The tough housing market...............

 

No matter how you slice it, the home building sector seems strangely slow given our population growth . . .

Brian Wesbury offers a pretty good take on why the housing market is so tight.  He includes governmental hurdles as a major problem.  Maybe.  We think the major problem (that he fails to mention) is the wipe out of the small homebuilder - the company that would build 10-12 houses per year - after the 2008 meltdown.  Those guys never recovered and/or aged out, and have not yet been replaced.  We were so focused on sending all high school graduates to college, we forgot the importance of the building trades.  There is still a screaming need for plumbers, electricians, carpenters, drywallers, etc.  The earning potential for those high school graduates entering those trades now seems significantly higher than college graduates with BA degrees.  Just saying.  As an honorable mention for housing problems, we should not forget the serious inflation of building material costs that the covid/broken-supply-chain-years brought us.  Prices have moderated a bit, but not much.  All in all, no quick fix to the housing problem is on the horizon.