What If The Real Reason Homes Are So Expensive Isn’t A Housing Shortage? Here’s What It Means For You

An analysis by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco challenges the common assumption that homes have gotten more expensive because too few have been built.

The analysis, published earlier this month, showed that cities across the country have built housing faster than their populations have grown. Home prices, meanwhile, tend to rise alongside incomes. Indeed, the housing supply grew faster than the population, even in expensive markets like San Francisco.

In other words, rising incomes, not a shortage of housing, could be fueling the soaring cost of houses.

The research by a team led by Schuyler Louie, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, could reframe the debate over what’s causing the housing affordability crisis—and how to fix it.

With rent and homeownership costs soaring relative to typical incomes, politicians from both major parties are looking for ways to bring those costs down. But the problem may have less to do with too few homes being built and more to do with high-income earners bidding up prices out of reach of everyone else.

“House price growth may simply reflect growth in housing demand, driven in part by growth in average income, such that questions of housing affordability may primarily be about differences in income growth at the top of the distribution relative to the middle,” the researchers wrote.

So far, efforts have focused on increasing supply to bring costs down since today’s high housing costs are partly the result of restricting supply. Groups like the National Association of Realtors and other housing advocates contend that restrictive local zoning laws, opposition to new developments, and other factors have, over the last few decades, caused a massive housing shortage.

Ending that shortage could improve housing affordability, the logic goes. For example, the Housing for the 21st Century Act, introduced last year and advancing through Congress with bipartisan support, aims to cut red tape and fund new construction.

But if Louie is correct, those solutions could be off the mark.

He argues that the affordability crisis won’t be solved by building more homes alone. The deeper issue, he wrote, is “the relative distribution of economic growth across income levels”—in short, who’s gaining income and where. If high earners are driving up prices in certain markets, adding supply won’t help the workers being priced out.

That shift matters for policy. Bills like the Housing for the 21st Century Act focus on clearing the way for new construction. But if the research holds, a more effective target might be the labor market itself—and the growing gap between what top earners and everyone else can afford to pay for a home.