For more than two decades the Demographia International Housing Affordability report (this year authored by Wendell Cox) has been the gold standard for people looking at the cost of housing. In those decades the Demographia reports have become ever more critical as housing inflation has grown all around the world.
Ultimately, as the report suggests, these high prices are largely the product of policies that seek to limit growth on the periphery, which has been the usual way that cities have grown. The Demographia report has shown that where such policies predominate, for example in the United Kingdom, California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, New Zealand, Australia and much of Canada, the results are disastrous, at least for potential homebuyers.
For us at the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, the study also has grave implications on the prospects for upward mobility. High housing prices, relative to incomes, are having a distinctly feudalizing impact on our home state of California, where the primary victims are young people, minorities and immigrants. Restrictive housing policies may be packaged as progressive, but in social terms their impact could better be characterized as regressive. As with any problem, the first step towards a resolutions should be to understand the basic facts.
This is what the Demographia study offers, and why we are so proud to be partners with Canada’s Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Now comes the difficult part: convincing policy makers to change directions before the new generation loses all hope of home ownership.
Read the Report. (33 pages)
Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.
