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blacksburg virginia is this pretty small

town

surrounded by rural areas it's kinda out

there

and the people who live in blacksburg

thirty thousand of them are college

students at virginia tech university

and just 15 000 are permanent residents

what this community has to offer is that

small town living

where you know your neighbors where you

have easy access to services

not a lot of traffic kim thurlow works

on housing initiatives for the town of

blacksburg

and she says homes there are flying off

the shelf right now

so average days on market for a for sale

home

is less than one right now less than one

day

less than one day kim says there are

just about 27

homes for sale in blacksburg right now

and 10 of those homes haven't even been

built yet so

there's just very little housing stock

at any given time

and that is causing a rise in prices and

it's

causing a bidding war kim says the

median income for blacksburg is

89 000 and making that she says you

could afford to buy like a

270 000 home but homes are going for

much more than that the average home

being sold

for new construction was 435 000

in blacksburg we're like we're

reaching the half a million mark here

yep

wow yep that's depressing it is a bunch

of homes in

tiny blacksburg are going for over a

million even

all over the u.s the small towns the

rural areas the big coastal cities

home prices are going up and up and

there's a simple reason

there just aren't enough homes for

everyone who wants one

do you see the housing shortage ending

anytime soon not in the next decade

not in the next decade like 20 31

fun right hello and welcome to planet

money i'm sarah gonzalez

and i'm erica barris today's national

housing supply shortage has actually

been decades in the making

today on the show three big reasons for

the housing shortage

and why it's gonna take so long to solve

it a lot of people

blame baby boomers but is it really

their fault

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good question that's a really good

question that's a great question this is

free therapy

thank you for asking me that god that's

such a good question that's an

interesting question

but what fresh air interviews are really

about are the interesting answers

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and npr

one of the reasons there's so much

interest in housing right now is because

interest rates are historically low

so if you can afford to buy an

overpriced house now's the time to do it

now in a healthy housing market you'd

have about

six months of housing supply but

according to a report last month from

harvard

there's currently less than two months

of housing supply in the u.s which is

very very tight by historic standards we

are talking record low

inventory there are just over a million

homes for sale

which is 3.8 million homes short

of what we need to meet demand so why

aren't there more homes for sale

the first big reason kind of does come

down to a battle between generations

baby boomers versus millennials boomers

are in the late 50s 60s and 70s so some

of them are retired but many of them are

still working

and boomers are a huge generation

millennials are in their 20s and 30s

some are even 40.

right so millennials are in like their

prime

home buying years and they're an even

huger generation and they are ready

to buy homes but there's a problem

boomers kinda own too many of the homes

right now

they have the biggest share of real

estate wealth in the us 44

of it even though they're just 28

of the adult population so this chapter

are boomers the problems

[Applause]

all right here's what previous

generations did they got older

and they sold their homes they moved in

with their kids or to a nursing facility

or

they downsized to like a little condo or

whatever but boomers

are not doing that they are choosing to

grow old

in their homes so some people are like

sell your homes already boomers

make room in the market for the next

generation but

not everyone feels this way so quran

you're here to basically defend baby

boomers they're not

who we should blame for our housing

supply shortage

yes i think it's very very unfair maybe

boomer generation is just not

creating the housing shortage quran call

is a housing supply specialist at the

urban institute

housing shortage problem is a

multi-pronged problem can i ask if

you're a baby boomer i'm not you're not

okay

i just had to ask karan says there's a

few reasons boomers aren't selling their

homes

for one thing they're healthier than

previous generations so many don't need

to move in with their kids or into a

nursing home

also boomers don't want to move they

like their grocery store

their friends their social activities

they want to stay where the action is

yeah i mean the baby boomer generation

they're

you know they're in their 60s and their

70s they're not like 80s and 90s right

like

many of them are still working it it's

sort of i mean it makes sense that they

are not ready to sell their homes

because they still have a lot of life

left to live

oh yeah absolutely and people are you

know they're living longer

uh their their health is in better shape

and those are all good things and you

should we should celebrate those things

you know we can't force people to you

know move out and live in places

uh where they don't want to live we just

need to

find more housing for younger folks and

quran says even if those healthy boomers

did choose to sell their homes down and

downsize to a condo

they'd still need to find some other

place to live they probably just buy a

different home

and you might think like well they could

just become renters but if they do that

then you just create

more demand for rental housing and rents

will go up

even more than they already have and on

top of that people don't usually go

from being homeowners to renters the

point of

all of this is if you just reallocate

people from one type of housing to

another

you're not solving the problem in the

long run the problem is we have

more people wanting to live in homes

than we have homes

the obvious answer is build more homes

right

if there weren't enough peaches in the

u.s we'd grow more peaches if there

weren't enough tvs we'd make more tvs or

at least

you know china would make more tvs right

so we should make

more housing we should build more

housing but

we can't and this is where things maybe

do

come back to the boomers a little bit

i'd say the the one area where

we can kind of point the finger at

boomers is that they have tended

not to allow change in their

neighborhoods

chapter two

still a little boomery but really in the

end we're all boomers

jenny schutz is an economist at the

brookings institution

and she says baby boomers have tended to

block new housing developments

they haven't really wanted anything in

their neighborhoods other than

stand-alone

single-family homes yeah i mean i i

blame them more for their political

behavior for an opposing new development

than for wanting to live in their houses

and asian place

remember when we said boomers aren't

moving into smaller condos when they get

older

well there actually aren't that many

condos for them to move into

you literally can't add more homes to a

neighborhood

because the older residents who live

there won't let us build it

listen this is totally rational behavior

you buy a house

it's in your interest for there to be

fewer houses around you

that makes the value of your home go up

and homeowners have a say in what kinds

of homes get built

and where because these decisions are

all made at the local level by

city councils and county supervisors so

a developer will tell a city

i want to build a new apartment complex

on this corner and

existing residents jenny says usually

homeowners who tend to be white tend to

be male

and are older will say i don't want it

it's going to change the feel of my

neighborhood it's going to bring traffic

or

schools are already overcrowded whatever

they oppose it and

local officials side with them so we

know that this happens

you know replicated over and over in

neighborhoods across the country

but collectively then that means we're

not building enough housing in the

places where people want to live

well what about like what about the city

council members though like why do they

listen to older constituents

so much yeah so city council members and

mayors and county supervisors are also

homeowners

and they tend to be older too so their

personal experience is a lot closer

to the homeowners who are saying don't

change my neighborhood

they're part of the generation that's

pushing back i'm curious do

do we all just become baby boomers and

act like baby boomers and

the older we get we just end up blocking

new housing it does seem to be true that

once people buy

houses they become a lot more resistant

to change in their neighborhoods i mean

they say that we become our parents as

we get older

that's probably true all right so

blocking new housing

goes way back of course stems from

racism and redlining

and policies meant to prevent black

people from buying in white

neighborhoods so boomers did not

invent blocking new development but

their opposition to

more housing and different kinds of

housing has led to some

really hard to undo zoning laws

oh yeah it's illegal to build anything

other than a single family detached

house

on the majority of land even in big

cities across the country

so in most of the us you are not allowed

to have town houses or duplexes or

triplexes or mobile homes

no apartments no condos no tiny homes no

granny flats in most

of the us and pretty much everyone

agrees we cannot get out of the housing

crisis

without changing some of these zoning

laws and

kind of amazingly jenny says some of

these zoning laws are starting to change

minneapolis just decided to allow

duplexes and triplexes

oregon now allows duplexes same with

raleigh in north carolina

it sounds so weird to hear oh north

carolina has made it legal to build

duplex like why

why has it not been legal to build a

duplex that's exactly the question why

did we ban

most forms of housing on most land and

yes some places are starting

to unban other forms of housing but even

in those places

there still aren't enough houses the

reason why

is the final chapter of the show we'll

get to that after the break

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from npr chapter three

last reason for the housing shortage the

u.s doesn't have enough people who know

how to build houses and it goes back to

the 2008 housing crisis

during the great recession there were

just a glut of homes on the market they

were losing value

it didn't make sense to build more

houses so we didn't

the u.s under built for years

in the great recession we stopped

building houses

the construction industry basically shut

down if you just look at the number of

homes built in the u.s

in the years before the housing crisis

we were building around

2 million new homes each year

in the years after the housing crisis we

were building like

500 000 homes and like 900 000 homes

so that is at least a million homes

each year for years that didn't get

built

and all this sends a pretty clear

message to people who might have gone

into the construction trades

there may not be a job here for you

right so the construction trades are

things where you go in as an apprentice

you build up experience and skill and

after you know 10 years you become a

master plumber

electrician carpenter so we lost kind of

a whole

cohort of people going into the

construction trades

that takes a long time to fix so now

we're in a situation where we need to

build

more homes fast but there's not enough

skilled people to do it

kim thurlow the housing manager in

blacksburg who we heard from at the

beginning of the show

she called it a trades crisis she's

dealing with it right now

we are really lacking skilled trades in

our area

so we are having to pull on contractors

and subcontractors

from outside of our region which just

increased

the cost overall for the development

they also have to wait a lot for

plumbers and electricians and carpenters

to be free

and ready to work so that adds to the

costs and for kim this comes down to

something else which is that for decades

students were encouraged to go to

college and get white-collar jobs not go

into the trades

and it's not true that trades

will make less money than many white

collar jobs

i can tell you that right now in this

community so

like a lot of places around the country

blacksburg is now trying to get people

to go into the construction trades again

they have an initiative to help offer

community college for free to people

going into the trades

but it's going to take some time it's

going to take a decade

to try and reverse that issue a bunch of

experts agree

it will take years to catch up we just

won't be able to build

enough homes fast enough so millennials

if everything goes well great news looks

like we'll all be able to buy homes

just around the time we're about to

retire great timing

i don't know that sounds like pretty

good news for gen z though yeah it's

like right in time for them

we didn't mention gen x at all erica

they're used to being forgotten

oh are you you're you're gen x right

you're you're basically gen x

you can say that you're putting that in

the story

she's a cusper she's a cusper

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today's show was produced by darius

rafian jacob goldstein edited the show

and alex goldmark is our supervising

producer

bryant first that is our show editor i'm

sarah gonzalez

and i'm erica barris this is npr thanks

for listening

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uh

Key Vocabulary

Vocabulary	Meanings
housing /ˈhaʊzɪŋ/ A2	noun - accommodations, homes, or living spaces
shortage /ˈʃɔːrtɪdʒ/ B1	noun - a lack or deficiency of something
market /ˈmɑːrkɪt/ A2	noun - a place or system where goods are bought and sold
afford /əˈfɔːrd/ A2	verb - to have enough money to pay for something
construction /kənˈstrʌkʃən/ B1	noun - the process of building something
generation /ˌdʒenəˈreɪʃən/ B1	noun - a group of people born and living around the same time
crisis /ˈkraɪsɪs/ B1	noun - a time of great danger or difficulty
demand /dɪˈmænd/ A2	noun - the desire or need for something
development /dɪˈveləpmənt/ B1	noun - the process of growing or being developed
neighborhood /ˈneɪbərˌhʊd/ A2	noun - a district or area within a town or city
initiative /ɪˈnɪʃətɪv/ B2	noun - a plan or action to achieve something
increase /ɪnˈkriːs/ A2	verb - to become larger or greater in size, amount, or degree
cost /kɔːst/ A1	noun - the amount of money needed to buy or do something
skilled /skɪld/ B1	adjective - having the abilities needed to do something well
reverse /rɪˈvɜːrs/ B1	verb - to change something to its opposite or former state
decade /ˈdɛkeɪd/ A2	noun - a period of ten years
incentive /ɪnˈsɛntɪv/ B2	noun - something that motivates or encourages someone to do something
equitably /ˈɛkwɪtəbli/ C1	adverb - in a fair and impartial way
permanent /ˈpɜːrmənənt/ B1	adjective - lasting or intended to last indefinitely
median /ˈmiːdiən/ C1	adjective - relating to the middle value in a set of numbers

Key Grammar Structures

• There’s just about 27 homes for sale in Blacksburg right now.

  ➔ Existential‑there construction with present simple (there is/are).

  ➔ "There’s" shows the existence of a limited number of homes.

• The median income for Blacksburg is $89,000 and making that she says you could afford to buy like a $270,000 home.

  ➔ Modal "could" for hypothetical ability + infinitive "to buy"; present participle clause "making that".

  ➔ She says you "could" afford to "buy" a $270,000 home – "could" = possible ability, "to buy" = infinitive complement.

• The average home being sold for new construction was $435,000.

  ➔ Passive voice with present participle "being sold" + past simple "was".

  ➔ "being sold" shows the action is happening to the home (passive), and "was" places it in the past.

• The first big reason kind of does come down to a battle between generations.

  ➔ Emphatic do‑support with "does come down" for emphasis; informal filler "kind of".

  ➔ "does" adds emphasis to the verb "come down" – it stresses the reason.

• Boomers aren’t selling their homes.

  ➔ Present progressive negative (are + not + verb‑ing) to describe an ongoing activity that is not happening.

  ➔ "aren’t" is the contracted form of "are not", showing the negative progressive aspect.

• They’ve tended not to allow change in their neighborhoods.

  ➔ Present perfect with past participle "tended" + infinitive "to allow"; negative infinitive "not to allow".

  ➔ "have tended" indicates a habit that started in the past and continues; "not to allow" shows the prohibited action.

• You can’t add more homes to a neighborhood because the older residents who live there won’t let us build it.

  ➔ Modal "can’t" for inability; relative clause "who live there"; future simple negative "won’t let".

  ➔ "can’t" means it is not possible to add homes; "who live there" describes the residents; "won’t let" = they will refuse to allow it.

• It’s illegal to build anything other than a single‑family detached house on the majority of land.

  ➔ "It is + adjective + infinitive" construction; infinitive of purpose "to build"; comparative phrase "other than".

  ➔ "It’s illegal" expresses a general rule; "to build" explains what is illegal; "other than" introduces the exception.

• The construction trades are things where you go in as an apprentice and build up experience.

  ➔ Relative clause with "where"; infinitive phrase "to build up"; present simple describing a general truth.

  ➔ "where" introduces the clause "you go in as an apprentice and build up experience" – it shows the situation in which the trades are used.