I mean, population _is_ pretty good evidence of growth. 20 years ago Houston MSA was 15% larger than SF MSA and today it's 50% larger. What other evidence of "building for growth" can you demand?
You can expand sprawl via single family homes and still not build nearly enough housing to meet population growth requirements.
You can have a lot more population and still build little. It just forces people to live in shared housing with roommates at very expensive rents.
I'm not arguing that you're wrong about Houston - maybe they did build enough. I'm just saying that population growth itself doesn't tell you too much.
It's the change in population vs. the change in new housing with a separate line for each.
It's not super easy to understand because the population change is in thousands of people and housing is just in individual units, but I think it's clear from the graph (if I'm reading it correctly) that Houston is not building enough to meet demand. When you mouse over you can see the amount of new people and compare it to the amount of new housing. There's a lot more new people than new housing.
[Edit]: I found an even cooler dataset which I added to the above graph, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B72x - it doesn't go back as far, but it shows available housing inventory which is a more relevant metric (and it's going down). I tried adding median price too, but it made the graph hard to read.
Basically, in a city not meeting demand I'd expect to see the following:
- Prices increasing faster than inflation
- Population increasing faster than new housing
- Availability of housing going down (supply constraints which cause prices to go up)
How bad the situation is depends on the above variables, but generally if you don't build enough to meet demand things get worse. That is true in a worst-in-the-world way in the bay area, but also appears to be true most places due to bad incentives - people who already bought in benefit (or at least think they benefit) from restricting supply.
Wouldn't you have to have some sort of adjustment for singles vs families over time? and for average number of people in a household? Number of people in a household has a cultural factor and age factor also (young single people often share households, more young people => higher density).
I have no idea impactful those numbers would be, just pointing out that there are lots of confounding factors to consider.
Yeah totally, I think those are all things to consider.
I'd also guess a factor of young single people sharing households is due to limited supply and high cost. If it was affordable to have your own apartment, more people would do so. The roommate situation is partly (though not entirely) a symptom of failure to build.
You can see this when you compare regions, where I grew up (western new york) housing is super cheap even though there's a lot less economic opportunity. Nobody I know from high school that stayed there lives with roommates. Many have bought their own (nice, new) house for ~150k. That house in the bay area would be 3 million easily.
So while I agree there are confounding factors at play, the housing supply issue is so extreme I think the others are largely rounding errors.
