How to strengthen housing safety nets
U.S. homeowners and renters need stronger safety nets than existing social insurance programs provide to prevent housing insecurity during economic downturns, according to a new paper based on a study by Wharton real estate professor Benjamin Keys and co-authors at the University of Notre Dame and New York University.
In their paper “Bolstering the Housing Safety Net: The Promise of Automatic Stabilizers,” the authors propose policy reforms that could help people stay in their homes during times of economic distress and support affordable housing construction and rehabilitation. Those reforms would complement and fill gaps in existing social insurance programs.
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Record-Shattering Decline in Housing Inventory
New data reveals how far the U.S. housing market has stayed from anything resembling normal. March 3, 2021, 5am PST | James Brasuell | Much of the housing market has gone missing.
That s the provocative lede of a story by Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui that quantifies the state of the national for-sale housing market. Homes that usually would have been up for sale are staying off the market about half as many homes are available for sale right now as last winter, according to the article.
The story is the same in markets historically defined by much different dynamics so inventory is down in Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, and Cleveland, for example. The decline in inventory is record shattering, according to the article, and it follows years of erosion in the national housing inventory. This picture is a product of the pandemic, but also of the years leading up to it, according to Badger and Bui.
New York Times News Service February 26, 2021 9:03 am
Much of the housing market has gone missing. On suburban streets and in many urban neighborhoods, across large and midsize metro areas, many homes that would have typically come up for sale over the past year never did. Even in cities with a pandemic glut of empty apartments and falling rents, it has become incredibly hard to buy a home.
Today, if you’re looking for one, you’re likely to see only about half as many homes for sale as were available last winter, according to data from Altos Research, a firm that tracks the market nationwide. That’s a record-shattering decline in inventory, following years of steady erosion.
Much of the housing market has gone missing. On suburban streets and in many urban neighborhoods, across large and midsize metro areas, many homes that would have typically come up for sale over the past year never did. Even in cities with a pandemic glut of empty apartments and falling rents, it has become incredibly hard to buy a home.
Today, if you’re looking for one, you’re likely to see only about half as many homes for sale as were available last winter, according to data from Altos Research, a firm that tracks the market nationwide. That’s a record-shattering decline in inventory, following years of steady erosion.