The results of this one were a big surprise to me. The question I asked is, are rents high because the new housing that's being built is too expensive? There's a lot of attention on how expensive market-rate housing is and how much luxury vs affordable
The role of big finance in housing has been getting a lot of attention lately. TikTokers made a big scare and convinced a lot of people that 40% of single-family homes are owned by private equity companies, which is not even close to being true. This turned out to be
Many people, myself included, think that finance has some important role in why the rent is so damn high. There is a growing "housing financialization" literature about this. The idea is that banks, investors, and other financial actors are driving up home and rent prices. This was a
Update 7/25/2025: Since publishing this, I realized that I wasn't controlling for underemployment. The results shown here should not be taken at face value. There may have been an increase in the share of people who are underemployed but have no other income than wages. This
Housing has gotten much more expensive in the last half century. We can learn a lot about how the rental market works by looking at who has borne that burden.
In this newsletter, I'll be sharing my research into the housing affordability crisis. I hope this will be a useful and accessible resource for people trying to understand why the housing market is so broken. I'm going to try to make one to three posts per