Summary: Americans have enjoyed extraordinary gains in material abundance, yet housing in recent decades stands out as a stubborn exception. Home prices in many parts of the United States have risen faster than incomes, placing growing pressure on renters and first-time buyers. The problem is not an inevitable market failure but the predictable result of supply constraints—especially land-use regulations—that can be reformed to increase affordability.
Americans have seen tremendous advances in the availability and abundance of material goods. As Marian L. Tupy and Gale Pooley from the Cato Institute have shown, the most basic necessity of food became eight times more affordable over the 100 years up to 2019, relative to average wages (the food inflation after 2019 set us back a little bit, but the long-run trends are still quite favorable). This increasing abundance is not limited to food alone, as a wide variety of finished goods have become much more affordable in recent decades.
These positive trends are well known for goods and even some services, such as cosmetic surgeries, but a common objection, both on social media and in real life, is: What about housing? That is a fair question, considering that Americans spend about 25 percent of their pre-tax annual income on housing, which has been a fairly constant share of their income for most of the past 125 years. Given the large share of the budget that housing costs represent, and the failure of housing to decline as a share of the budget as other necessities did, it is worth investigating the problem further.
On housing, the critics do have a point: Housing costs across the US and many other nations have quickly outpaced income growth in recent years. While we shouldn’t be nostalgic for the housing of the 1950s—houses were about half the size of today’s and had fewer amenities we now consider standard, such as air conditioning—nostalgia for the housing of 30 years ago might be justifiable.
Since 1994, two common measures of housing prices, the Case-Shiller Index and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Median Sales Price data, have increased faster than most measures of income, including median family income and average wages. And unlike the change since the 1950s, the recent increase in housing prices can’t be primarily explained by houses getting bigger: The median square footage of new homes sold has increased only 16 percent since 1994 and has even been falling in the past decade.
Even more so, to the extent housing has become more expensive relative to wage growth in recent years, the trend could worsen over the next 30 years—unless we quickly change policy to allow the supply of housing to increase.
It may seem puzzling that housing could remain roughly the same share of income on average in the US, even as housing prices have increased faster than incomes in recent decades. This seeming puzzle can be resolved by thinking about two different kinds of households: renters and homeowners. While renters and homeowners may certainly be different in many ways—renters tend to be younger, poorer, and so on—there is a fundamental difference in how they experience increases in the price of housing. Renters are typically subject to new market-rate rents on a regular basis, often annually. However, if homeowners remain in the same house they are generally insulated from these changes, with only insurance and property taxes possibly increasing annually, not their principal and interest on the mortgage.
These intuitions are borne out in the data. According to the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey, in 1984 the share of income that renters spent on housing was about 30.4 percent, which rose over the next four decades to 34.4 percent. Homeowners saw the opposite pattern, with the share of their income spent on housing falling from 27.7 percent in 1984 to 22.6 percent in 2024. The overall average has been fairly stable, but the experience of renters and homeowners has diverged.
The Facts of Housing Unaffordability
Historically, the rule of thumb in the United States is to spend no more than 30 percent of income on housing—though as we saw above, on average Americans spend less than that. But averages can obscure cost burdens for some households. According to an analysis of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS), fully one-third of US households spent over 30 percent of their income on housing, and 16 percent of households spent over half of their income on housing in 2024. The number of cost-burdened households has been steadily rising in recent years, as the price of both homes and rentals has increased faster than incomes in most of the US.
We can see the problem of rising home values relative to income by looking at another rule of thumb: Home prices should be in the range of three and five times a household’s annual income. In 1994, out of the United States’ 387 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), 263 had median home prices that were less than three times the median household income (the data once again come from Harvard’s JCHS). Only 12 MSAs in 1994—mostly in California and Hawaii—had ratios above 5.0.
Fast-forward to 2024, when there were 114 MSAs above the 5.0 ratio of median home prices to income, and those were scattered all over the country. Instead of being in just California and Hawaii, they were also in previously affordable states such as Montana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Arkansas. In 2024, the number of MSAs with price-to-income ratios below 3.0 had dwindled to just 32, many of them in the dying Rust Belt. And you don’t even need to go back to 1994 to see the dramatic change. As late as 2019, there were still well over 100 MSAs with a price-to-income ratio below 3.0.
While the majority (241 MSAs) are still within the suggested range of three to five times a household’s income, many are pushing toward the upper end of that range. Given the trend—the median ratio crept up from 2.65 in 1994 to 4.27 in 2024—it is not unreasonable to expect the ratio to continue to increase, absent any changes in policy.
The challenge of housing affordability is not unique to the United States. Using the home-price-to-income ratio from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), since 1994 the US saw home prices increase by 20 percent more than incomes did, meaning that housing is more expensive in real terms. Some other countries were in a much worse situation: Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom all had over 80 percent increases in the ratio of housing prices to income. Not every country followed the same pattern, though. In New Zealand, the price-to-income ratio rose by 126 percent between 1994 and 2021. The ratio declined to 80 percent in 2024. And Japan’s price-to-income ratio fell by 25 percent from 1994 to 2024. However, even Japan has recently seen a modest increase in the ratio, by about 14 percent in the past decade. We’ll look at New Zealand and Japan in more detail below.
The Fix for Housing Affordability
But something can be done. While there have been several political solutions proposed, most of those focused on the demand side, such as subsidies to homeowners or renters. Those kinds of solutions are suboptimal because they increase demand, which will only further increase prices if supply does not also increase. The real problem is on the supply side: There is not enough new housing being built in the places people want to live and of the size people want. What is preventing additional building? In most of the US, it is land-use restrictions such as zoning and other policies that limit the density of new homes. Australia and countries across Europe have implemented similar policies that limit the construction of housing in various ways, primarily in the first half of the 20th century. Price increases did not show up immediately, because in most places restrictions were not binding constraints; there was plenty of land in favorable locations until recent decades.
A major restriction on the supply of housing comes in the form of single-family zoning, which prevents multifamily housing (everything from duplexes to skyscraper apartments) from being built in residential areas. A 2019 analysis by the New York Times found that about 75 percent of residential areas in US cities are reserved for single-family homes. In some cities that figure may reach over 85 percent. Of course, most families probably aspire to eventually own a single-family home, but the zoning laws force most land to be dedicated to this form of housing for everyone. That contributes to making housing unaffordable for many younger families today.
Land-use restrictions limit supply in ways that go beyond merely proscribing that most lots be reserved for single-family homes. For example, regulations will often require lots to be of a minimum size, which is counterproductive because land area is often the most expensive part of the property in urban settings, and the regulation forces families to purchase more land than they want. Regulations also set a maximum amount (a common range is 40–60 percent) of the lot that can be covered by the building itself, essentially forcing homes to have large lawns. Again, many families might want a large lot with a large lawn, but these regulations require it for everyone. The problem is that the less land dedicated to the home itself, the less land there is for other homes in the same area. These rules preclude single-family home types that were common in the past in large American cities, such as row houses or townhouses, which typically occupy most of the small lots they sit on.
Zoning Reforms Work
Would reforming land-use regulations really increase the supply of housing and make it more affordable? The available evidence indeed suggests it would.
One example of reform is New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland, which in 2016 reformed residential zoning to allow for more intensive housing—duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, and the like—on most residential land. This process is referred to as “upzoning.” The results were staggering: As documented in a paper published in the Journal of Urban Economics, construction boomed, with permits doubling in five years. The economists who studied this reform found that rents were 26–33 percent lower than they would have been without it. Rents kept skyrocketing in the rest of New Zealand but stabilized in the parts of Auckland that were upzoned. As mentioned above, New Zealand is notable for seeing its home-price-to-income ratio fall after 2021: As rents stabilized and incomes continued to grow, the ratio declined.
Another example comes from Houston, the fourth-largest city in the US. Houston has long been known as the shining example of a major US city that never adopted citywide zoning, even though some neighborhoods have private deed restrictions that incorporate features similar to zoning. But despite eschewing traditional zoning, Houston still has land-use regulations of various sorts. For example, like most cities, Houston prescribed a minimum lot size of 5,000 square feet. Because people would’ve been paying for more land than they needed, alternate forms of housing such as townhomes were less likely to be built. First in 1998 and then in 2013, Houston reduced the minimum lot size to just 1,400 square feet in parts of the city. As Mercatus Center economist Emily Hamilton shows, there was a boom in construction following the reforms. Despite adding over 1 million people between 1970 and 2020, Houston still managed to have median home prices below the national average.
If Houston and Auckland demonstrate the power of local reform, Tokyo shows what is possible when a nation treats housing as essential infrastructure rather than a matter set by local competing interest groups. As urban scholar André Sorensen details in The Making of Urban Japan (2002), the country stripped municipalities of the power to block code-compliant projects, effectively turning zoning into a national “right to build” rather than a discretionary local negotiation. The results of this policy choice are astonishing. According to a 2016 analysis by the Financial Times, the city of Tokyo consistently builds more new housing each year than the entire state of California or the whole of England, despite having little empty land to spare. By removing the “veto points” that plague Western cities, Tokyo has achieved the status of a growing, vibrant mega-city where rents have remained flat for decades.
Allowing the Market to Increase Supply Keeps Housing Affordable
As families become richer and the population grows, there is increasing pressure on housing prices in desirable locales. The natural market response to increasing prices is to increase supply. Unfortunately, in much of the US and the rest of the developed world, governments have put artificial barriers in place to prevent this market response. While the housing shortage was created by the political process—through the establishment of zoning and other land-use regulations—the solution does not need to come from governments in the form of subsidizing demand. Instead, to unleash the forces of the market and human initiative, governments need to ease regulations on supply.
Land-use regulations are not the only interference in the market process that makes housing less affordable. Some forms of trade policy and protectionism can also harm home prices. For example, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) estimates that recent tariff increases for lumber and other inputs can add at least $10,000 to the average price of a home. Even more costly are building regulations, which the NAHB estimated could exceed $90,000 for a typical home in 2021 and were around 40 percent of the cost of multifamily housing such as apartment buildings. While not all of these regulations could be eliminated immediately, the best thing governments can do to address the affordability issue in housing is to figure out how they can get out of the way.
