Table 1 Pressing challenges in U.S. housing markets
From: Challenges and opportunities in scaling climate-resilient housing solutions in the United States
Thematic codes | Illustrative quotes | Number of interviewees |
|---|---|---|
Affordability | “Affordability and availability, which I lumped together. Housing is expensive in a bunch of places because there isn’t enough of it and there are too many households competing for too few homes.” – Academia Participant | 48.4%; n = 31 |
Climate Resilience | “We are a coastal city. And we can see the coastal modeling and what areas of the city are going to flood. So how do we build responsibly? How do we build new housing but also make sure that it’s going to be resilient to those future climate risks?” – Home Building Participant | 42.2%; n = 27 |
Insurance | “I think that insurance is a big one that comes to mind with climate change and the risk landscape and how that could possibly be insured and how insurance companies adjust to those changes in risk and what that means for people who need that insurance.” – Design Participant | 28.1%; n = 18 |
Housing Supply | “The general shortage of housing. We continue to be limited as a country, it seems, in our ability to produce a sufficient number of multifamily units to meet demand.” – Design Participant | 25%; n = 16 |
Costs to Build | “Construction costs have really gone up with labor costs going up, with COVID, [doing] a really big number on supply chains…But it’s a combination of high construction material costs everywhere and a pretty long protracted labor shortage everywhere, as well as I think people’s drive to customize. It’s not affordable to build any quality green home(s) anymore. So that’s a challenge that I think our sector faces overall.” – Home Building Participant | 15.6%; n = 10 |
Regulations | “A key barrier that we have to remove is local regulatory barriers that simply make it illegal to build a lot of this housing.” – Advocacy Participant | 9.4%; n = 6 |
Labor | “Labor rates and cost of living in California make it really hard to have a workforce that can build and develop housing at the scale that’s needed and be compensated fairly and then have the product be something that’s affordable for the people that need that housing.” – Design Participant | 6.3%; n = 4 |
Infrastructure | “One of the biggest barriers and obstacles for private sector housing right now would be infrastructure, particularly for co-op access to increased water and wastewater infrastructure.” – Government Participant | 3.1%; n = 2 |
