A new report claims America is currently in the midst of a ‘housing crisis’ as the number of available homes fails to keep pace with growing demand for real estate, freezing many would-be homeowners off the market under current conditions.

Last week, the nonprofit Up for Growth released its “Housing Underproduction in the US” report, which details the serious and growing imbalance between high demand and low supply for homes.

The report begins by announcing, “America is experiencing a housing crisis,” and the content of the report attempts to underscore the seriousness of this point. The authors note that there is a shortfall of 3.8 million homes below housing need, double the number in 2012, accompanied by rapidly rising house prices making an increasingly prohibitive market. .

The report marked a notable departure from previous versions of Up for Growth, as the authors were keen to use a “racial equity lens” to highlight the racial dimension of the housing situation – 9 pages of the 75-page document are explicitly devoted to racial politics.

The organization’s new methodology also aims to enable more granular local precision. The authors of this report have also chosen to rely on “publicly available” and “annually updated” data sources, with the stated intention of enabling prompt and effective policy action in response to the problem.

According to the newspaper, the current housing crisis is a continuation of long-standing trends greatly exacerbated by the shock of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which has prompted remote workers to leave expensive urban areas and buy houses. in the suburbs.

While the factors and circumstances behind the current real estate crisis are many, they tend to revolve around one key issue: a lack of inventory, which is driving prices up and has recently begun to slow the pace. house sales.

“The biggest factor behind today’s high real estate prices is a lack of inventory,” Kristina Morales, a seasoned real estate agent who runs her eponymous real estate company, told The Epoch Times. “The demand is so much higher than the supply, creating hyper-competition over a single property. This competition drives prices up way above the list price and ultimately drives up property prices.

expensive california

Nowhere is the housing crisis more severe than in California, the most expensive state for housing, which has seen home values ​​soar since the pandemic began.

Last May, median home prices in California set a new record high of $898,000, more than 10% higher than the same time last year and more than $100,000 higher than the second-largest state. for the median price of the most expensive houses, Hawaii.

This trend has left homeownership off the table even for relatively affluent residents of the Golden State, with the median home selling for more than 25 times the median annual income.

While California is the worst case of the current housing crisis, virtually nowhere in the United States has been spared from rapidly rising real estate costs. Until real estate prices begin to calm down, the main victims of this housing crisis will remain the middle class, whose dreams of home ownership have been put on hold indefinitely due to prohibitive prices and a competitive market.