If you take the population and divide by the rate of housing starts per year, you get a quantity in dimensions of time and units of years. This quantity roughly speaking is related to the "longevity of a dwelling" you need to have in order for the housing per person that's available not to decline. So if real longevity of houses is more or less a constant, then when this graph is high housing availability is declining, and when it's low it's growing... There's a reason millennials feel cheated
Roughly we can say that we need required longevity to be equal to typical longevity of real buildings, and the assumption should be that the steady state that was about right... somewhere in the 150 year range on this graph.
Note that there's a dimensionless factor not included in here, so this is just proportional to the real required longevity. The factor is more or less related to the typical household size, which has been fairly constant at like 2.6-2.5 people/dwelling for the last 20+ years but declined from near 4 in 1940. Data available here: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families/households.html
Dagnab it, I am constantly wishing I had more text in my messages and forgetting to tag stuff in my first post. This message is just to tag @economics@a.gup.pe and some hash tags #economics#housing#data#statistics
This discussion is about housing longevity and the adequate production rate of housing starts to keep housing from becoming scarce. There's a graph in the first post that shows very interesting dynamics.
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