SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Of course, it's spring - typically peak homebuying season, but few Americans are actually buying homes at the moment. Sales have stalled for the last three years. And a new report says that's partly due to an unbalanced housing market that is especially difficult to afford for middle-class families. NPR's personal finance reporter Stephan Bisaha joins us. Stephan, thanks so much for being with us.
STEPHAN BISAHA, BYLINE: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
SIMON: So this is more complicated than homes just getting more expensive, isn't it?
BISAHA: Yeah. So for a long time, home prices - they have risen faster than people's income. But, you know, if that was the only problem, a home buyer could just shop for a cheaper home, a smaller kitchen, fewer bedrooms - not ideal, but manageable. The problem is that there're just not enough of those cheaper homes. So this comes from a new report this past week from Realtor.com and the National Association of Realtors that points out this housing mismatch.
Now, middle income means different things to different people, but let's imagine your family makes about $75,000 a year. Before the pandemic, you could afford about half of all the homes up for sale, middle-class, after market. But if you went Zillow surfing this past March, you'd only be able to afford less than a quarter of homes for sale. This is actually a bit of an improvement from a couple years ago but still worse than it was before the pandemic.
SIMON: Why are there so few homes that middle-class families can afford?
BISAHA: We can divide this in two - new homes and existing homes. New homes are just way more expensive to build. Like, just take the cost of land. Since the pandemic, land costs have gone up 75%. So developers haven't even started building the home yet, and they're already spending way more than before. Then there's material costs and labor costs - those have all gone up, too.
SIMON: What about existing, sometimes much-older homes?
BISAHA: Yeah. Well, during the pandemic, a lot of people renovated their homes, so they've gone up a lot in price, and the real big challenge comes down to mortgage rates. Like, take my twin sister. She's got a small townhouse and would love a bigger home to better fit her growing family. She refinanced her mortgage in the early days of the pandemic and got a really low interest rate. But if she wanted to move, she'd have to get a new mortgage, and that's likely more than double what she currently has. The average 30-year mortgage today is about 6.5%.
SIMON: Stephan, weren't mortgage rates dropping earlier this year?
BISAHA: Yes, but then the war with Iran rattled markets, and that sent up the cost of borrowing money. So my sister is like a lot of American homeowners - sitting on a home they thought would be their starter home, wanting a bigger one but not willing to give up their lower mortgage rates.
SIMON: Are lawmakers in Washington trying to do something that would make homes more affordable?
BISAHA: Just this past week, the U.S. House overwhelmingly voted in favor of a bill to drive down the cost of homes by encouraging construction. It has a lot of different solutions packed inside, but most of them come down to clearing up bits of red tape for builders. Like, imagine if you had a company that made modular homes. You make the pieces. They get assembled later. Let's call it Scott Simon's Houses R Us.
SIMON: I'm not sure that guarantees its success, but go ahead, please.
BISAHA: Well, modular homes, they are generally cheaper to build. So they help make housing more affordable. This bill would work toward allowing modular houses to follow one code instead of thousands of local ones. So you can get your home to market faster and cheaper. Or let's say you want to build a home between two existing properties that already went through an environmental review. You wouldn't need to go through that process again. It also bans corporate investors from buying up more than 350 homes - ideally, giving families less competition for houses. This is an amended version of a bill the Senate passed a couple months ago and now heads back to them to approve or make more changes.
SIMON: NPR's personal finance reporter Stephan Bisaha. Stephan, thanks so much for being with us.
BISAHA: Thank you, Scott.
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