I don't understand what you mean. Nothing prevents people from moving to Madison. And let's not have any spurious claims that there are no good jobs in Madison: the unemployment rate is significantly lower in WI than in NY.
And they have below-expected dwellings per 1,000 residents. The "Total number of dwellings per thousand inhabitants, 2022 and 2011" suggests there are potential supply problems.
As someone with spare bedrooms, this itself is a problem of undersupply. If you can't be sure of being able to trade up when you need to (e.g. after starting a family) because house prices are up 100% in 10 years, then you're going to want to buy a house for all possible future needs, rather than current needs.
Add to that, things that might be desirable for other reasons, like garden space, rooms for use as offices, large kitchens, etc. all tend to scale with bedroom count too.
Also trading up comes with stamp duty, which is a damper on moving house unless you absolutely have to. Not only is your new house bigger and more expensive then anything you've ever bought before with that extra bedroom, plus the large expenses and hassle of moving in general, it's likely another £10k or more in stamp duty unless your new 3-bed is somewhere pretty cheap in the country. You don't get the first time buyer discount either, as you already have a house.
It's basically a tax that punishes labour mobility and not oversizing property.
Of course, you have to pay to heat and maintain that bigger house and pay higher council tax on it, so your saved stamp duty will probably be used after a few years, so in an ultra-rational way, it comes out in the wash, but it certainly doesn't feel like it at the time.
House ownership is higher among boomers, who are not going to have children anyway. Maybe for some people concern for future prices is a good reason, but certainly it is not for everyone. If there’s spare capacity enough for 20% more people and population growth forecast by 2050 is just one third of that, you cannot really talk about undersupply, when there’s enough accommodation to cover even future demand.
This assumes a level of fungibility that's just not there. Apart from the discussions elsewhere in this thread about why spare bedrooms might not be suitable to rent, even for those that are, splitting a family of 4 across 4 spare bedrooms in 4 different properties is suboptimal at best and legally child neglect at worst.
Equally, houses in Cornwall are of little use when the jobs are in London.
If you're talking about the study that everyone was talking about last week, that definition of "spare bedroom" includes a family of four with three bedrooms who gives each child their own bedroom when they could just have them sleep in the same room.
Just to conceptualize this, it's like every 5 bedroom house having 1 unused bedroom, perhaps being used as an office. Of course, most houses don't have 5 bedrooms, so in reality this is an extra bedroom for every 2 houses. Again, possibly being well used for another purpose. That doesn't seem like a lot of underutilization to me.
Guest bedroom is underutilized space unless you are a hotel or full-time Airbnb. How often people are staying there? A few months a year in total, if children spend the whole summer with grandparents and visit on rare holidays?
Is that a problem? It's a guest bedroom for every two houses. Something approaching the vast majority of all economic output goes toward things which are extraneous when measured against the historical median standard of living. But people like nice things. And a guest bedroom is a nice thing that some people like.
My home is listed as having more bedrooms than people.
They are not dead spaces, and they wouldn't somehow become more useful if I knocked a wall or two through to reduce the room count or reclassified them.
Are you purposefully being obtuse? The point is the difference between bedrooms, bedrooms used as offices, etc, and spare bedrooms. You can have more bedrooms than people and fully utilize the rooms not being used as bedrooms; the statistic is 20% of rooms are being underutilized ie spare bedrooms that don’t get used.
I'm not deliberately being obtuse - I simply don't believe that many people have literally empty rooms that they don't use.
I don't know anyone that has an empty room in their house, or one that no-one enters for weeks at a time, etc. Maybe the odd country estate is like that.
To a communist, the concept of having a guest room, office, storage room etc might feel like "underutilization".
If we apply that more generally, then the park outside my house is underutilized because the maximum capacity are not sunbathing in it at all times. I think that's a pretty silly use of language.
I absolutely know people with rooms that are literally unused. They aren’t empty, but it’s not a valuable use of space just because it means you don’t have to get rid of your last three couches and a desk that’s nice but not nice enough to use.
Who decides what "valuable use of space" is? Next we'll be taxing people whose living rooms are too big because they're not "valuable use of space" and could be split into another bedroom.
In life, some people look up, some people look down.
I'll never understand how someone could think that completely normal things like a house, garden, car, etc are somehow "too much". But they do. It's baffling.
I can understand, though not agree, with being angry with someone who owns say, tens of thousands of houses, millions of acres of land, and leaves it all empty.
But the idea that a house is underutilized if it doesn't have as many people as could possibly live in it? All I can say is, Hong Kong exists, Manhattan exists, feel free, I'm not in for that.
> I don't know anyone that has an empty room in their house, or one that no-one enters for weeks at a time, etc.
I don't have any statistics to hand but, based on experience, there are a lot of houses in the UK like this. Particularly among middle class couples in their 60s, whose children have left home. In fact, my parents have two spare bedrooms that are only used a handful of times each year.
Labeling formal logic as „communism“ won’t help (it‘s also kinda funny when people with certain cultural background use this word as synonym for some biblical evil, rather than for what it is). Guest room is not a necessity in most cases, it is convenience for which alternatives do exist and may even be more cost efficient/practical. Since it is not, downsizing your home in retirement to release space for bigger family will be more efficient than building everyone a house with a spare bedroom. It does not have to be expropriation of the property for this to happen, just a policy with good incentives (less maintenance effort, less taxes to pay, better investment opportunities etc).
> Since it is not, downsizing your home in retirement to release space for bigger family will be more efficient than building everyone a house with a spare bedroom.
This is true. The problem tends to be that people become settled in an area, and would prefer to downsize there so they don't need to uproot themselves. This is often very difficult, as there may not be availability in that area for a suitable smaller property.
The owner is living there and happy with the space or they would move. That is not underutilization. The solution to housing shortage is to build more housing, not to create “bedroom police” who go around and tell you’re not allowed to have your house because they will decide for you how much space you need.
Lol bedroom police. Yes, because that's exactly what we were discussing.
Or, you could, you know, make it more affordable to build smaller homes with fewer bedrooms so people actually have options when they become empty nesters.
The difference showing that Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, and the US had either the same, or more dwellings per thousand inhabitants in 2011 than 2022?
I don’t know if I’m just misunderstanding your point, or misreading the material, but that is also not an example of underutilization.
My point is that the relatively static proportion of people to dwellings in those countries over that period suggests that a supply shortage is not sufficient to explain the accommodation crisis.
What I am suggesting is that incentives to invest in property have led to an increase in the number of properties that are not being used as a primary residence (i.e. are underutilised) and that that is the most significant factor causing the shortage of available homes.
I see now through a US & REIT centric bias, I think.
Given a market like NZ’s size, growth/prices, and attractiveness I can see demand like speculation, STRs, and 2nd homes possibly affecting utilization more than supply.
Given US markets that are larger, cheaper, and less attractive where investment properties fueled on cheap credit were rented out or to a much smaller degree flipped, it’s truly, significantly more difficult to imagine vs simple lack of supply (especially given historically low US rental & homeowner vacancy rates).
I think you’d want to look at household size - 4 five person households need fewer houses than 10 two person households, even though the population is the same.
That's a good point and I have done that in the past (for NZ). Household size has remained steady over roughly the same period (decade up to 2018 where census data is available). This doesn't account for a possible significant change in household size distribution of course (e.g. the possibility of many more elderly living alone while young people increasingly live in shared housing).
This is literally an article about how infill/density became easier in Houston, removing the need to expand residential zoning outwards to flood plains and refinery backyards to continue growing.
Actually, it was an article about how they could increase housing density near existing refineries in the urban area and in already inhabited flood plains.
There are 6 refineries that I found inside the highway 8 beltway in about 30 seconds. All of them have housing developments within 1000m. Two have houses within a few hundred meters.
Sounds like it could be almost livable if it weren't for the derechos and hurricanes.
Meanwhile, Austin and other parts of the triangle are building like crazy in low-lying areas and near floodplains with massive tract home developments.
You could live for the food alone, but between the humidity and Galveston for a beach it’s probably still debatable.
Flooding is an issue but it isn’t existential for Austin/SA or DFW, and with the huge reforms in Austin recently a type of opt out style like the article is now there too that can compensate for sprawl.
Worried about Corpus and RGV in the future though.
There isn’t a single European colonizer who didn’t replace native populations in their settler colonies, “other colonizers” do not exist.
That the Spanish Empire established large extractive colonies in 2 densely populated Indias (Aztec, Inca empires) [0] does not erase the complete and near total genocide the Spanish perpetrated in the less populated Caribbean, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina etc to replace the natives with their settlers.
The intractable population density of large extractive colonies does not excuse Empire, and does not provide moral superiority.
I know of districts using some degree of social promotion, but I’ve never heard of one promoting on performance but using standardized tests alone instead of class grades or clearing a certain bar for both grades and standardized test as the performance criteria.
Was that the case in the 1960s/1970s because that was when the author was in elementary through high school? I graduated high school in 1995 and what you are describing was not the case at my school nor any other school that I knew of at that time.
Please note this is utility scale solar, not random homeowners adding panels to their roofs. These are ~~fossil fuel~~ energy companies investing in and operating these installations.
Yes we looked at panels for our home but I believe community (off site) solar is the way to go. You essentially buy panels as part of a large farm and the energy they produce is subtracted from your utility bill.
No maintenance, no worry about roof angles or which way your house faces. Usually the investment is financed but you still come out ahead each month.
Of course need to have a local program and participating power company.
That's what is so frustrating about people who oppose renewables - it's super simple capitalism at work. Once prices came down enough, why would you want to have to PAY for the fuel your power plant uses?! Install it and let it go!
This is also what's killed coal so effectively - why would any company want to provide all of those good paying jobs when they just don't have to! (this pertains to NG and other fuels, too - they are just so much less human intensive to extract once the infrastructure is established)
Residential solar in the US is largely a greenwashing, financialization to exploit homeowners. 99.9% of the time, there is no battery or inverter in these systems and they lack 2/3-way ATCs and instead fail completely without grid power "for safety".
Commercial-scale solar is an entirely different beast, and Texas is crushing it post-snowpocalypse, without much thanks to ERCOT. [0]
Panera was never going to be exempt, their dough is trucked in every day.
They hire from the same pool of labor as fast food franchises anyways. Actual, proper bakeries are a bit different and more incestuous IME, I think it’s the odd working hours.
We are still subject to space time.