America has a housing problem? Who knew? — Pete Golis column

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Surprise! The two political parties seem to have discovered that the country has a housing shortage. Both Republicans and Democrats have surfaced ideas that seek to build more houses and apartments.

Whether national politicians will move the needle on housing will be tested over time, but their newfound concern speaks to a new awareness of how housing prices push up the cost of living. It turns out you can’t talk about inflation without talking about a primary driver, which is the high cost of housing.

Here’s the latest from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University: “ … millions of potential homebuyers have been priced out of the market by high home prices and interest rates, while the number of renters with cost burdens has hit an all-time high.”

More than 12 million households are spending more than half their income on housing.

In Sonoma County and most of California, of course, this counts as old news. The run-up in rents and home prices continues to leave salaries and wages in the rearview mirror. As a national discussion begins, all we can say is … it’s about time.

To help new homebuyers, the Republican platform promises to “reduce mortgage rates by slashing Inflation, open limited portions of Federal lands to allow for new home construction, promote homeownership through Tax Incentives and support for first-time buyers, and cut unnecessary regulations that raise housing costs.”

The Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris, has sketched out a plan to build an additional 3 million houses and apartments over the next four years. The Harris plan would subsidize homebuilders and homebuyers and restrict single-family home purchases by large investors.

Harris also wants to address one often-overlooked cause of increased housing costs, which is: We’re building bigger houses, and then acting surprised when housing costs more. She would offer tax incentives to builders of so-called starter homes.

Into the late 1970s, the Wall Street Journal reported, America was annually producing 400,000 homes of 1,400 square-feet or less. By 2020, the number of smaller homes — starter homes — declined to 65,000, and the median size of a new house had swelled to 2,300 square feet.

Any national strategy will struggle to overcome the variations in housing markets. The median sale price of a home in Sonoma County — $812,000, according to realtor.com — is almost twice the national median price, which means the $25,000 assistance payments Harris wants to give first-time homebuyers will go a lot further in, say, Missouri, where the median home price is only a third of what it is in Sonoma County.

Republican or Democrat, saying and doing are not the same thing, of course. Stay tuned to see if a divided Congress can be persuaded to agree to tax incentives or new money for housing.

GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump says deporting undocumented immigrants also would free-up housing (while economists warn that the idea ignores the impact on construction crews comprised primarily of foreign-born workers).

Trump also wants to “protect the suburbs” by opposing proposals to relax zoning rules in single-family neighborhoods. It’s a position that makes for strange bedfellows because communities where anti-housing sentiments are strongest tend to exist in blue states.

“We are more likely to believe that ‘housing is a human right’ than conservatives in Florida or Texas, but less likely to actually get people housed,” wrote columnist Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. “We accept a yawning gulf between our values and our outcomes.”

With mixed results, Democrats in the California Legislature have sought to limit local governments’ ability to reject new housing, and now Democrats on the national level suggest they want to do the same.

Whether this will make friends remains in doubt. When a $20 billion Bay Area housing bond issue was pulled from the ballot this month, poor polling results were blamed. Plenty of people fear the changes associated with new home construction.

What we know for sure is that many longtime Sonoma County residents couldn’t afford the price of admission today. Consider the median asking prices that confront would-be homebuyers — $937,000 countywide, $1.8 million in Healdsburg, $1.4 million in Sonoma and Sebastopol, $980,000 in Petaluma, $850,000 in Santa Rosa, $829,000 in Windsor, $766,000 in Cloverdale, $675,000 in Rohnert Park and Cotati.

The New York Times sought to identify reasons that home construction declined during the 2008 recession and never came back. Before 2008, Americans were building 2 million homes a year. Now the average is 1.1 million homes a year, far below the pace needed to keep pace with population growth.

Among the culprits: High interest rates and other barriers to new loans, local regulation, builders’ trepidation about local regulatory barriers, the greater profits available from building larger homes, a decline in the number of buildable lots.

In Sonoma County, the housing shortage — exacerbated by the tens of thousands of homes and apartments destroyed by wildfires — has made it difficult to recruit replacements for an aging cohort of baby boomers. Whether you seek a doctor or a plumber or civil servant, you know this story. Once upon a time, young people were drawn to Sonoma County by affordable housing. Not anymore.

As voters, we remain both skeptical and hopeful. In Sonoma County and California, too, we’ve already heard politicians make promises far removed from the realities of the housing market.

Still, we hope the national discussion will increase the awareness that people need housing they can afford. We wait to learn if all this talk translates into help for people in need.

Pete Golis is a columnist for The Press Democrat. Email him at golispd@gmail.com.

You can send letters to the editor to letters@pressdemocrat.com.

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