2 minute readThe best and truest part of Peter Coy’s New York Times economics opinion column – “ The 2020 update to this analysis illustrates the job creation and tax generation impacts of each completed single-family home here: This data – economic modeling though it may be – may help to put human faces and human striving and human contribution to statistical impacts we’re seeing occur within the compass of homebuilding and its related business ecosystem. Let’s take stock of what Coy himself writes in his conclusion that “The Housing Market Is Bad, But Not That Bad.” There’s a short-term cycle effect and then a long-term issue of how much housing we need,” Robert Dietz, the chief economist of the National Association of Home Builders, told me. “For the longer term, are we overbuilt? I have to still answer no.” What’s more, he said, banks have lent more judiciously this time than in the housing bubble, so there’s been less nonsensical construction. Taking into account both short- and long-term factors, he’s forecasting a drop of at least 10 percent in construction of single-family homes this year, the first calendar-year decline since 2011. That’s bad, he says, but not nearly as bad as the plunge after the real estate bubble began to burst 16 years ago. If Dietz is now correct in his estimation that single-family housing starts may be on pace to fall below the 1 million mark, that would reflect a net variance – versus an earlier 2022 forecast published by Bill McBride of Calculated Risk – of 113,000 homes or more, not started in 2022. So when you look carefully at what “not that bad” adds up to in terms of some of the impacts on people of homebuilders starting 113,000 fewer homes in 2022, the calculus quickly spools up into the trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of livelihoods, hitting both within the 12 months of the starts themselves, and the aftereffects of those missing new homes. When you really boil it down to the human level, even a 10% decline – which we believe will wind up being a conservative estimate – deserves more than mention as a “chupchik.”
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Why We See Builders And Buyers As People, Not Abstract Statistics
August 18, 2022, 6:20pm
