#housing-affordability

#housing-affordability

Stuck in limbo between social housing and cost rental schemes, people are looking at other options including emigration

Did you buy your house during the pandemic years? Congratulations, there's a good chance you have a dirt cheap mortgage rate. Perhaps below 3% about half of today's average for a 30-year fixed mortgage. For would-be buyers who missed that golden window, it can feel like they lost their opportunity to afford a house. But it turns out there is a way to turn back the housing market clock: It's called an assumable mortgage.

In recent years, residual seasonality, along with delayed price adjustments in response to pandemic-era shocks, have led to upside CPI surprises in January, he told USA Today. These were no longer on full display this time around, further reinforcing our view (that) tariff-induced price increases on the goods side are largely behind us. But we aren't changing the baseline forecast for monetary policy based on one inflation reading.

You're more likely to find California houses owned by investors in the state's more affordable communities. That's what my trusty spreadsheet found after reviewing a BatchData report from the third quarter of 2025 that calculates investor ownership of houses and townhomes nationwide. Investors in this study include everything from giant companies controlling thousands of houses to folks with a small collection of rentals to short-term rental operators to people with a second home. Condo ownership was not included.

Nearly 1.3 million mortgages including more than 500,000 originated in 2025 carry rates between 6.875% and 6.99%, the most sensitive group to recent rate declines. ICE cited data from the Mortgage Bankers Association, which found that refinance activity hit a 17-week high in the week ending Jan. 16, with refinances making up 62% of all applications. ICE estimates about two-thirds of these originations were rate-and-term refis.

When Lily Telloyan was in middle school, her household grew from two generations to four. Her grandparents and great-grandmother were getting older, so her parents moved the whole family under one roof in Lansing, Michigan. Nearly 20 years later, four generations of the family are living together again. After spending her college years in Indiana and then moving in with her husband, Alex, in Lansing, Lily started thinking about multigenerational living again.

"Affordability was part of it, but we were also looking forward to having a slower pace of life. I lived in South Florida my entire life - and it's not anything like what it used to be."

I'm now older than they were when they had me. I'm turning 27 and, though I don't want children, it's sometimes difficult not to measure my life against theirs. They got married at 21. When I was 21, I was finishing my bachelor's degree in the middle of a pandemic. At 25, rather than having a child, I was moving in with my girlfriend, and we became cat parents.

It is also, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of homebuilders' policy engagement, not an accurate representation of where things stand. That distinction matters. In an environment starved for credible, scalable solutions to America's housing affordability crisis, mischaracterizing what is in motion versus what is merely being floated or theorized risks obscuring the real problem: there is currently no grand, coordinated federal-homebuilder initiative underway despite months of investment in conversations, proposals, and strategic exploration.

A major, unheralded source of their success is the mainstream media's virtual blackout of their critics. By 'mainstream media,' I mean venues ranging from Mother Jones to The Wall Street Journal, as well as NPR. Thanks to its reach and stature, the liberal New York Times is the most influential pro-Yimby censor. When did you last read a serious challenge to Yimby orthodoxy in the Times, other than in the readers' comments? Never.

Utah lawmakers opened their 2026 legislative agenda with a proposal to revive a once-bedrock fixture of the American Dream of homeownership: starter homes. By streamlining permit approvals and rezoning for smaller property lots, Beehive State legislators will try to pry open a path to first-time homeownership. The bill would reduce minimum lot sizes to encourage the construction of starter homes and improve problematic statewide housing affordability.

When there aren't enough houses for everyone who wants to buy one, the price goes up as wealthier people bid up the cost of existing housing. Building more houses would drive down the prices of existing houses. That's good for people looking to enter the housing market, but many existing homeowners view their homes as investments, assets they believe should appreciate faster than inflation over time.

Cape Town tourism is a booming industry, and the Mother City needs foreign cash to operate as one of the planet's elite destinations. However, some locals are getting a little annoyed by the oversupply of digital nomads. European tourists are loving Cape Town, and why wouldn't they? When one single Euro gets you R19, an Uber to Boulders Beach to check out the penguins isn't all that pricy.

As Victoria DeLuce, senior vice president of home equity lending at Rate and a speaker at HousingWire's Housing Economic Summit, states in a recent interview, the Trump administration is paying attention to the affordability crisis and the industry is also ready to step in to address it. DeLuce will join John Toohig, head of whole loan trading at Raymond James, on stage at the Housing Economic Summit to discuss housing opportunities and risks through the lens of capital markets.

Earlier this month, the City of Louisville, Ky., announced a partnership with Govstream.ai, a technology company that utilizes AI to speed up the permitting process, reflecting a broader national push to utilize AI to accelerate permitting and approvals. Municipalities are increasingly under pressure from their constituents and the federal government to streamline residential development amid a national housing affordability crisis.

Ask most people what's wrong with housing affordability, and the answer comes quickly: rates are too high. It's an easy diagnosis, clean and intuitive, and it fits neatly into headlines and political talking points. But it's also incomplete, and increasingly, misleading. To understand why, it helps to start with something personal. The first home I bought was in 1989. It cost $259,000. My mortgage rate was 10 percent.

A significant number of Santa Clara County residents say they're considering leaving the Bay Area, a reflection of the persistent frustration over housing costs and affordability even as population data suggests the region is not experiencing a mass exodus. Joint Venture Silicon Valley's annual survey found 40% of respondents in Santa Clara County said they are likely to leave in the next few years, a decline from recent years when up to 57% of respondents were looking to move.

Sarah works full-time as a school teacher, but has been forced to take up a second job to pay the spiralling bills from the management company of her building. While she was aware of the annual service charge of around 1,400, she wasn't prepared for the bills for a reserve fund which have risen steeply as the management company aims to secure an extra 400,000 from residents for a roof replacement and other projects.

Regional Concentration: Most relocations now occur within the same region rather than across the country. Households are increasingly "trading one nearby city for another" to find better housing affordability without leaving their home state or region. Proximity to Home: Over 50% of moves stay within the same county, and approximately 80% remain within the same state. Long-distance interstate moves accounted for only about 19.3% of all relocations in 2024-2025.

Seniors main source of income is their Social Security. The five largest worries for seniors are housing, transportation, food, health care and taxes. Living in high-cost areas where school and infrastructure bonds are an open checkbook makes it impossible for seniors to keep their homes, let alone sell their homes in an unstable housing market. If families cannot afford housing, how can seniors with fixed incomes afford to thrive? They cannot.

Seniors main source of income is their Social Security. The five largest worries for seniors are housing, transportation, food, health care and taxes. Living in high-cost areas where school and infrastructure bonds are an open checkbook makes it impossible for seniors to keep their homes, let alone sell their homes in an unstable housing market. If families cannot afford housing, how can seniors with fixed incomes afford to thrive? They cannot.

Investors own roughly one in six of California's single-family residences. That's what my trusty spreadsheet found after reviewing a BatchData report that estimates investor ownership of houses and townhomes nationwide. Investors in this study include everything from giant companies controlling thousands of houses to folks with a small collection of rentals to short-term rental operators to people with a second home.

including seeing membership of the Congressional Real Estate Caucus, a bipartisan group working to tackle housing supply and affordability, grow to 100 members; having over 1000 grants, programs and initiatives funded to advance pro-housing policies and elect legislators focused on housing at the state and local level; defeating 11 harmful tax proposals over the past decade, which NAR said prevented $1.3 trillion in new taxes on real estate;

San Francisco is one of the cities the authors use as a case study, and their mathematical simulation suggests that is could take up to 100 years of increasing housing supply at levels that are unrealistic at best to see rents fall to the level where a worker without an advanced degree could afford. "The simulation makes clear it is unrealistic to think that we can deregulate and build our way out of the affordability crisis with market-rate housing, even with large positive supply shocks, in any reasonable time frame," the study states.