Neighborhoods are designed, slowly and constantly, by the people who live in them. We make decisions about what gets built and who gets to use it or live in it through a network of community meetings, zoning boards, and city and state governments. In the process we create something we call “housing policy”. I have […]
I wrote an earlier post that explains what TIF is and how it works. Click through and read it here. In any community, we put things we want in plans. We want good jobs for the people who live here. We want homes people can afford to rent and buy. We want polluted land cleaned […]
Here’s an interesting chart that showed up on my desk via Barry Ritholz’s blog. It’s a chart of new housing supply in the US over a fifty-year span of time, and you really can see how the US housing new construction market has not yet recovered from the ’08 recession and financial crisis. Check it […]
Here’s a chart from the recently released 72-page final report of the Governor’s Task Force on Housing, which is out today. It shows the relationship between housing supply and housing affordability for both the owner-occupied and rental markets within the Minneapolis area. Here you go: It’s a relatively straightforward situation happening here, with a tight […]
Via the People’s Policy Project, here’s a chart from a new Harvard study on rental housing in the US. It shows trends in vacancy rate for new apartment construction separated out by price point (rental rates). Voila: Here’s what Chapter 4 says about the above chart: Newly constructed high-end apartment properties became more difficult […]
You might have missed Greta Kaul’s excellent article in Minnpost a while back, bringing some data into the conversation about the Twin Cities housing market. It is well worth your time and describes how the rental and home markets have changed over the last 5-10 years. Here’s one of the charts that caught my eye: […]
Via Visualizing Economics, here’s a cool chart showing the percentage of a home’s value that is tied up in land (as opposed to the house itself). Here’s the chart: The chart’s maker, Catherine Mulbrandon, doesn’t say much about this other than to point towards the dataset, which comes from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. […]
Via Barry Ritholz’ blog, here’s a wonky economic chart from a recent Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco report, about the difference between this housing market and the housing bubble of the early 2000s. This chart shows both the mortgage debt-to-income ratio (which is still declining from the peak) and the house price-to-rent ratio (which […]
I read recently that over 40% of people age 30-44 are renters. In the core cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, that number is much higher. Via Insight News, here’s the current picture about rents and rental vacancy in the Twin Cities metro: As you can see, the rental market is tight. Here’s what the […]