Home prices rose nearly 20% last year, in large part because the U.S. is several million homes short of demand. Builders say the pandemic is partly to blame, but the problem goes deeper than that.
Builder Emerson Claus and his foreman Rene Landeverde at the site of an apartment they are building in a suburb of Boston.
"What I call a bloodbath happened," says Claus. It was the worst housing market crash since the Great Depression. Many homebuilders went out of business. Claus was building houses in Florida when the bottom fell out. Hipolito Herrador is fashioning supports to hold up a portion of an existing house so an additional apartment unit can be built onto it. Some states and towns are changing their zoning rules to make it easier to add such"accessory dwelling units."
Overly restrictive zoning is a big problem nationally, says Robert Dietz, the chief economist with the National Association of Home Builders."In certain neighborhoods you simply cannot build townhouses.""You have to build single family units on lots that are bigger than the market wants," Dietz says. "This is not a free market choice. It's a government-imposed rule.
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