Last night, while chit-chatting prior to an Alan Doyle concert (above) in Denver’s Lowry neighborhood — our first such event since the Before Times — my beloved and her bestie touched on the always popular topic of Denver’s insane housing market. They traded 👀 tales of Zillow estimates, and wondered aloud who the heck is buying all these average-seeming houses at sky-high prices.
The pandemic-era surge in housing unaffordability (“We’re #5! We’re #5!“) is great for the Mile High Household’s net worth: our house’s putative value is two and a half times what we paid for it 13 years ago — with roughly half of that increase happening in just the last 18 months! But, needless to say, it’s super shitty for anyone trying to buy a first home. (Also for our property tax bill. Heh.) And it feels uncomfortably unstable & unsustainable, in a late-2000s-deja-vu sort of way, y’know?
Anyway, this morning, inspired by Becky & V’s conversation, I posted a couple of tweets — followed by some lively back-and-forth with Twitter friends — asking if we’re in a(nother) housing bubble. I thought I’d post the resulting thread here, both for posterity (in case it ends up being another one of my Cassandra moments), and also because I want it all collected in one place so I can ask Planet Money about it. 🙂
The thread started with a retweet of @byzplease’s viral tweet from yesterday (RT’d into my timeline this morning), which featured a map of AirBnBs in New Orleans (source here), and asked: “All the AirBnBs in New Orleans, a city with a housing shortage. Huh, wonder where all the housing went?”
Despite my Trump-induced leftward drift in recent years, I’m still predisposed to be somewhat skeptical of the progressive tendency — sometimes justified, but sometimes a knee-jerk impulse, IMHO — to blame complex structural and economic problems on simple greed: greedy corporations, greedy industries, greedy CEOs, greedy landlords & speculators, and so forth. Like, yeah, at some level capitalism runs on “greed,” but also, not everything is a morality tale, guys. Shit’s complicated!
And yet, as I gazed at the NOLA map and reflected on last night’s Becky-V convo (and also recalled some progressive friends’ tweets in recent months, fretting about investment firms buying up houses), I thought to myself: hmm, there might be something to this one. And so, I mused:
Several people (namely @LeahLibresco, @BYUapologist, @MichaelTWorley, and @PlantBasedChad) replied, and an interesting conversation ensued:
And one final tweet:
UPDATE: A mortgage loan officer in Utah weighs in:
