We’ve all heard the number. Depending on who’s speaking, America is between three and five million homes short. Realtors quote it. Economists reference it. Builders use it. Politicians cite it. After hearing it hundreds of times, I’ve stopped questioning the number itself and have started questioning something simpler.
Who are these four million homes for? Almost nobody explains where these people are living today or what circumstances have created this unmet demand.
Most of them aren’t homeless. They aren’t standing in line waiting for a builder to finish the next subdivision, and they’re not all sleeping in cars. Some are adult children who live with parents because buying a first home has become financially impossible. Others are living with roommates. Millions continue renting, not because they don’t want to own a home, but because the numbers don’t work.
Perhaps the “housing shortage” is really a shortage of opportunity. The opportunity to buy that first home. The opportunity to move from a starter home into something larger as a family grows. The opportunity for retirees to downsize without leaving the community they’ve lived in for decades. The normal flow of housing seems to have slowed to a crawl, leaving people stuck where they are.
The housing market used to function like a ladder. Young adults rented their first apartment, eventually bought a modest home, traded up as their careers and families expanded, and downsized in retirement.
Today, that ladder feels as if several of its rungs have disappeared. First-time buyers struggle to get on it, growing families can’t afford the next step and older homeowners often decide to stay put because there are few alternatives. When fewer people move, fewer homes become available and pressure builds in the system.
That brings me to another question I’ve been turning over in my mind. Every year our industry builds hundreds of thousands of new homes, yet every year we’re told we’re still millions behind. If we somehow built four million additional homes tomorrow, would four million families suddenly appear?
Of course not.
Those households already exist. They would simply begin moving into homes that better fit their lives, incomes and aspirations. Maybe the housing shortage isn’t simply about building more homes. Maybe it’s about understanding why the homes people need, in the places they want to live, remain so difficult to provide.
I’m not suggesting the estimates are wrong, nor am I arguing against building more housing. Quite the opposite. We need more homes, and offsite construction can play an important role in delivering them.
But until we know who those four million households really are, where they’re living today and what’s preventing them from moving into housing that better fits their needs, we’ll probably keep repeating the same number year after year while wondering why it never gets any smaller.
Maybe that’s the conversation the housing industry should be having — not how many new homes we need, but whether we truly understand the people behind that number.
