The Unassuming Economist

On prices, rent, and mortgage:    

• Rent Control: A Proven Way to Make Housing Scarce and Expensive – AEI
• Where Are Mortgage Delinquencies Rising the Most? – New York Fed
• Where mortgage rates are headed in 2026, according to 21 experts. Among the 21 mortgage rate forecasts tracked by ResiClub, the average prediction is 6.18% for calendar year 2026. – Forbes
• Revitalizing Bank Mortgage Lending, One Step with Basel – FED
• Federal Reserve Wants To Loosen Bank Rules To Boost Mortgage Lending – Realtor.com
• The Federal Reserve Wants to Change How You Shop for a Mortgage. Proposal aims to get banks back in the market by easing requirements – Wall Street Journal
• A new mortgage crisis is quietly hitting those who can least afford it. This week, there was yet another warning that many homeowners might be headed for trouble. – Washington Post
• Washington Inflates Credit Scores and Another Housing Bubble. Why is the Trump administration continuing the Biden push for ‘inclusive’ credit scores? – Wall Street Journal
• January 2026 Rental Report: Renter Conditions Improve Across U.S. Markets, With Notable Increases in Vacancies – Realtor.com
• States Hold the Keys to Greater Mortgage Access for Manufactured Home Buyers. Updates to real estate titling laws could reduce costs and complexities for borrowers – Pew
• Mamdani Fills Out Housing Board in Push to Freeze Rent. Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed six members to the Rent Guidelines Board, which decides whether rents can go up in nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments. – New York Times

On sales, permits, starts, and supply:    

• Residential Building Worker Wages Slow in 2025 Amid Cooling Housing Activity – NAHB
• Home Sales in January Posted Biggest Monthly Decline in Nearly Four Years. Freezing temperatures and high home prices snuffed out the sales momentum from previous months – Wall Street Journal
• US existing home sales drop to more than two-year low in January – Reuters
• January 2026 Hottest Housing Markets – Realtor.com
• Congressional housing deal faces new hurdle as Trump pushes investor ban. The issue is another area in which the president’s populist ideas are clashing with GOP free-market orthodoxy. – Politico
• Yes, Housing Supply Will Help, But It’s Not Everything – Forbes
• Cost of Credit for Builders & Developers at Its Lowest Since 2022 – NAHB
• The housing market is not getting much better. And neither is inflation – FT
• Builder Sentiment Edges Lower on Affordability Concerns – NAHB
• Part 2: Current State of the Housing Market; Overview for mid-February 2026 – Calculated Risk
• Housing Starts Increased to 1.404 million Annual Rate in December – Calculated Risk
• Land Grab for Data Centers Is One More Obstacle to Much-Needed Housing. Resistance grows to more land sales in Northern Virginia; ‘They’d rather have homes than data’ – Wall Street Journal
• US homebuilder sentiment remains subdued amid affordability challenges – Reuters
• Overall Housing Starts Inch Lower in 2025 – NAHB
• US single-family housing starts rebound in January, building permits decline – Reuters

On other developments:    

• A Simple Test of What People Really Think About Immigration. If you want to see whether immigration is making cities better or worse, just look at property values. – Marginal Revolution
• The decline of single-earner housebuyers in America. A tale of opportunities and costs – The Economist
• How Congress Plans to Take On the Housing Crisis. Modular housing, easier access to home loans are among proposals lawmakers are working on – Wall Street Journal
• A new bill aims to make homes affordable again. Here’s how. The House has passed the Housing for the 21st Century Act. Here’s how experts say it will make it easier (and cheaper) to buy affordable homes – Quartz
• Congress just passed a major housing bill. Will it actually lower your home price? The House passed a wide-ranging housing bill with bipartisan support, aiming to cut costs by streamlining zoning, financing, and federal programs. – Fast Company
• The ‘New Housing Crisis’ Isn’t New. What It Means If You’re Buying or Selling. – Barron’s  
• A ground-floor Costco is proving what’s broken in housing. Thrive Living’s partnership with Costco is the exception that proves the rule about what’s broken in housing. – Washington Post
• How Rising Costs Affect Home Affordability – NAHB
• How Housing Affordability Conditions Vary Across States and Metro Areas – NAHB
• 64% of Single Americans Struggle to Afford Housing, Compared With 39% of Married People – Redfin
• America’s Affordability Crisis Is a Housing Shortage. We Can Fix It in Three Steps – AEI
• Three’s a Crowd. With housing costs at an all-time high, more couples are living with roommates to manage the load. – New York Times
• The affordability crisis is driving unprecedented price cuts in the housing market, Realtor.com says – Fortune
• Disney-Led Theme Park Expansions Reshape Housing Markets – Realtor.com
• Homebuyer Down Payments Shrink for First Time in 5 Months – Redfin
• More States Requiring Landlords to Disclose Flood Risk, but Laws Vary Nationwide – Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies

From a paper by Li Xie, and Zhisheng Huang:

“We incorporate the characteristics of energy price management systems in developed countries and China into a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model (DSGE) respectively, examine the differences in the impact of international energy price shocks on the countries’ inflation under the two types of energy price management systems, and then analyze the role of developed countries’ energy price management system (DC-EPMS) and China’s energy price management system (CN-EPMS) in the process of international energy price shocks affecting inflation. The results indicate that CN-EPMS is more effective in mitigating the negative impact of international energy price shocks on inflation compared to DC-EPMS in developed countries. Under the DC-EPMS, non-state-owned enterprises in a dominant position in the energy market, faced with international energy price shocks, will be driven by profit-maximizing behaviors to transfer the fluctuations in international energy prices to domestic energy prices and their expectations, thereby triggering inflation in developed countries; under the CN-EPMS, state-owned energy enterprises as policy implementation tools, faced with international energy price shocks, have played a functional role in safeguarding energy supply and maintaining energy price stability through energy price control and policy-oriented financial support, thereby stabilizing the energy price expectations of domestic energy consumers and effectively blocking the transmission of international energy price shocks to the inflation.”

From a paper by Kardelen Cicek, Julieth Pico Mejía, Marcos Poplawski-Ribeiro, Alberto Tumino:

“This paper analyzes the redistributive effects of inflation across 18 European economies from
2021:Q3 to 2022:Q2, using unique micro-datasets for this country sample. We estimate inflation’s impact on household welfare through the consumption basket, income, and wealth channels. Our main contribution is incorporating real assets into the wealth channel and accounting for behavioral responses to inflation in both the income and wealth channels. These factors significantly alter inflation’s distributional effects compared to previous literature. The inflation shock is estimated to have caused an average welfare loss equivalent to 18.5 percent of annual household income across our sample, with households in the poorest income quintiles suffering the largest losses. Cross-country differences also widen when real assets are incorporated, with a few economies even showing welfare gains for some or all quintiles because house prices rose faster than inflation.”

From a paper by Claus Brand, Gavin Goy, and Wolfgang Lemke:

“Using a novel macro-finance model we infer jointly the equilibrium real interest rate r*, trend inflation, interest rate expectations, and bond risk premia for the United States. In the model r* plays a dual macro-finance role: as the benchmark real interest rate that closes the output gap and as the time-varying long-run real interest rate that determines the level of the yield curve. Our estimated r* declines over the last decade, with estimation uncertainty being relatively contained. We show that both macro and financial information is important to infer r*. Accounting for the secular decline in interest rates renders term premia more stable than those based on stationary yield curve models.”

On cross-country:

• 68% of people living in EU households own their home – Eurostat
• MEPs adopt proposals to tackle Europe’s housing crisis – European Parliament
• There are reasons why housing has become the top concern among European citizens. This analysis examines the recent evolution of the European residential market and explores differences between countries in a context where housing has become the main concern among Europeans. What we see is a cycle marked by successive shocks and an insufficient supply, which is now emerging as the main source of tension. – CaixaBank

Working papers and conferences:

• Housing policy, inflation, and monetary policy. An unorthodox view – Brookings
• Understanding CPI shelter inflation: The importance of the new-tenant/all-tenant rent gap – Journal of Housing Economics
• Residential Segregation and Unequal Access to Local Public Services in India: Evidence from 1.5m Neighborhoods – NBER
• Call for Papers: 6th Workshop on Rent Control on June 22-23 – DIW Berlin

On Australia and New Zealand:

• [Australia] Australia’s Rental Affordability Hits Record Low, Property Consultancy Cotality Says – Bloomberg
• [Australia] Will the government finally deliver a housing policy that stops making a bad situation worse? The 5% deposit guarantee has done what everyone expected to housing affordability. But fixing the capital gains tax discount would be a great move – The Guardian

On other countries:  

• [Hong Kong] Hong Kong reserves 4,000 homes for tenants hit by subdivided flats overhaul – South China Morning Post
• [United Kingdom] UK house prices rise by most since November 2024, Halifax says – Reuters
• [United Kingdom] Residential Research Update – February 2026 – Savills
• [United Kingdom] UK first-time buyers too pessimistic about securing a property, study says. Building Societies Association finds many are gloomy about their prospects of financing a purchase – FT