Epsiode 152: Luca Gattoni-Celli discusses the housing crisis
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What is the housing crisis and why is it happening now?
Hello
and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I'm Matt Teichman, and with us today is Luca Gattonicelli, founder of Yimby's of Northern Virginia and author of the Cornerstone Substack about housing, urbanism, and the world we build for each other. He is here to discuss the housing crisis and how to fix it. Luca Gattonicelli, welcome.
Thanks, Matt. Happy to be here. And thanks for inviting me here.
My pleasure. Okay, let's just start by talking about what the housing crisis is. What's the crisis we're
in? So I actually just wrote a piece in USA Today about this through another program in called Young Voices. It's kind of a fellowship program. In that op-ed, I talk about how the housing crisis is fundamentally a shortage of homes in America, especially in the places where people want to live and work and seek opportunity, educational and otherwise.
So, yeah, actually, that was my first question
was going to
be like, is the crisis evenly spread out all over America or are we mostly talking about close to cities?
You know what? Since the pandemic, it's both. So before the pandemic, it was concentrated in places like New York, San Francisco, Boston. And with the pandemic shaking up where people wanted to live and what they wanted out of their lives and their homes, it kind of metastasized largely from California across the western half of the United States, but also just... In general, you know, people move further out. They were expecting to work remotely indefinitely or most days of the week. And it is true. And I think too often overlooked that the housing crisis is worse in the places with the disproportionate jobs and opportunity in the country. But. There are really very few places left in the United States, if any, that are meaningfully desirable in any way and also affordable to live in.
You know, a place like Buffalo, and I have a friend who loves the Bills, so I'm not insulting Buffalo, but a place like Buffalo has a terrible housing crisis. in much the same way as where we are now, Arlington, Virginia. And Arlington has Amazon HQ2 right down the road. It has the Pentagon. It has a lot of different opportunities and interesting things happening here. And if you try to get an apartment in Buffalo, it's fundamentally the same experience. There's not enough options. All of them are a little bit or maybe a lot overpriced. And, you know, going back to the high level question, the housing affordability crisis is fundamentally driven by a lack of supply. And you can see that in the economic data.
And even in the, like, you know, a year or two before the subprime mortgage crisis really hit, home construction measured in total units fell off a cliff. And also units completed is still very much down. So like units in production has gone back up. It's actually at a historically high level right now, but units completed like homes actually being delivered onto the market is still way down and catching up. So, you know, there's going to be a lot of catching up to do and coinciding with this, you have millennials who are famously the largest generation, the largest demographic cohort in us history hitting our prime home buying years. So, So supply went down just as demand went up, and that equals a shortage and high prices.
Right. So one thing I was initially wondering about this is, yes, the proliferation of more and more remote work is making cities less where you have to live in order to have a good paying job. But... it's also kind of like spreading the problems that previously were specific to areas right around cities all over the place to remote areas where that wasn't a problem
before. Yeah, it's a good question. I'm not an expert on return to work or hybrid work policies, and I think it's probably a bad idea to try to generalize. One observation that does jump out for me is that although the primary reason that someone would want to live in a city or want to relocate historically would have been for a job, although, side note, increasingly it's just literally so they can afford to buy a home, right?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the housing crisis and why is it happening now?
0:09–6:28
2
How did the pandemic change where people want to live and affect housing demand?
6:28–17:33
3
Why do zoning regulations, permitting, and building codes inflate home prices?
17:33–23:25
4
What is the historical link between single‑family zoning and racism/classism?
23:25–31:11
5
How do NIMBY and YIMBY movements differ in their approach to new housing?
31:11–35:34
6
What role do permitting delays and building‑code requirements play in the crisis?
35:34–39:09
7
How does weak property‑rights enforcement worsen housing affordability?
39:09–42:46
8
What solutions does Luca propose to break the cycle of unaffordable housing?
42:46–43:08
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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Episode 151: Witold Więcek discusses statistics and academic research