Low interest rates were and are truly insane and a great example of a policy that traps everyone into a negative sum prisoner's dilemma. As an average working professional in the Bay Area, the bank would have happily given me $1M at <3% interest, *but only if I spent that money on a house.* While on an individual level this is obviously an amazing deal that I should snatch up, across an entire community it just means that a 3 bedroom in mountain view becomes $2M and I can't afford anything nice even with a $1M budget.
High interest rates would hurt me in the short term but long term is what keeps housing within reach of working people.
Separate thread to defend the YIMBY worldview here - I'm convinced that, as you point to, the national numbers are massively skewed by the economic centers of the country. But as you acknowledge these are precisely the places where the YIMBYs have the strongest case. You can still find plenty of decent $80k houses out there in this country, those houses just aren't where people want to live and work. It's just specifically the "outlier regions" where housing is most desperately needed and most valuable that throws everything out of whack. But there aren't too many YIMBYs asking for more high density housing in podunk towns, right? To me that seems to suggests that the YIMBYs, to the extent that they advocate for greater density specifically in those places that could use it the most, are basically right even if the YIMBY model doesn't fully explain housing affordability crisis in the country as a whole.
My model for housing failure in this country is that it has used a sprawl-based strategy for building more housing stock for at least the past 50+ years rather than increasing density. This is why it's tricky for research to find correlations between construction rates in a specific city and its affordability, in a sprawl-based environment it doesn't matter if the city fucks up its ability to build as long as the suburbs are there to bleed off housing demand. While this strategy basically worked as long as the space was available to keep building outward, at a certain point commutes just become too long and the strategy breaks down. I often talk to working people in the Bay Area commuting in from ~2 hours out, and even those formerly cheap towns that far out are becoming too expensive for someone on a working class salary.
Sprawl was always a terrible approach, was only possible thanks to its many costly externalities being directly or indirectly subsidized by the government, and today it doesn't even work to as we've run out of wide open space around the key cities. (Also, suburbs suck but that's my coastal urbanite snobbery talking) So fundamentally it's time to start up-zoning and rediscovering urbanism.
Low interest rates were and are truly insane and a great example of a policy that traps everyone into a negative sum prisoner's dilemma. As an average working professional in the Bay Area, the bank would have happily given me $1M at <3% interest, *but only if I spent that money on a house.* While on an individual level this is obviously an amazing deal that I should snatch up, across an entire community it just means that a 3 bedroom in mountain view becomes $2M and I can't afford anything nice even with a $1M budget.
High interest rates would hurt me in the short term but long term is what keeps housing within reach of working people.
Separate thread to defend the YIMBY worldview here - I'm convinced that, as you point to, the national numbers are massively skewed by the economic centers of the country. But as you acknowledge these are precisely the places where the YIMBYs have the strongest case. You can still find plenty of decent $80k houses out there in this country, those houses just aren't where people want to live and work. It's just specifically the "outlier regions" where housing is most desperately needed and most valuable that throws everything out of whack. But there aren't too many YIMBYs asking for more high density housing in podunk towns, right? To me that seems to suggests that the YIMBYs, to the extent that they advocate for greater density specifically in those places that could use it the most, are basically right even if the YIMBY model doesn't fully explain housing affordability crisis in the country as a whole.
My model for housing failure in this country is that it has used a sprawl-based strategy for building more housing stock for at least the past 50+ years rather than increasing density. This is why it's tricky for research to find correlations between construction rates in a specific city and its affordability, in a sprawl-based environment it doesn't matter if the city fucks up its ability to build as long as the suburbs are there to bleed off housing demand. While this strategy basically worked as long as the space was available to keep building outward, at a certain point commutes just become too long and the strategy breaks down. I often talk to working people in the Bay Area commuting in from ~2 hours out, and even those formerly cheap towns that far out are becoming too expensive for someone on a working class salary.
Sprawl was always a terrible approach, was only possible thanks to its many costly externalities being directly or indirectly subsidized by the government, and today it doesn't even work to as we've run out of wide open space around the key cities. (Also, suburbs suck but that's my coastal urbanite snobbery talking) So fundamentally it's time to start up-zoning and rediscovering urbanism.