FREE NEWSLETTER
SIPPING MORNING coffee on the porch of my 40-year-old aluminum box in the Sonoran Desert, I’m pondering the cost of housing.
My affordable unit sits on cement piers at the end of a street within an age-restricted park, at the sparsely populated edge of Tucson. Few jobs exist nearby. Civic amenities are modest. Summer weather is challenging, with heat, thunderstorms and seasonal rattlesnakes. Still, these conditions have created a financially comfortable place for a retiree to live.
There isn’t enough affordable housing in the U.S., a problem that’s now affecting my children in high-cost-of-living California. That isn’t a problem at my desert property in Arizona, and there’s a lesson here for other states.
My one-bedroom park unit cost me less than $50,000 for a home on a spacious lot in a high desert landscape worthy of an army of selfie-seeking visitors. I have a covered double driveway that also serves as a ramada-like shelter for neighborly potlucks and other uses beyond protecting my car from sun, rain and hailstones.
There’s a small patio, a workshop for retirement hobbies and an attached laundry shed. Utilities are included in the lot’s rent, except the electric bill, which has been modest despite summer cooling costs. I’m experimenting with pay-as-you-go internet access since I’m not yet a year-round resident.
Why isn’t there more affordable housing like mine? Explanations and accusations abound as politicians argue over what’s to be done. Housing is a major expense whether we buy or rent, live alone or together.
Our sense of well-being is tied to finding suitable digs that don’t stress our finances. We all want a home where cost increases can be absorbed by pay raises or the returns on our retirement investments.
In 2000, California’s first-time buyers could purchase a house for under $100,000, with a monthly mortgage payment of $826. If housing prices had risen at the rate of inflation, those homes would cost $180,000 today. Instead, the lowest tier of housing in the state runs nearly $500,000. At that price, monthly mortgage payments hit $3,630.
Wages have not risen at this rate, increasing pressure on the government to improve housing affordability. Since 2020, mortgage payments in California have risen by over 80%, while rents have increased more than 40% most everywhere in the state.
Affordable housing projects in major California cities cost the government as much as $1 million for a one-bedroom unit. Market rate apartments rent for $2,000 a month, and higher downtown. Even with roommates, rents derail well-intentioned spending plans and leave little or nothing for retirement savings.
You don’t live in California? This problem affects you, too, as California’s stressed population leaves for elsewhere. Even some Texans and Floridians are moving to places that suit them better, feeding complaints that these new arrivals are boosting the cost of living in their new states. Among these nomads are many retirees moving to stretch their dollars. I never thought this would include me, but I’m now a part of this story.
In my 55-plus community, trash is picked up curbside twice a week. I grab a small trash bag from under the sink and put it a few steps away at the edge of my lot.
Back home, trash day is a weekly wrestle down a long driveway with giant, wobbly-wheeled, government-issued trash cans sporting broken lids. Three cans in all, for ordinance-required sorting into green waste, recyclables and ordinary rubbish.
Here in Tucson, for the virtuous, a community recycling site is within a 10-minute drive. I still sort my trash, storing recyclables in the shed. I visit the recycling bins every couple of weeks on my way to other places, dog in tow. He enjoys the car ride over, the smells of the recycling and the hustle-bustle of fellow recyclers.
The RV park’s onsite property manager oversees compliance with its lengthy rulebook. Rules can be annoying, even worrisome at times, especially after decades of living free and wild in my home city. Was my dear old family dog barking at passersby while I was at the grocery store? Not allowed here.
On the other hand, rules can help keep properties clean and orderly, and neighbors behaving neighborly, despite close quarters and turnover. This orderliness is something I value.
There are cheaper places to park an RV: small campgrounds or on public lands. In Quartzsite, Arizona, a million snowbirds descend every year. They winter in RV parks, the Bureau of Land Management’s long-term visitor area, or the Bureau’s free dispersed camping. I prefer the security of a structured community.
The $1 million spent for a one-bedroom apartment in government-produced housing in California would buy 20 one-bedroom units like mine. It’s frustrating to see government efforts to increase housing result in so few new homes.
My rent is $500 a month, which even funds a community center where seasonal residents lead clubs and activities most days of the week. Most folks are capable of paying $500 a month. But not enough parks like mine exist. In cities like Los Angeles, unauthorized RV parking is a major concern, since there’s nowhere to park at a price people can afford.
I’m trying to resolve the housing question with my young adults. Our hometown doesn’t present so much as a studio apartment with easy access to mass transit that’s affordable to a young worker, even with a friend or two to share expenses. If it did, the one kid who didn’t move away might yet establish her own household, as she starts a career in the public school district.
Her sister seeks her first post-college job elsewhere and my third has left California for the Mountain West. With many working-age adults leaving the state, the consequences include schools with fewer students and a projected perennial structural deficit in the state budget, with costs to be picked up by the remaining taxpayers.
“Pay rent or buy a pizza?” my brother remembers thinking when he was young. Maybe we are victims of our technology, as financial wizards use computer algorithms to wring every cent possible from rental properties. Landlords can opt for market pricing every unit or, alternatively, repurpose longtime rentals as Airbnb properties.
Meanwhile, government rules regarding minimum housing standards have resulted in tearing down both old single-room-occupancy hotels and mid-century high-rise public housing. Gentrification in genteel city neighborhoods has taken older houses, which once might have been split into several cheap apartments, and replaced them with single-family homes.
Overall, millions of low-cost units have disappeared and not been replaced. This is the nature of the current housing crisis—a problem for the next generation of business and government leaders to tackle.
Catherine Horiuchi is retired from the University of San Francisco’s School of Management, where she was an associate professor teaching graduate courses in public policy, public finance and government technology. Check out Catherine’s earlier articles.
Want to receive our weekly newsletter? Sign up now. How about our daily alert about the site's latest posts? Join the list.
Government should not be involved with the building of homes. Government does nothing efficiently and this is a stellar example.
It sounds like you live in a RV or trailer park community. In addition to zoning problems another big issue has been developers and private capital. The units sit on land they rent, not own. What has happened in several communities in CA is the land gets sold and the new owners decide to drive out the residents by raising rent as leases renew. This happened in Palo Alto and San Diego, among other places.
It’s happening here too, in suburban Seattle, but it’s an even more efficient process. The new park owners not only raise the rents but impose new rules for property appearance that the residents must meet or be evicted in as little as 20 days, and so are forced out that way.
The one positive aspect of this predatory behavior is that it has spawned a group called the Bluebills, volunteer carpenters who show up and patch holes in roofs, change siding, repair porches and replace gutters. They started out as a small group of retired Boeing engineers but now have significantly expanded and pulled in more donations to increase the number of parks and tenants they can help.
We live a stone’s throw away from you in a long-established 55+ mobile home park near Starr Pass resort.
Tucson is unique in having not only a plethora of such parks that help keep lot rent fairly competitive, but also in having at least three resident-owned parks where you pay a higher price for your old mobile but own the land it sits on and are thereby protected from lot rent spikes and the ever-present threat of the park as a whole being sold to a new corporate owner who either jacks up the rent to unaffordable levels or razes the place and builds condos or single-family homes.
You may be interested in this U of A study on this issue:
https://www.mapazdashboard.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/2021-10/MAP_MH_Final_Oct5_2021%20V2.pdf
Why no affordable housing: zoning. NIMBY. I would love to downsize and stay in my neighbor. But only SFH are allowd.
Two very important things for housing. One is universal and one should be, but you may dismiss this.
1. Water.
2. Walkability and public transportation.
This is all true.
People who complain that more housing ruins the character of their towns need to tell their kids to not procreate. I say that the world is overpopulated and putting huge stress on our resources, but I enjoy having a grandchild. So I guess this makes me a hypocrite? Also, I have no desire to move out of this big house which felt less big when before the kids moved out and put pressure on housing availability.
(Maybe limitting immigration would help solve the housing problem locally, but too many people globally is precisely why we have so many immigrants.)
As long as our population keeps expanding and we have the expectation of not living with multiple people in small spaces, we need more housing. A lot more housing.
I live in a neighborhood of single family houses. I support small backyard units being built or allowing hpuses to be broken up into multiple units. I am in a very small minority.
Immigrants aren’t fleeing overpopulation. They are fleeing violence, persecution, lack of jobs, lack of education and opportunity for their children, or natural disaster.
Housing was in short supply and then the government let many millions of people cross the border into the country. This predictably made the housing crisis worse. It is the old rule of supply and demand.
There are an untold number of abandoned row homes in Baltimore where I live part of the year and they can be snapped up for pennies as long as you are willing to rehab them.
You bring up an important point. Not so long ago, every high school had shop classes. Now, not so many. Young people don’t learn the skills to maintain an existing house, much less rehab an older house. However, if there was a better way to promote old row houses, I can imagine them all being restored. The city is trying to get these homes updated, have any of the incentive programs worked as hoped?
When you say “government” you really mean taxpayers. Most of whom don’t live in California. I often wonder how prices can go up so much unless someone is willing to pay, but who is that?
When we bought our condo located on property that before 2010 was a Civil War era jail, there was a beautiful tree covered hillside above us. Then they built 160 $800,000 + homes that all quickly sold.
Then the state said the town needed subsidized affordable housing so on the last few acres of trees was jammed affordable housing units which I must say is very well maintained, but it all has greatly increased traffic and put new strains on the towns resources including schools… and forever has ruined a once lovely mountain and changed a small town.
“I’m from the government and I’m here to help” goes the cliche. Good of you to mention how notion of the “government” spending a million dollars per one-bedroom unit hides who’s picking up the tab.
This is one of my pet peeves, the third-party-payor dilemma. I know how much I’m able/willing to pay. The person who is buying/renting has an idea of how much they are able/willing to pay. The government? That is all someone else’s money they are spending. There are few incentives to economize or spend with care.
California’s state and local government revenues are generated from taxes, fees, and borrowed money which seems to me the same as taxes and fees. As I understand it, the Federal government spends from revenues generated and monetary expansion. In fiscal 2024, the Federal government overspent revenues and added to the deficit $1.83 trillion dollars. Some people see this as worrisome and inflationary, others do not.
I could argue that it’s not the government’s business, or its area of expertise, to build housing. In most places, I’d probably be shouted down by housing advocates who say the government’s role is to assure housing for all people (“Housing is a human right,” is the mantra.)
It seems to me the “government” gets stuck with all kinds of unpleasant mandates, hoisted upon its institutions and its workforce by elected officials responding to interest groups and public outrage. Addressing a crisis in housing is one of them.
As a taxpayer and consumer, I find it disingenuous for any government official to announce that I’m not paying for something based on the moment’s idea of the source of funds for a project. A common disinformation occurs whenever my city or state announces that something will be paid for thanks to a Federal allocation. As if I’m not paying Federal taxes or suffering the consequences of inflation that outstrips any earnings I receive.
Catherine, nice description of the problem. I don’t have suggestions for solutions, but you do spark questions.
I don’t mean to disparage the folks who devote themselves to public service, but it sometimes seems the problems are too complex for those tasked to solve them or cooperation from all parties is not forthcoming. Housing often sits squarely in the province of property rights, and the desire of most people to climb up from where they currently live. Perhaps there’s a private solution.
In my area, historically, the economy was based on textile manufacturing and agriculture. Both industries provided housing for their workers. The accommodations were commensurate with their low wages, but some of the mill villages had services that were unavailable to other townsfolk. More recently, don’t I recall that school district of Santa Barbara, CA subsidised housing for new teachers because houses are so expensive?
Maybe time will work it out. Are we just seeing an iteration of the housing cycle? A couple of decades of low interest led to big houses in desirable locations that now are unaffordable to many in the current environment. We humans tend to handle wealth poorly. We eat ourselves to poor health and house and drive ourselves beyond our needs. Will there eventually be a glut of unaffordable housing that drives down prices?
I’m don’t mean to sit on the porch of my house throwing stones. But it seems akin to a favorable market cycle, where timing our birth often has an affect on the lifetime wealth we can accumulate. I have a young daughter as well, who will be looking to live independently in a few years. Thanks for raising this issue, I’m interested in seeing the outcome.
Thank you for your comment. On my shelf sits a 1993 James Buchanan monograph, “Property as a Guarantor of Liberty” which informed my understanding just how important a space of our own must be.
“… sometimes it seems the problems are too complex for those tasked to solve them or cooperation from all parties is not forthcoming.”
One of my brother’s aphorisms goes something like “You can’t maximize for three variables.” Can’t remember it exactly, but the idea is that having more than one or two priorities makes it impossible to solve effectively. This is a constant concern for government officials.
There are private solutions that several commenters noted here, among them the smaller, possibly mobile “home”. The most desperate urban homeless don’t move frequently, since agencies (public and private) deliver services to their known locations. Less desperate but some no less needy, two million snowbirds in Quartzsite include many “nomads”. You can still access online Jessica Bruder’s original piece in Harper’s, the precursor to her book Nomadland.
https://harpers.org/archive/2014/08/the-end-of-retirement/
Your point about workforce housing is also relevant. Here in California that includes housing for seasonal agriculture workers, once temporary but now more full-year and family housing. In resort areas, some business owners make space for their workers; one restaurant in Bisbee, AZ cut its dining space in half to set up a dorm for its staff. In college, a few of my friends worked at ski resorts, which offered housing for housekeeping and other service staff.
A many-faceted problem has a many-faced resolution, for sure.
Catherine, in the late 1960s when I was stationed at Davis-Monthan AFB, the total population of the Tucson Metro area was around 250k. I think today it is around 1 million. Despite this population growth, there is still a lot of vacant land available for development. This land availability is the factor that allows for the existence of trailer parks like where you live. In the SF Bay area, geographic factors, including the SF Bay itself limit the amount of vacant land. What land is available is taxed based on the best economic use of that land. So, when you could cram apartments holding 10 or 20 times the population of your trailer park into the land it currently occupies, someone in the Bay Area would buy it and kick out the trailer occupants in order to build the apartments. Thus, it is the free market valuation of a scarce commodity, land, that is one of the main forces driving up the cost of housing there.
Unfortunately, Tucson, Phoenix and the rest of Southern AZ have their own issues complicating the availability of future housing. There the big issue is water, or rather the lack of it. The Colorado River is slowly drying up and the states like CA and AZ which have been using it for various purposes have to cope with this decline. So, as you probably know, you cannot build in this area without a guaranteed long term future supply of water for any proposed development. Over time, this will make the existing supply of housing which has a current access to water more valuable, and rents will increase.
There seems to be a human love for the expanse of the oceans. What else could lead to such a premium paid, and a desire for so many to live close to shore? Something like 50% of the US lives within 50 miles of our two coasts NOAA’s county-based calculation is 40% living in coastal counties, that is, 40% of nation lives in 10% of the land. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html
That leaves 90% of the land for the other half of the country, so, yes, much more affordable. Though even then, there are large metropolitan areas that approach the affordability profile of the coasts.
My rent went up this year, but only a few dollars a month. I believe this is due to the location’s lack of proximity to amenities, and most particularly the University of Arizona. The “easier” and “tastier” one’s life is, in terms of walking distance, the more expensive the neighborhood.
I’m guessing when you were at Davis-Monthan AFB in the 60s, you would have seen more plants unsuited to the climate. There’s been a constant effort in Arizona, decades in playing out, to cut water usage to better match the population (growing) with the water supply (problematic at best). There’s still room for reduced water use here, a few remaining golf courses, green grass in at least one large cemetery, things like that which suggests a bit of remaining resilience. The Federal government has also injected itself in the Colorado River allocations, California can expect to lose some of this and that’s fed into the re-invigoration of the old Peripheral Canal, reinvented as the Delta Tunnel, which will move much of Northern California’s water south.
There are a few million-dollar trailer parks on east and west coasts. Sometimes I see features on them in architectural journals. Credit the market!
It’s interesting how we have a housing crisis yet there are cities with vast undervalued housing markets. Interrupting the natural development patterns has certainly created a bizzaro patchwork of undervalued, overvalued, underutilized and stagnant.
Thanks for your comment. Housing problems often track changes in business and industry, so the “collapse” of domestic steel and automakers and resulting job losses were followed by population shifts, leaving empty housing behind. Changes in family demographics, globalization, and new technologies alter preferences and needs in housing.
I would advise my public policy students to visit open houses, new and old. A 1930’s kitchen might have had a single light bulb, houses had smaller bedrooms, closets were tiny. The “standard” 1930’s family house in my neighborhood was two bedrooms, one bath, around 1200 square feet. The “upscale” house in that same neighborhood might be 1500 square feet, still one bathroom, a third bedroom.
I’ve encouraged my young adults to explore job markets outside our city and state, I believe for many families, the affordability of housing and the job opportunities beyond the country’s priciest areas are compelling. I regret the impact of those who move on the historic populations in the cities receiving these transplants who risk their housing stock becoming less affordable.
There’s an economic concept of “stickiness” that’s relevant to housing markets. It’s much easier to stay in one’s current job and move a few blocks than to find a new job in a new place, even if one’s overall financial wellbeing will improve with the change. The price differential then has to be much greater before a person will pick up and leave. I think this feeds chain migration: one person moves, and then friends and family follow.
I live on the East Coast and am jealous of all the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land the Western US has to offer. I believe the widespread and free, dispersed BLM camping options allow you to stay at a site for up to 14 days before needing to move on.
In retirement, I imagine traveling the West in a well-equipped van, camping at BLM land for months at a time, with a small home base like yours to return to when I grow tired of the road.
That’s exactly what we do in our retirement. We travel 4 to 6 months in our campervan, and have a home base in Georgia close to 2 of our kids and grandkids. It’s a great way to live. This past summer we spent 4 months traveling to Alaska and Canada.
Have you read Nomadland?
Also, look at state parks and National Forests in the east.
I haven’t but I really enjoyed the movie.
Thanks for this article on a vexing topic. I also wonder about where, how, and if my kids will eventually own homes. It’s a larger topic that impacts folks well beyond my family. Here in Raleigh, NC there is constant discussion about affordable housing, because there are still local spots where unhoused individuals set up camps and shelters, and there are people with jobs living in vehicles. And this doesn’t doesn’t begin to address that whole issue, because food insecurity goes hand-in-hand with unstable housing.
I’ve written HD articles about our house. On one hand, I’m thrilled with the Zillow-estimated value increases since we’ve purchased this home (obviously an unrealized gain). However, the increase works against folks who wish to relocate to this area or all the first time buyers searching for a place to call their own.
I don’t have any answers. There is no single solution to this conundrum. But the leaders with the wherewithal to initiate change aren’t making a measurable difference.
“…food insecurity goes hand-in-hand with unstable housing.” This is something I’ve noticed even among young adults who are sharing apartments, with shared food storage. Worse for those living in cars or on the street. (A trailer/RV has more of a kitchen which can help.) This problem also tracks to the loss of shop class/home economics in high schools, where young adults could be learning to quickly construct healthy meals from inexpensive items such as rice and beans and fresh/canned/frozen veggies. Oats, eggs, milk, all these are relatively cheap. Instead, many eat highly processed items of low nutritional value, and fast food, which cost many multiples of simple home-made meals.
I live near NC State University, with a current enrollment of 38K+ undergraduate and graduate students. The university maintaina a food pantry for food insecure students, some of whom live in their vehicles, and use the gym facilities for personal care. My church and many other organizations make regular donations to that food pantry.
Thanks Cathy for a thought provoking article. My adopted state of NJ is grappling with affordable housing in many of it’s more expensive area, including its beach towns. There are no easy answers. Your Arizona place sounds great, except for the rattlesnakes. That’s a dealbreaker.
NJ is the most overpopulated state per square mile in the country. And yet we continue to squeeze more building in on every open piece of land. Do a Google Earth look at the Jersey shore and see what overbuilding has done. We should be rehabilitating our cities and most urban areas rather than consuming more open space.
I hear people worry about the environment and yet not a day goes by we aren’t cutting down more oxygen-generating trees.
You’ve written about buildings going up near your community that have taken over former hillsides… It’s expensive to rehab former industrial zones and everyone imagines themselves instead moving into pastoral settings. Governments spend barrels of money on each redevelopment project which addresses the housing needs of at most a few hundred “lucky” people (how people get selected for these units… I’ve never had a chance for one.)
By contrast, most every crappy district moved into by artistic types (who must live there since the prices people will pay for art is minimal) slowly transforms into a sought-after area, often with no government assistance at all beyond ignoring that artists are moving into barely-habitable and substandard space. Eventually the artists can’t afford to live there anymore, and the next generation starts rehabbing another bad location. It’s very cost-efficient if not too speedy.
I agree 100%
Thanks for reading and replying!
Rattlesnakes hibernate a few months a year, so that’s a respite. Human beings have got along with them somehow for millennia, and they keep the mouse/rat population in check. But still…
It makes me grateful every time I walk the three steps up to my front door, since most critters are on the surface or underground. Once I’m inside I can relax. But I’m outdoors much of each day. A requirement to stay attentive while walking is good for my mental and physical health, too. Number one thing to watch for is “jumping” cholla buds. Tradeoffs!
Today’s forecast back home is 40s/50s and dense fog. A sunny 77 degrees in the desert.
I wonder what effect short term rentals like Airbnb has. My son and his wife live in a ski/vacation town in the mountains of northern NH, and so many homes and condos are short term rentals they have priced out the workers that work at the outlets and hotels from home ownership. In their neighborhood they passed a rule outlawing short term rentals for this and other obvious reasons.
An increasing proportion of properties offered as short term rentals has negatively impacted service workers in destination cities and resort areas around the world. Public policy response to this is complex. Here’s a piece from the Urban Institute that includes a number of links…
https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/abundance-short-term-rentals-who-wins-and-who-loses
The effect is present, but to a much lesser degree, even in non-destination cities.
Something like 2 million units of housing have been repurposed as short term rentals. Not insignificant, yet the demolishing of millions of sub-standard housing units without replacements has created a more significant impact, IMHO. The combined effect, certainly worse.