Unbundling our Housing Choices
When choosing a home, we have to balance many interests and values-- do we want to be on a quiet street or close to a thriving commercial center? Do we want a lot of private space, or the additional free time that comes with not having to maintain a lot of private space? And of course, we all need to choose homes that match our budgets. Strong Towns discusses the oversimplification of surveys on housing preferences and the "bundling" of housing options, and how to provide better options in housing and neighborhoods.
“Housing is similarly “bundled”—you can’t disentangle a lot of these attributes from each other. And there are many, many combinations of housing or neighborhood attributes—think of them like channels—that homebuyers might love, but homes fitting the description are few or nonexistent. Sorry, you can’t get this with that. Yet the housing market isn’t dominated by an oligopoly of a few big companies like television is. There are millions of sellers and buyers in the housing market, and millions of individual lots on which housing exists or could be built, so what gives?”