1 minute readIs the future of housing households; or were households the past of housing?
Already slipping due in large part to an epidemic in drug overdose-related deaths, the most recent data reflect a sharp drop – disproportionately impacting Hispanic and Black Americans – owing to the death toll of Covid-19.
New York Times staffers Julie Bosman, Sophie Kasakove and Daniel Victor write:
Racial and ethnic disparities have persisted throughout the pandemic, a reflection of many factors, including the differences in overall health and available health care between white, Hispanic and Black people in the United States. Black and Hispanic Americans were more likely to be employed in risky, public-facing jobs during the pandemic — bus drivers, restaurant cooks, sanitation workers — rather than working on laptops from the relative safety of their homes.
They also more commonly depend on public transportation, risking coronavirus exposure, or live in multigenerational homes and in tighter conditions that are more conducive to spreading the virus.
The precipitous drop in 2020, caused largely by Covid-19, is not likely to be permanent. In 1918, the flu pandemic wiped 11.8 years from Americans’ life expectancy, and the number fully rebounded the following year. But Elizabeth Arias, one of the researchers who produced the report, said life expectancy was not likely to bounce back to prepandemic levels anytime soon.
Returning the life expectancy numbers to those of 2019 would require having “no more excess death because of Covid, and that’s already not possible in 2021,” Dr. Arias said.
Expecting that – at some now more indefinite date in the future – life expectancy will resume an upward trajectory, and that demographic household patterns will add to the fundamental structure of demand, all focus trains itself to supply.
Can housing’s ability to supply housing recover?
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