartment buildings, however. In the early to mid 1970s I lived in one of the crappiest apartment you can imagine in a Boston suburb. It was a one-bedroom that leaked through the walls, and was infested with mice. Ugh! The rent was $110 a month, and although it was a bargain it really was in terrible condition.

29. @neo:But the cars that they had tended to be in poor shape and most likely would not even be allowed on the road today.

    Right, and here you’re saying the same thing I did in different words. The rules have been changed to close this option off. The car may have been old and unsafe but you could afford one. Talking about how much better the unaffordable cars of today are than the affordable ones of the past is a bit qu’ils mangent de la brioche.

    Likewise the houses of today are bigger and newer, and fewer people can afford them. The health care of today is better, but fewer people can afford it. And the cheaper options that used to exist don’t anymore.

30. @neo: I realized we were cross-posting, and I appreciate the Yorkshiremen, which is probably the best note to end this on. We’ve come a long ways from the hole with a tarp over the corner of it.

31. …Democrats have a Super Majority in the Legislature and all Constitutional offices…

    Indeed, California is there’s to destroy.
    (And they’ve been doing a pretty decent job of it…)

    Next stop: the entire country.

32. I would suggest that there are many more single / divorced solid middle class people living alone in nice houses than there were in previous decades. I see this in my handyman business. So man and wife divorce and they both have a house when previous generations they statistically would have been living together in one house.

33. Oops, should be “…theirs to destroy…”

    (Not to worry: They’ll do their very bestest no matter how it’s spelled…)

34. Regarding the “housing shortage”

    The biggest issues behind the “housing problem” are:

    1. Authorities Having Jurisdiction, and various government and quasi-government entities, and utilities raise the bar to (and costs) to building homes such that it has gotten to the point that only large developers (and the very wealthy) can afford to build house. (About half the costs of a modest home involve connecting to utilities.)

    2. Businesses buying up homes to use as rentals, either as long term or short term rentals. They outbid individuals almost every time. It makes it harder and harder to buy a house — as well as drives up the costs of homes. And individuals do it as well — those that can buy up houses to rent out on AirBnB and VRBO, etc. whenever they can. (If it is REMOTELY worthwhile for them to do so. I looked at a house near-ish a reservoir that ONLY attracts locals. It was in a town that had nothing but a post office and. The house was turned into an AirBnB. BTW, this is in a different market than I discuss below. I gave up on that market.)

    3. Unrealistic expectations of the younger people. “I already discussed this at length, bot one thing to add: Houses were smaller, which helped them be more affordable. My parents first house (which they didn’t get until they were in their thirties) was about 1200 sf. My husband I currently live in a house built in the 1980’s that is 1400 sf. New houses now rarely come this small. It has gotten to the point that small houses are not worth it for developers to build. See Number 1 above. And Number 4 below.

    4. Pervasive construction litigation. Developers, contractors, subcontractors, all KNOW that there WILL be a lawsuit. As such they do two things: Spend more and more on insurance (which drives up the costs of projects), and only build projects that will have a nice sized profit margin — which precludes building genuinely affordable housing.

    The few ways to address these issues are:

    1. If elected officials REALLY wanted “affordable housing” they would make it affordable to build the housing in the first place. Reduce fees for permitting, reduce the costs of feasibility studies, work with utilities to reduce connection fess and costs, work on tort reform to reduce construction litigation, and work on the cost of insurance (which may get reduced as result of tort reform already.)

    2. Establish a tax structure (either income or property or both) that no longer makes it desirable to remove housing from the market by converting it to rentals. Remove tax breaks on mortgages for second home. (Do people who can afford a second really need the tax break?)

    I do not see legislators doing much to help anything — they have vested interests in making it worse. As legislators, they see the skyrocketing fees go into the coffers that pay them their increasing salaries; as individuals, they buy up the houses for rentals and get the tax breaks. Or when they leave office, they go to work at some private equity firm that buys up vast swaths of real estate….

    (I have grown to despise AirBnB after three years of looking for a house in a specific market that was affordable about six months before we were planning to move. Then came COVID, and an influx of out-of-staters. They bought MULTIPLE houses — to avoid capital gains taxes on selling their previous homes. Huge swaths of this market are a ghost town many times of the year because they are now densely AirBnB properties. It wasn’t really a vacation destination prior, but now it is. For a few months out the year. The former vacation destinations are now priced out of reach for the people that are needed to provide services. It is a mess.)

35. In the 80’s in my building time I saw that the average of UT was about 200sf I couldn’t believe it then, but I certainly can now!

36. A good article on the “vibecession” below, with more analysis than neo typically produces. (In fairness, she might say that’s not the point of this blog.) I note that conservatives were happy with the vibecession during the Biden administration, and only complain about the wickedness and self-indulgence of the young now.
    https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/vibecession-much-more-than-you-wanted

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