Chill, the U.S. Isn't Running Out of Homes
By 2030, mortality and new supply may proliferate housing surpluses nationwide. Will YIMBYs notice?
If you had to mark a turning point, 2022 was the year YIMBYs—“Yes, In My Backyard” activists pushing to eliminate barriers to housing construction—graduated from niche Twitter circles to a transpartisan monoculture of policy analysts, journalists, and politicians. For the last three years, their core claim has dominated media unchallenged: that a national housing shortage is driving up the cost of living, and that exclusionary zoning and local resistance are to blame. Their solution? Sweeping, top-down efforts to override democratic checks and local input. But like so many policy panics before it, the housing shortage is quietly—and rather quickly—resolving itself.
The United States, it must be said, is too vast and varied to be treated as a single housing market. This seems obvious, yet it bears repeating when especially constrained cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York are routinely conflated with the rest of the country. California alone accounts for roughly 1.4 million of the estimated 3.8 million national housing shortfall, according to Freddie Mac. (Other credible estimates range based on methodology and usually don’t top 4 million units.) New York’s exact contribution is unclear, but given recent supply declines, it’s likely outsized as well. Two states—both home to a disproportionate number of national media and policy professionals—appear to account for a large share of the shortage. Reasonable people can agree we need more housing, and that growing communities require some tradeoffs. But to characterize this as a national crisis and label local democratic institutions as “minoritarian” for resisting centralized control is a petulant exercise in fair-weather democracy.
Housing costs, meanwhile, are influenced by far more than zoning battles. Interest rates, labor shortages, material costs, property taxes, speculative investors, and shifting preferences all play a role. Blaming longtime residents in gentrifying neighborhoods is not only uncharitable—it’s analytically lazy. Demand itself is also variable. In Austin, as I’ve written before, rents declined more than 10% year-over-year. Why? Developers overestimated demand. Pandemic-era migration slowed, and population growth dropped to its lowest point in at least 70 years. Not everybody wants to be in every city. Whether a metro area has sufficient supply relative to demand is always changing on an annual and even quarterly basis.
So how is the United States going to escape its housing shortage in five years?
The biggest reason is what’s been dubbed the “Silver Tsunami”—a somewhat macabre term for the exit of seniors from the housing market through downsizing, relocation, or death. According to a 2024 report from the Mortgage Bankers Association, over 4 million owner-occupied homes will be vacated by 2030 due to aging. A caveat is that the report makes assumptions about where people want to live. So despite a likely surplus, methodologies like this will give license to activists to argue a shortage persists. The “Silver Tsunami” isn’t speculative—it’s demographic certainty. A massive transfer of property is underway, and even without a single new unit built, it’s enough to substantially narrow if not close the supply gap and alter the housing market as we know it.
Luckily, by then, the union as a whole is expecting lots of new construction. Census data estimates that 1.6 million units were constructed in 2024 — a major increase of 15.8 percent that lies in stark contrast to the underbuilding during the 2010s. If one conservatively estimates that annual construction trends continue, 7.5 million new units can be expected complete by the end of 2030. Federal Reserve data indicates that 1.3 million units are already under construction as of this summer. So 4 million units delivered by the “Silver Tsunami” and another 7.5 million units gets us to 11.5 million units — well above the current shortage. But what about demand?
Immigration is the biggest driver of new household formation. Yet even generous projections don’t shift the picture much. Net immigration has averaged around 1 million people per year. At an average household size of 2.5, that results in roughly 400,000 new households annually—or about 2.4 million by 2030. That’s meaningful, but modest relative to the 11.5 million new or freed-up homes entering the market. Add in declining birth rates, delayed family formation, and shrinking household size, and it’s clear that demand isn’t accelerating—it’s plateauing.
Yes, downside risks exist. A construction slowdown due to high interest rates, rising tariffs on materials, or a recession could reduce output. Investor-owned units could stay vacant. Older housing stock may be lost to disrepair or natural disasters. Climate migration could reshape demand. But even with these variables, the likely outcome isn’t a return to crisis—it’s a smaller surplus. And if the surplus is smaller, some metro areas may still face shortages. That’s normal. Markets differ. Disparities as a result of regional variation isn’t a national policy failure.
Then what will become of the YIMBY movement when housing supply is met? Will the progress-oriented faction of the movement acknowledge loudly that the issue is resolved? Will technocrats advocating against decentralization and democratic federalism abandon their campaign to centralize more local decision-making?
The likeliest scenario is that YIMBYism further fuses with urbanism. The goalposts will be moved as the argument pivots from the amount of housing to the type of housing: smaller, denser, communal and dependent on walking, biking and public transportation. Advocates lobbying against government intervention in zoning may embrace government efforts to not-so-subtly restrict free movement by purposefully burdening drivers with exclusionary designs like road dieting. Single-family homes won’t be banned but deploying grants to coerce developers into constructing units that aim for efficiency over all else. Developers will be free to build whatever they want as long as it is within a half-mile of light rail or, say, adheres to new parking restrictions. In short: a new zoning regime that favors state-coordinated urban design over individual choice. What’s efficient on paper will veto what may be more practical or comfortable particularly in warming climates. It won’t come as a surprise if many of these ironic turns escape critique from the urban academics, urban reporters, public opinion pollsters, and urban planners who share the same vision. Progress on housing, paradoxically, may inflame the issue further. Not unlike the groupthink behind so-called “wokeness,” which captured influential institutions across sectors, YIMBY-urbanism may resist acknowledging success for fear it breeds complacency. The focus will shift to managing how people live—not just solving what was framed as a crisis-level shortage. That will introduce its own challenges to American democracy, not in the language of firebrand populism but zealous technocracy.
Meanwhile, far bigger issues loom: declining birth rates, AI-driven job displacement, elder care — and rising anxiety and depression particularly in cities often romanticized as a social utopia. All of these will dramatically alter, for better or worse, the desirability of cities, suburbs and towns. Resolving any of them will take more than a policy choice.
But something to take from the housing issue in attempts to tackle them is to strengthen the very American commitment to deferring to more institutions and people — not fewer of them centered in outlier coastal enclaves — in devising new approaches, especially divergent ones and ones that do not “work”. As we’re now routinely observing with this presidency, delivering results isn’t enough to secure the legitimacy or trust of institutions when that trust hinges on the fairness of the process, not just outcomes.
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