Which regulations would you suggest caused my parents' rural South Carolina home to gain 50% in value over the last ten years? There's plenty of land, all of it zoned for agriculture or residential.
I was claiming that a 50% from 2009-2019 is a modest, explainable increase (and probably from a more reasonable base), that is probably not the result of regulation.
For contrast, Seattle's median home price was already expensive at ~$400K in 2009, dropped to ~$350K in 2012, and has doubled to ~$700K since then. In the short term, it's more due to the crazy hiring growth by tech companies here. But even though Seattle is building much more than San Francisco, the majority of the land is zoned for single family homes, so there's no way for building to catch up.
The rural home in SC sounds much more healthy and like what people want - steady increases in price, a few points above inflation.
Since I was curious about the numbers, I went back and looked it up. Since June of 2009 (ie, the same time period) median housing price in Seattle has gone from $365,000 to $655,000. Numerically that's huge, but it's actually only about 7% faster growth than my parents' property-- a growth rate that most people here, including yourself, seem to view as unexceptional. This in a city that by all accounts is exploding in population and in the midst of a dire housing crunch which demands deregulation.
Don't get me wrong-- 7% is a lot of money. But it's an effect size that could easily be explained by simple profiteering, FOMO, construction cost increases, or any number of other local factors that have little to do with the regulatory environment. Paradoxically, it could even be caused by new construction, since new homes and condos typically cost more than the homes they're replacing.
None of this is to say that I'm 100% certain regulation doesn't play a role in Seattle's housing woes. But the difference in how these two situations are perceived should, I think, represent a warning about conventional wisdom in both places.
It's the 7%/yr for decades that really gets you. There are articles about San Francisco from the 80s about how it will become impossibly expensive and drive out longtime residents if they don't increase housing production. Multiply that shortage in construction by 40 years and you end up hundreds of thousands of units short.
Seattle is actually doing fairly well, considering how fast people are moving here. Washington had more people move there than Texas (at 4x the population) and a higher % of the population than Florida. There's no way to build housing fast enough to accommodate that without tons of greenfield, but we'll see how the next 10 years go.
Just to clarify: that isn't 7% per year. That's 7% per decade.
To make it clearer what I'm saying, my parents bought their house in South Carolina in June of 2009 for about $130,000. Last month it went at just north of $195,000. If you had done exactly the same thing in Seattle and were subject to the median growth in housing prices that home would have sold last month for $205,000.
It's not chump change, but it isn't a night-and-day difference either. What I think it underscores is the difference between the actual problem we face (homes here are expensive) and the symptom we expect to see from theory (demand has skyrocketed -> home prices are skyrocketing). Because we don't see the symptom predicted by theory, I have to question whether the remedy the theory calls for is appropriate.
1/ inflation over ten years is roughly 19%. So 50% is not "slightly ahead" by any means.
2/ Residential construction cost per square foot seems like a stronger candidate, with a roughly 35% jump nationwide over that time period (remembering that this does not account for inflation). Accounting for inflation that's essentially half the price increase.
3/ Neither of these factors, if they fully explained the value increase, would support the claim that regulation is to blame.
>3/ Neither of these factors, if they fully explained the value increase, would support the claim that regulation is to blame.
The point is that the 50% increase is the baseline appreciation or in other words the increase due to everything but regulation. Things like natural inflation, construction costs, etc. A rate above that is likely due to supply being constrained by regulation (or at least that's what the GP argues).
As it turns out, extrapolating the experiences of a geographically small and economically unique metro area to the entire US is not a sound start. Regulation may very well be to blame in San Francisco, but South Carolina is about as far from San Francisco as you can get-- in more ways than miles. Your problems are just not the same as their problems.
