from the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan public-policy organization, argues that, eventually, the shift to working from home may turn into the antidote for the price spikes that we've seen. That's because the places where remote workers are flocking — the Sun Belt region in the Southern US and suburban areas outside big coastal cities — are exactly the kinds of locations that are best-equipped to build cheap housing to absorb the flood of newly remote workers.
"These are trends that started well before COVID, but it certainly accelerated that shift," Parsons told me."We saw just enormous demand from 2020 to 2021 across the suburbs in general, and in the Sun Belt specifically." Between 2020 and 2022, rents rose 8% and home prices rose by more than 20% nationally, adjusted for inflation. In Phoenix, rents surged 26% in the same period, according to inflation-adjusted data from Zillow. In Las Vegas, rents jumped 23%. Charlotte residents saw rents climb 13%. A
A decline in housing costs will be accelerated by the same thing that caused prices to explode earlier in the pandemic: people moving to cheaper places. The Sun Belt, with its promise of warmer weather, more space, and cheaper homes, also happens to be a wonderland for developers.
Take, for example, Houston and Dallas, a pair of Texas metros that have been able to remain"impressively affordable for being in-demand places," Tucker said. In Houston,have dramatically reduced minimum lot sizes across the city, allowing developers to build more houses on the same amount of land.