How about more housing for the holidays?

“We have a supply problem with housing,” Marc Norman, associate dean at the NYU Schack Institute of Real Estate, told Yahoo Finance Live (video above). “We’ll see the price declines, but I think the income gains that we are seeing lately are still not keeping up with the prices that we are seeing in the market — in most markets.”…

“We, for the last 20 years, have underbuilt the housing,” Norman said. “In 2008, we saw the sort of demand go down, but it never came back in terms of supply.”

After the 2008 real estate crash, residential construction activities in the private sector never recovered to the level of 2006. Although home building slowly increased year over year during the last decade, projects remained well below early 2000 levels, according to figures from the Census Bureau and. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Several thoughts in response:

1. The United States has never fully recovered from the housing bubble in the late 2000s. The rise in housing values, homeownership, and lending activity led to a lot of trouble.
2. How much money has the real estate and development sector made since the late 2000s? How much money has been left on the table by not building (or not being able to build, as discussed in the article, due to zoning and other restrictions)?
3. How many older homes are retrofitted or renovated to meet current standards and tastes each year compared to how many new housing units are needed? Both routes could help provide housing.

All of this could set up nicely for giving housing as a Christmas present in the future.