By NAHB
With a nationwide shortage of roughly 1.5 million housing units that is making it increasingly difficult for American families to afford to purchase or rent a home, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) today unveiled a 10-point housing plan designed to tame shelter inflation and ease the housing affordability crisis by removing barriers that hinder the construction of new homes and apartments.
“The lack of homes is the primary cause of growing housing affordability challenges,” said NAHB Chairman Carl Harris, a custom home builder from Wichita, Kan. “Any policy that seeks to improve affordability without addressing the need to increase the supply of single-family and multifamily for-sale and for-rent housing is doomed to fail.”
Shelter inflation – rent and homeownership costs – is still rising well above a 5% rate, and for the past year, more than half of overall inflation in the economy has been due to rising housing costs. The only way to effectively tame shelter inflation – particularly with elevated interest rates for both mortgages and development/construction loans – is to build more attainable, affordable housing.
With policymakers at all levels of government looking for ways to provide more affordable homeownership and rental housing opportunities for all Americans, NAHB is offering a plan that outlines initiatives that can be taken at the local, state and federal levels to address the root of the problem – the impediments to increasing the nation’s housing supply.
