I know. It’s weird that we have to go over this again, and again, and again but if we’re worried about housing prices being too high, the answer is to make more housing. In a recent post at Redfin’s blog by the Urban Institute points this out yet again with a retrospective look at national housing data. Let’s start with what it says about demand for housing.

There were 968,075 new households in 2014, according to the Census Bureau. Data for 2015 aren’t yet available, but we know household formation has been rising. It’s safe to assume between 1 million and 1.1 million new households were created last year. Supply outstripped demand leading up to the financial crisis, by as much as a million units in 2006.

How did we do in keeping up with that demand?

We added together single-family, multi-family and manufactured housing construction in 2015, then subtracted units lost to various causes. The bulk of the new supply, at 968,000 units, was single-family and multi-family construction; Manufactured housing such as mobile homes, added another 69,000 units, bringing the total to just over one million.

To calculate the loss of existing stock we borrowed from a study by Eggers and Moumen which suggests that demolition, disaster and other events reduce the U.S. housing stock at an annual rate of .31 percent. There were more than 134.7 million housing units in the U.S. last year, so by that calculation we lost 418,000 of them, resulting in a net new supply of only 619,630 houses, condos and apartments.

So, as the blog posts headline sums up: “We’re Building 6 Homes for Every 10 New Households. Where Will People Live?”

The lack of affordable stock is already at crisis levels.  We need an array of federal, state, and local strategies to boost construction in undersupplied areas, provide better affordability for renters.

And what is our strategy here in Seattle? If you’ve been reading this blog or the papers you already know the answer: Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ).  Unfortunately the Mayor’s MIZ scheme that will pass through the City Council any week now will not “boost construction,” but instead will levy a new set of fees and requirements on the production already underway.

As I’ve pointed out before, when leadership wears ideological blinders or, in this case, a blindfold, influencing housing prices in a positive way for consumers quickly becomes about affordability. And our measure for this qualititative experience for price is lousy. Then the “solution” becomes to make building new housing harder to do and more expensive with mandates for fees and inclusion to, ironically, create a few hundred affordable units. Nevertheless, like hearing that indeed Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo were right about the Sun being the center of the solar system, I guess it’s reassuring to read that science still confirms that if you want lower or stable prices you should build more supply to meet demand.