Kevin Erdmann will be discussing his findings on the challenges of growth in an age of housing scarcity, including information on specific trends for Denver. The United States suffers from a shortage of well-placed homes. This was true even at the peak of the housing boom in 2005. Using a broad array of evidence on housing inflation, income, migration, homeownership trends, and international comparisons, Kevin Erdmann has been able to demonstrate that high home prices have been largely caused by the constrained housing supply in a handful of magnet cities leading the new economy.

Erdmann was a small business owner for 17 years, and he has a master’s degree in finance from the University of Arizona. After being surprised by some personal investigations into the Great Recession, he became the accidental author of a radical new account of the causes of the housing bubble and financial crisis, including two books, "Shut Out: How a Housing Shortage Caused the Great Recession and Crippled Our Economy", reviewed here, which was published at the end of 2019, and "Building from the Ground Up: Reclaiming the American Housing Boom", in January 2022.

Housing markets provide telling clues about the roles of supply, lending, and migration. Misunderstanding those clues led to the Great Recession. Restraining lending markets without solving the more fundamental supply problem has led to additional struggles in housing affordability. Erdmann will lay out the differences and the similarities of the current housing market and the previous boom, and what that means for housing markets moving ahead.

Additionally, there's an interesting recent post on EconLib that mentions Kevin's work in this area and is worth a read, including the comments section of the post. This great background and preparation reading for this luncheon: https://www.econlib.org/kevin-erdmann-was-right/

A copy of Kevin's 2022 DABE Webinar is available online at: https://youtu.be/7HBF81L_mFM