By Kevin Drum
Here are two charts about housing. The first is from Brad DeLong, and it shows how much housing was overbuilt during the boom of the aughts. The blue line is trend growth, and the orange triangle that goes from 2002-07 amounts to about $300 billion dollars in excess housing. Since then, however, we've been massively underbuilding housing. That's the orange block that starts in 2007, and it already amounts to $1.2 trillion. It will probably add up to $2 trillion or more by the time we get back to the trend line. That's a net undersupply of $1.7 trillion...[continued]
