housing

Why Did Homeownership Rates Grow?0
- June 30, 2011
Between 1890 and 1940, U.S. homeownership rates hovered between 44 and 48 percent. Then they suddenly grew to 62 percent by 1960. What happened to cause the rates to rise so much? The conventional answer is government intervention. Kenneth Jackson, author of Crabgrass Frontier, argues that legislation passed during the New Deal would “revolutionize the […]
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The History of Home Ownership 0
- June 15, 2011
An earlier series of Antiplanner posts looked at the recent financial crisis and the role the housing market played in that crisis. This has led the Antiplanner to look deeper into the history of housing and home ownership. The Census Bureau began tallying homeownership rates in the 1890 census; before that, American homeownership rates can […]
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Building Micro-Homes in Portland 0
- May 5, 2011
Okay, it is one thing for someone who wants to live within a block of Central Park to pay $700 a month for a 90-square-foot “apartment.” But now a major homebuilder, D.R. Horton, is building 364- to 687-square-foot micro-homes in Portland. “You can’t just keep going farther from the city and acquiring farm land,” says […]
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Ending the Mortgage Interest Deduction 0
- May 4, 2011
Realtors and home builders strongly defend the mortgage interest deduction as a way of increasing homeownership, which is supposed to be a good thing. But does it really work that well? Edward Glaeser doesn’t think so. While he agrees that there are social benefits to increasing homeownership, he notes that the mortgage-interest deduction mainly benefits […]
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Mixed Messages from Fortune Magazine 0
- April 15, 2011
On March 29, Colin Barr, a Fortune magazine financial writer, argues in a blog post that “housing prices will keep falling.” Just two weeks later, the cover story of the April 11 Fortune proclaims the “return of real estate” and says “it’s time to buy again.” They can’t both be right: either Fortune magazine is […]
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Another Smart-Growth Plot?0
- February 14, 2011
“Under Obama’s proposal, fewer to own homes,” reported the Antiplanner’s local paper. The paper was reprinting an article from the New York Times, whose original headline was the slightly less inflammatory, “Administration calls for cutting aid to homebuyers.” Is this another smart-growth plot to restrict homeownership only to the wealthy? Or is it a rational […]
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