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What's the deal with new housing going up like crazy in places that have few jobs and negative population growth?
I asked an AI about this, and it said something about how even though people are leaving the region, there's still a backlog of housing supply, especially for smaller units such as apartments and starter homes. I do in fact see a lot of apartments going up, and I suppose "starter homes," though the kind that costs more than the median home price for the area (which is not especially high). And then the expectation is that when Xers and Millenials get older, they'll buy the sprawling houses that are currently occupied by boomers? These houses seem very large, and I don't really understand them.
I sort of get what's happening in places like Arizona and Florida, where a larger than usual retiree cohort wants to live somewhere warm in a nice new easy to maintain house. I guess Phoenix is still adding subdivisions by sheer force of cheapness?
I would guess that this is not answerable with any degree of rigor without a specific example, which you are presumably unwilling to offer because it's too close to home.
That said, in a general sense I can think of a few reasons. you see that pattern:
You have a warped perception of a place. There are lots of towns that had a bad reputation when I was growing up, but have since turned around completely, and it often takes a while for my perception to catch up to the reality. What do you mean hip young people are moving to Pittsburgh? This can also be a case of using county level statistics when you're dealing with the housing supply in a smaller area, the county is shrinking but [town] is growing.
The industry in an area is shrinking overall, but the jobs that do exist are shifting, so the housing stock is shifting as well. You have a town that used to have a cardboard box factory employing 1,000 people at an adjusted wage of $25,000/yr, 1,000 houses were built to accommodate the workers. Now that factory only employs 500 people at an adjusted wage of $50,000/yr and a SaaS payroll company opened up an office in town where they employ 100 people at an adjusted wage of $100,000/yr. On the one hand you'd say well there's 1,000 houses and only 600 workers, there's plenty of housing! On the other, you'd say all the existing housing was designed for a worker making $25k, and there's no housing for people making $100k. The old, bad, factory housing is a decrepit slum at the same time that the new shiny stuff is being built.
Shifting tastes. Greater sprawl is more in fashion with online shopping and less socializing, there's less need to reach amenities, so you see rural housing on large acreage sold as a luxury good, no neighbors is awesome and it doesn't really matter that you can't get to the mall. Flip side, apartments and dense mixed use developments are more in fashion among a different subset of buyers, who highly value being able to walk to get a quart of milk or a beer, and don't want to spend their Saturdays on lawn care.
It doesn't have a bad reputation in comparison to other places, it just doesn't have much of an economic base. Maybe it's just the last place in the country for all the subsistence farmers' children to move to an apartment in town. Maybe the Intel plant is a bigger economic force than I realized?
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