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Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the average salary country wide. What's the average salary in "some of the poorer regions"? Also I'm not sure rental rates in a country currently actively being invaded and regularly bombed is a good example.
The situation was actually comparable even before the full-scale invasion.
The article shows our rents are up 4 percent; nothing shows any indication of slowing.
The folks most likely to be priced out of housing by escalating costs - they are the same folks who don't have the stack of cash needed to move to a different market.
Source: https://www.redfin.com/news/rental-tracker-may-2025/
“I’m not seeing many first-time homebuyers right now,” said Nicole Stewart, a Redfin Premier real estate agent in Boise, ID. “Rental rates here are still more manageable than saving up for a down payment and mortgage. People are finding rentals that are nicer than the house they could afford at the same monthly cost. That’s in part because a lot of home sellers are overpricing their properties as they struggle to adjust to the changing housing market.”
> The typical U.S. homebuyer needs to earn over $50,000 more than the typical renter to afford monthly housing payments, and the gap has been widening due to high home prices and mortgages rates.
I’ve heard that buying a house is being “long” on the local labor market. What this is suggesting is that labor markets (i.e. salaries) in general have not kept pace with inflation and higher interest rates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it was 2% in the soviet union
Ah yea, it looks like that's true. I didn't calculate the actual percentages, but it was very low. Thanks for the heads up - > Demand for housing also remains heavy because Soviet rents, heavily subsidized by the Government, are very low. A modest two‐room apartment will en for 6 to 8 rubles ($8 to $11.30) a month, including some utilities. A four‐room apartment wil rent for 14 to 16 rubles ($18.20 to $22.30). Apartm…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By 1933 [Social Democrats in Vienna] had built almost 60,000 dwellings, mostly in huge apartment houses... These were built so efficiently that the average cost per apartment was only about $1,650 each; since rent was expected to cover only upkeep and not construction cost (which came from taxes), the average rent was less than $2.00 a month. Thus the poor of Vienna spend only a fraction of their income for rent, les…
> rent was expected to cover only upkeep and not construction cost (which came from taxes) I think he meant non-subsidized rents.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much of the narrative has been that the problem is because nimby boomers won’t allow apartment complexes in single family neighborhoods, there are simply not enough apartments.
We've been rewarding voices who want to lock the gate behind them. They want their area frozen at the moment they moved into their home. What we learned is that those voices are catastrophic for entire classes of people - like new families.
what's a good way to reconcile this with the common narrative that there's a big housing shortage?
Rents are still too damn high. The shortage will be over when rent is less than 10% of take home pay for a lower class laborer in NYC.
If that were ever true, people would chose to spend a higher percentage to get a nicer, bigger, or better located place.
Unlike many goods, there is practically no upper bound on what you can spend on housing. You can't buy a better phone for $3000, but you can continue to buy a better home up to $50 million (possibly more).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Still, she added, rents are about 20% higher than pre-pandemic levels, and consumers remain concerned about their financial situation and job security in recent surveys. When people throw around the word shortage what they mean is "availability at a price I'm willing to pay." Same with labor shortages.
That's... the definition of shortage
what's a good way to reconcile this with the common narrative that there's a big housing shortage?
There's a housing shortage in places like California where people aren't allowed to build. There's no housing shortage in places like Austin, Texas where people are allowed to build.