#housing-affordability

#housing-affordability

Affordability started recovering slightly since 2023, when it reached historical lows. For home ownership, we observed improved affordability, while for renters we saw stabilization over the last two years. Even with these improvements, we cannot overlook how much housing affordability has eroded in recent years, especially in Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax, clearly demonstrating that Canada's housing affordability crisis is no longer limited to Toronto and Vancouver.

According to the outlet SlashGear, the neighborhood encompasses five 1,000-square-foot houses just north of Sacramento. Each domicile is produced by a hulking concrete printer worth about $1.5 million, which took about 24 days to spit out the first house. In the future, 4Dify expects the whole process to take about 10 days, but that isn't what's astonishing about the Yuba County neighborhood - it's the price tag.

By looking at the 20192025 job cycle alongside the current qualification bar for new homes, we can see exactly why the market feels frozen despite high employment in other sectors. In short: The economy is currently hemorrhaging the only people who can afford the product you sell. To understand the job data, we first have to look at the Gate a buyer must pass. As of early 2026, the median price for a new home is approximately $392,300.

The ruthless, haughty Cersei Lannister was forced to walk naked down a majestic staircase in the finale of the fifth season of Game of Thrones. That scene, which was filmed in 2014, established Dubrovnik a city of just 41,500 inhabitants that is known as the gem of the Adriatic Sea into an eternal vacation destination. Today, traversing its Jesuit Stairs and surrounding streets in mid-August can be a desperate endeavor. Crowds fill every nook, and prices are exorbitant.

With mortgage rates nearing 6%, an additional 5.5 million households that could not qualify for a mortgage one year ago would qualify at today's lower rates, Yun said in a statement. Most newly qualifying households do not act immediately, but based on past experience, about 10% could enter the marketpotentially adding roughly 550,000 new homebuyers this year compared with last year.

Housing affordability is a top concern for many Americans, and both chambers of Congress have been advancing legislation to help prospective homeowners-though it may take years for those benefits to actually materialize. This past week, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill called the Housing for the 21st Century Act, which aims to increase the supply of affordable housing.

Although affordability is improving across the US, Zillow senior economist Kara Ng told Business Insider that buyers may not feel it in already expensive markets, like Seattle, for example. "The typical household buying a typical home in Seattle is going to spend 47% of their income on monthly payments," Ng told Business Insider. "We expect them to spend from 47% down to 45% over the next year. So that's an improvement in affordability, but it's a very different starting place."

Stuck in limbo between social housing and cost rental schemes, people are looking at other options including emigration

Did you buy your house during the pandemic years? Congratulations, there's a good chance you have a dirt cheap mortgage rate. Perhaps below 3% about half of today's average for a 30-year fixed mortgage. For would-be buyers who missed that golden window, it can feel like they lost their opportunity to afford a house. But it turns out there is a way to turn back the housing market clock: It's called an assumable mortgage.

In recent years, residual seasonality, along with delayed price adjustments in response to pandemic-era shocks, have led to upside CPI surprises in January, he told USA Today. These were no longer on full display this time around, further reinforcing our view (that) tariff-induced price increases on the goods side are largely behind us. But we aren't changing the baseline forecast for monetary policy based on one inflation reading.

The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco is not a radical leftist institution, and its research economists are not Nimbys, or socialists, or anything other than classically trained academics who look at data. So it's interesting that two Federal Reserve researchers have just published a paper that adds to the clear evidence that "constraints" on the supply of private-market housing have little to do with the lack of affordability in cities like San Francisco.

You're more likely to find California houses owned by investors in the state's more affordable communities. That's what my trusty spreadsheet found after reviewing a BatchData report from the third quarter of 2025 that calculates investor ownership of houses and townhomes nationwide. Investors in this study include everything from giant companies controlling thousands of houses to folks with a small collection of rentals to short-term rental operators to people with a second home. Condo ownership was not included.

Nearly 1.3 million mortgages including more than 500,000 originated in 2025 carry rates between 6.875% and 6.99%, the most sensitive group to recent rate declines. ICE cited data from the Mortgage Bankers Association, which found that refinance activity hit a 17-week high in the week ending Jan. 16, with refinances making up 62% of all applications. ICE estimates about two-thirds of these originations were rate-and-term refis.

When Lily Telloyan was in middle school, her household grew from two generations to four. Her grandparents and great-grandmother were getting older, so her parents moved the whole family under one roof in Lansing, Michigan. Nearly 20 years later, four generations of the family are living together again. After spending her college years in Indiana and then moving in with her husband, Alex, in Lansing, Lily started thinking about multigenerational living again.

"Affordability was part of it, but we were also looking forward to having a slower pace of life. I lived in South Florida my entire life - and it's not anything like what it used to be."

I'm now older than they were when they had me. I'm turning 27 and, though I don't want children, it's sometimes difficult not to measure my life against theirs. They got married at 21. When I was 21, I was finishing my bachelor's degree in the middle of a pandemic. At 25, rather than having a child, I was moving in with my girlfriend, and we became cat parents.

A growing share of New Yorkers are struggling to afford life in one of the most expensive cities in the world as the costs of basic necessities like housing, groceries, and childcare soar. For decades, the city has failed to build enough new homes, creating a severe shortage that's driven up rents and home prices. Family-sized apartments with two or three bedrooms are especially hard to come by.

It is also, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of homebuilders' policy engagement, not an accurate representation of where things stand. That distinction matters. In an environment starved for credible, scalable solutions to America's housing affordability crisis, mischaracterizing what is in motion versus what is merely being floated or theorized risks obscuring the real problem: there is currently no grand, coordinated federal-homebuilder initiative underway despite months of investment in conversations, proposals, and strategic exploration.

A major, unheralded source of their success is the mainstream media's virtual blackout of their critics. By 'mainstream media,' I mean venues ranging from Mother Jones to The Wall Street Journal, as well as NPR. Thanks to its reach and stature, the liberal New York Times is the most influential pro-Yimby censor. When did you last read a serious challenge to Yimby orthodoxy in the Times, other than in the readers' comments? Never.

SUFFERN, N.Y. Rep. Mike Lawler, a Republican in a competitive New York congressional district, ran into a disruptive and sometimes hostile crowd at a town hall on Sunday night. With the GOP holding onto a slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrats hope to flip the seat in this year's midterm races. The Cook Political Report considers the election in New York's 17th Congressional District, which covers several suburban New York counties in the Hudson River Valley, a toss-up race.

Utah lawmakers opened their 2026 legislative agenda with a proposal to revive a once-bedrock fixture of the American Dream of homeownership: starter homes. By streamlining permit approvals and rezoning for smaller property lots, Beehive State legislators will try to pry open a path to first-time homeownership. The bill would reduce minimum lot sizes to encourage the construction of starter homes and improve problematic statewide housing affordability.

When there aren't enough houses for everyone who wants to buy one, the price goes up as wealthier people bid up the cost of existing housing. Building more houses would drive down the prices of existing houses. That's good for people looking to enter the housing market, but many existing homeowners view their homes as investments, assets they believe should appreciate faster than inflation over time.

Cape Town tourism is a booming industry, and the Mother City needs foreign cash to operate as one of the planet's elite destinations. However, some locals are getting a little annoyed by the oversupply of digital nomads. European tourists are loving Cape Town, and why wouldn't they? When one single Euro gets you R19, an Uber to Boulders Beach to check out the penguins isn't all that pricy.

As Victoria DeLuce, senior vice president of home equity lending at Rate and a speaker at HousingWire's Housing Economic Summit, states in a recent interview, the Trump administration is paying attention to the affordability crisis and the industry is also ready to step in to address it. DeLuce will join John Toohig, head of whole loan trading at Raymond James, on stage at the Housing Economic Summit to discuss housing opportunities and risks through the lens of capital markets.

Earlier this month, the City of Louisville, Ky., announced a partnership with Govstream.ai, a technology company that utilizes AI to speed up the permitting process, reflecting a broader national push to utilize AI to accelerate permitting and approvals. Municipalities are increasingly under pressure from their constituents and the federal government to streamline residential development amid a national housing affordability crisis.

Ask most people what's wrong with housing affordability, and the answer comes quickly: rates are too high. It's an easy diagnosis, clean and intuitive, and it fits neatly into headlines and political talking points. But it's also incomplete, and increasingly, misleading. To understand why, it helps to start with something personal. The first home I bought was in 1989. It cost $259,000. My mortgage rate was 10 percent.

A significant number of Santa Clara County residents say they're considering leaving the Bay Area, a reflection of the persistent frustration over housing costs and affordability even as population data suggests the region is not experiencing a mass exodus. Joint Venture Silicon Valley's annual survey found 40% of respondents in Santa Clara County said they are likely to leave in the next few years, a decline from recent years when up to 57% of respondents were looking to move.