“The housing stock we have is in terrible shape,” he said. “That’s why I’m busy…”
— Roofing professional Bryan DeHenau, December 2024.
Bryan DeHenau spends his days fixing other people’s roofs, but he can’t afford to buy a home of his own. At age 38, he rents an apartment with his mom outside Detroit. His story illustrates some of the issues behind the American housing crisis — and, if you read his story in a Washington Post op-ed by columnist Heather Long, you will hear some suggestions for fixing the problem…
…including a suggestion to build “Trump Towers” all across America. Not skyscrapers for commercial businesses, but apartments for working families to live in. If President Trump were backing that idea… maybe some of the country’s NIMBY neighborhoods would actually embrace multi-family housing, for a change?
He could say, for example, that it’s time to build Trump Towers across America, which would immediately make them sound desirable — even luxurious — in many communities…
Especially since the Great Recession, America hasn’t been building enough homes to meet demand. In the 2000s, Mr. DeHenau’s roofing company was mostly putting roofs on new homes. As of 2024, he mostly repairs or replaces existing roofs.
According to Ms. Long’s op-ed:
In 1972, when the U.S. population was just over 200 million, nearly 2.4 million new homes were built.
Last year, only 1.4 million homes were added, for a population of 335 million. Realistically, at least 2 million new homes need to be built every year, DeHenau said, and ideally more. Many leading housing experts agree.
The U.S. hasn’t come close to hitting that number — 2 million homes — since 2005.
In 2009, Americans built only about 554,000 new homes, one quarter of the number we needed. Here’s a graph from Ms. Long’s op-ed.
A graph of the shortage in Pagosa Springs would look similar to the graph above, if you ignore the curve prior to 1990, when relatively little new construction was underway in Archuleta County. We’re not even close to the numbers built in the early 2000s.
This editorial series was inspired by a 90-minute BuildingCulture podcast featuring building contractor Austin Tunnell, and urban planners Chuck Marohn and Nolan Gray — three thoughtful people with big concerns about housing in America.
A great introduction to the housing crisis… and some very interesting ideas, to a person like myself concerned about working people, struggling to survive in Pagosa’s current economy.
Austin Tunnell’s company, Building Culture, specializes in brick houses, which have a superior durability but cost perhaps 30% more than a stick-built house.
You don’t see many brick houses in Pagosa Springs, but some of the more historic communities in Colorado have their entire downtowns built out of brick.
For example, Salida, Colorado. 140-year-old buildings still in daily use. (Maybe worth 30% more?)
When I lived in Salida, for about 18 months, I learned that walls of the commercial and residential buildings typically consisted of double courses of brick, with a space in between — to provide better insulation against hot summers and cold winters.
Most of the brick buildings in Salida’s downtown — commercial and residential — date from the late 1800s. But even some of the newer buildings in the downtown have been constructed using brick.
Brick is not a perfect construction material — there’s no perfect construction material — but a properly-constructed brick house has certain advantages over your typical modern, stick-built house, as are pointed out on the Building Culture website:
We have a few red-brick structures in Pagosa Springs, and quite a few concrete-block buildings, but almost all our houses are stick-built with a wood-based ‘skeleton’. That makes a certain historical sense, in a community surrounded by forest, except that nearly all the wood used by our construction industry is imported from Canada.
It also makes sense, because people no longer build their own homes. We’ve lost the shared knowledge of building, and rely on “professionals”. But there’s a shortage of “professionals” and that makes their labor relatively expensive. Supply and demand, and all that.
The way houses are built today is “broken” for many reasons. One big reason is mortgage lending practices.
I spent a month in Mexico, many years ago, and noticed that the houses under construction were nearly all built from concrete block. I was also told that families did not finance their homes using 30-year mortgages, because that financial product was not typically available to families. So a house was typically built “out of pocket”… slowly… often over many years. One concrete block, after another.
The housing industry in the U.S., meanwhile, is trapped in a financial pattern. The only types of housing that can easily get government-backed mortgages are free-standing single-family homes, and high-rise apartments. You want to build a duplex? Or an ADU (Accessory Dwelling Unit)? Good luck getting it financed.
And most American families can’t even imagine building their house themselves… even though laying a brick is, physically, a relatively simple act.
One of the ideas I heard in expressed the Marohn-Gray-Tunnell podcast: the federal government is not going to come to our rescue. If any tax-funded entity is going to step up and help address this crisis, it will be the state and local governments.
Really? Local governments?
Since the start of the Great Recession, when Pagosa’s construction industry came to practically a complete standstill, the Town government and County government have spent literally tens of millions of dollars on tourism and recreation and new government buildings…
…and almost nothing on making sure we have a workforce, who can find housing they can afford.
From what I can discern, looking at the budgets of our local governments, these are the same priorities — tourism, recreation, new government buildings — for 2025.
Can Donald Trump save us? If we’re not willing to save ourselves?