Is There a Housing Shortage in the U.S.? If So, How Big Is It?
Updated: 5 hours ago
Short Answer: Yes, the U.S. has a structural housing shortage. That said, how big that shortage is depends on how you define and measure it.
That’s not because someone got the math wrong. They’re measuring different things.
The 10 million is the high end. It only counts single-family homes, and it measures against the building pace from before the crash, bubble years included. The 1 million is the low end because it only looks at today’s market. Most estimates land around 4 million.
My number
I put the current shortage at around 6 million units. That’s higher than most because I also count older homes that need replacing and the households that never formed because of a lack of housing. The biggest shortages, as a share of housing stock, are in California, Hawaii and New York.
Why are we short?
I’d point to five reasons:
Construction slowed sharply after 2008 and never fully caught up.
Land-use restrictions, mostly in coastal states, limit what can get built.
Builders moved away from entry-level homes.
Rate lock and higher mortgage rates since 2022 elevated capital costs for builders while disincentivizing existing homeowners from listing, locking up inventory.
Home prices and rents have escalated significantly faster than median wage growth over the past decade.
Why it doesn’t feel like a shortage everywhere
In parts of Texas, Florida and the Mountain West, there are more homes for sale right now than buyers who can afford them. That isn’t the same as having enough housing. Those markets built a lot of homes at prices that don’t match local incomes. The shortage there is in homes people can afford, not homes in general.
The Northeast, Midwest and West Coast are short on both.
How long to fix it?
Closing this gap will take years, if not decades. Realtor.com estimates that even if we built 50% more homes a year than we did in 2025, and pent-up demand fully eased, it would still take about seven years to close the gap.
Here in Washington
The Commerce Department estimates we need 1 to 1.1 million new homes over the next 20 years. That works out to about 55,000 a year, a pace Washington has hit only once since 1990.
If this topic interests you, below is a link to the slides I presented to the State Senate in September 2026.
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