Housing in the United States

Housing in the United States comes in a variety of forms and tenures. The rate of homeownership in the United States, as measured by the fraction of units that are owner-occupied, was 64%. This rate is less than the rates in other large countries such as China (90%), Russia (89%) Mexico (80%), or Brazil (73%) (see List of countries by home ownership rate).

Housing in the United States is heavily commodified, and when viewed as an economic sector, contributes to 15% of the gross domestic product. As in countries such as Canada or the United Kingdom, the United States is experiencing a crisis in housing affordability, with cost increases in housing vastly outstripping wage growth. From 2000 to 2021, the median rent more than doubled. The amount of public housing is capped via the Faircloth Limit, and when available can only be offered to households meeting certain eligibility requirements.

More than half a million people are homeless. The geographic patterns of homelessness in the United States are explained by the high cost and low availability of housing, rather than variations in the rates of mental illness or drug addiction.

Most houses in the United States are made from wood.

Overview
Housing as shelter is one of the "basic needs" of humans, offering protection against the elements. It also provides a place of privacy away from the public eye where daily activities can take place. Residents often have personal attachment to a house, making it a home. A home's location, style and access to schools, parks, and other amenities can align a household to a greater community to reinforce cultural or religious bonds. These characteristics can also reinforce residential segregation and unequal access to amenities.

Housing is also important to developers, builders, lenders, realtors, investors, architects, and other specialized professions and trades. These groups view housing as a commodity for financial gain.

As the United States industrialized in the 20th century, demand for housing fueled job growth and consumer products to create economic growth. By the 1970s, the United States was being deindustrialized, and regional economies began to diverge: previously manufacturing-focused cities in the Rust Belt and elsewhere experienced population decline, and housing costs rose drastically in urban regions such as New York, San Francisco and Boston. In 2016, housing costs in two thirds of the United States exceeded wage growth. Housing prices have risen dramatically since the Covid pandemic and are unlikely to change anytime soon. In January 2020, the median home price was $290,499 – nearly 45% lower than the median home price in May 2023.

For households earning 30% of the county's median income, most counties in the United States do not have rental housing considered affordable to at least half that income segment (one-third of 30% of median).

Construction
Wood framing is widely used in home construction in the United States, accounting for 90% of new houses in 2019. Concrete is used to build a foundation, usually with either a crawl space, or basement included. Interiors usually have drywall. Roofing often consists of asphalt shingles, although steel, and tile materials are also used.

Wood-frame construction in the United States is more cost effective than masonry, in part because bricks typically must be shipped farther and labor costs are higher; however, it is perceived to be flimsy in comparison to typical European construction. The federal government and insurance agencies have tried to promote concrete-frame construction and other basic techniques for resisting extreme weather events, but with little success: a 2017 report by McKinsey concluded that "the productivity of construction remains stuck at the same level as 80 years ago".

Increasingly, some property insurers will no longer offer home insurance policies in regions where houses are often destroyed by weather events such as wildfires or hurricanes.

Supply


There are about 135 million homes in the United States as of 2016. Housing researchers generally conclude that the supply of housing in the United States is too low to meet demand, resulting in an affordability crisis. Among the renting population, nearly half pay more than 30% of their income toward rent.

Although a nationwide problem, the undersupply of housing is caused in large part by local community actions that discourage new development. These include the imposition of regulations such as single-family zoning, minimum parking requirements, and height restriction laws that limit the density of new residences within a municipality or increase the expense and difficulty of construction. These tactics are related to the social phenomenon of nimbyism, in which existing residents, especially those who own property, work to stymie new construction. In particular, the suppression of moderate-density housing such as duplexes and townhouses has resulted in a so-called missing middle problem that drives up housing scarcity and inhibits the development of walkable neighborhoods.

The typical age of a home varies by state, with a national median of 39 years. A 2016 report by the Center for American Progress found that 30 million homes have health or safety hazards, such as problems with plumbing, natural gas, or heating; 6 million of these homes have structural problems. Structural failures in condominium or apartment buildings have resulted in catastrophic loss of life, as in the 2021 Surfside condominium collapse. Many of the 160,000 condominium buildings in the United States do not have sufficient funds to carry out major repairs.

Poor-quality housing in the United States is associated with increases in chronic illnesses such as asthma and eczema, as well as the negative effects from the persistence of environmental lead (e.g., from lead paint that has not been removed). These effects are particularly acute in the dilapidated housing characteristic of dense urban environments.

Public housing


Federal efforts at public housing began in the 1930s, with a series of New Deal efforts culminating in the Housing Act of 1937. This created the United States Housing Authority as a centralized agency with the power to disburse funds, while the work of building and maintaining public housing projects was largely devolved onto state and municipal public housing authorities. From the outset, public housing was tied to the notion of "slum clearance", and the 1937 Act required that for every unit of public housing that was built, another unit had to be eliminated. Additionally, to protect the commodified housing market, the 1937 Act, and the 1949 Act that followed it, effectively restricted public housing to low-income households, thereby concentrating poverty into these housing projects. The 1949 Act also required that targets of slum clearance (by then called "urban renewal") be given preference in public housing projects, further concentrating poverty.

The federal government began to enmesh public housing with private development through a series of acts in 1959, 1961, 1965, and 1968, and 1970. The Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 established the Section 8 program, which directs public housing money to private landlords via means-tested rental assistance. Private subsidy was coupled with an underinvestment in public housing, and large projects such as Cabrini–Green in Chicago and Pruitt–Igoe in St. Louis became notorious for their squalor.

The amount of public housing crested in the 1990s, with about 1.4 million units. Today, the number of units has been reduced to 1.0 million. The fraction of US households receiving public or subsidized housing is far lower than the fraction in Western Europe.

Commodification
Economists have noted increasing ownership of housing units by investors keeping the units vacant or renting them to the exclusion of traditional homebuyers. Investors bought about one of every seven U.S. homes in the first quarter of 2021, up from the prior three quarters, in which they bought closer to 1 in 10 homes.

Homelessness


In 2014, approximately 1.5 million homeless people resided in shelters. , the Department of Housing and Urban Development reported there were roughly 553,000 homeless people in the United States on a given night, or 0.17% of the population. Recent spikes in the homeless population include a 44% increase in Seattle in 2017 and 16% in the city of Los Angeles in 2019. In January 2018 the federal government statistics gave comprehensive encompassing nationwide statistics, with a total number of 552,830 individuals, of which 358,363 (65%) were sheltered in provided housing, while some 194,467 (35%) were unsheltered.

There is some geographic variation in the rate of homelessness, which is correlated with the cost and availability of housing. Popular alternative explanations such as rates of mental illness or drug addiction do not explain the observed geographic variation in homelessness rates, nor do differences in regional climates.