Quarterly homeownership rates for US: 1995-2018

Housing Costs vs Fertility, YIMBY Righteousness and more

in /by

A few short smaller items this week:

  • I’ve been saying this for a long time: Higher Rent, Fewer Babies? Housing Costs and Fertility Decline. Lots of good graphs in this one. As economies grow and people get wealthier, they want more space per person, and if they can’t afford it, they shrink their family size to compensate. Nobody wants to raise a family in a 2 bedroom apartment anymore. Hat tip to Howard.
  • Atlantic: Why YIMBY Righteousness Backfires (no paywall link) – Treating suburbanites as hateful snobs will not make them more welcoming of newcomers. Concluding summary excerpt:

“Tinkering around with local fiscal incentives, forging alliances with regional business elites, and helping some property-rich homeowners get richer won’t usher in an egalitarian new millennium of integrated neighborhoods from coast to coast, but it will help YIMBYs build a more persuasive case that housing growth is in the enlightened self-interest of suburbanites who might otherwise be concerned about rising tax burdens and sinking home values. That’s not a bad start.”

  • Bill King: Ridership For The Uptown BRT Is 5% Of What Metro Projected. What an epic failure by METRO, even taking into account the pandemic. Yet they’re just going to pretend it didn’t happen and plow ahead with the $1.5B Universities BRT line reducing Richmond to one lane each direction?!?
  • A massive rail-fail in Honolulu: white elephant $5 billion light rail line opens with ridership at TWO percent of capacity! Why does government keep wasting mountains of money on these projects?!

This piece first appeared at Houston Strategies.


Tory Gattis is a Founding Senior Fellow with the Urban Reform Institute and co-authored the original study with noted urbanist Joel Kotkin and others, creating a city philosophy around upward social mobility for all citizens as an alternative to the popular smart growth, new urbanism, and creative class movements. He is also an editor of the Houston Strategies blog.

Graph: Census Bureau