A Housing Shortage on the Horizon?
If you take a step back from the current doom and gloom of foreclosures and declining sales and focus on the low construction levels over the past few years, some economists say a housing shortage might be in the offing. A 2009 report by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor William Wheaton says that despite the glut of existing homes, with current depressed levels of construction, there might be “excess demand” for newly constructed homes. We’re only adding about 600,000 new housing units a year now, and the long-term growth in new households is 1.3 million to 1.4 million per year, says Ross DeVol, executive director of economic research at the Milken Institute.
The household formation rate has fallen off somewhat because of the recession. But that decline is misleading because college graduates have chosen to live at home with their parents while they find their financial footing, and people defer getting married for a year or two. But long term, that household growth says that “if we build substantially less than that amount, which we’re doing now, in four, five or six years, if we don’t ramp up housing starts, we could see a shortage,” DeVol says. One risk is that so many home builders leave the field during the current downturn that there could be “capacity constraints” in the long term as the U.S. population continues to grow, says John Vogel, professor of real estate at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
There won’t be constraints in overbuilt places like Las Vegas, Phoenix, Riverside, Calif., or Miami and Ft. Lauderdale. But if the pace of home construction doesn’t pick up, “we are going to begin to see some tightness in some areas of the country that didn’t have the boom and bust occur,” DeVol says. The regions most likely to be undersupplied by mid-2012 are those where supply and demand are now in balance, says Celia Chen, senior director of housing economics at Moody’s. Chen includes states like Washington, Oregon, New Mexico and Utah in this group.
from SmartMoney (7/26/10); Lisa Scherzer
