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42 sats \ 4 replies \ @SimpleStacker 30 Sep \ parent \ on: Questioning the Shortage Narrative: How Small Assumptions ReW the Housing Story econ
I didn't know that Freddie Mac uses such an ad-hoc method for estimating "shortage". Anything based on something as hard to define as an "ideal vacancy rate" or "target vacancy rate" doesn't have a lot of credibility to me.
But I think it's fair enough to say that housing demand has grown faster than housing supply (especially in major cities), which has put upward pressure on house prices and rents.
Sure, but that's not a shortage
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I'm fine with the colloquial term... I don't know what
Q_D > Q_S looks like in real life, or how we'd even know, because Q_D would be unobserved in that instance.I guess we can detect it with the presence of non-price based allocation mechanisms, like lotteries, lines, etc. But with a market as heterogeneous as housing, I'm not sure how easy that is to observe.
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That's fair, and I don't generally mind colloquial terms either.
I just wanted to know how I'm supposed to interpret the statement. Seems like it boils down to "3.7 million fewer homes than some bureaucrat thinks there should be."
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Yeah, pretty much. And then people bandy about these numbers as if they were gospel truth. Which is annoying.
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