Would that residential real estate and construction were one and the same with housing.
Would, too, that the economy was actually one and the same with the people who live in it, work it, and prosper by it.
They’re false equivalents, alas. Unequal more in nature even than measure.
The “unpause” button–never having been tried before–may meaningfully reboot activity in the next several weeks or months. We may hope that it does. But it may not.
What that leaves leaders whose business is home and community, the No. 1 determinants of human health and well-being–the most essential and critical economic activity of all–is a choice and a challenge.
Those leaders can wait downstream for historically grim fundamentals on jobs and income to reassemble into a demand stream, they can navigate the shoals of policy, emergency financial aid, forbearance, forgiveness, and foreclosure, and they can hang for dear life on to the whipsawing tail of a Wall Street that’s lost its very capacity to detect fear from greed.
Or, home building’s leaders can, like Jeff Bezos, right now, “go big.”
After all, what home builders–and their investor, developer, architectural, manufacturing, materials, contractor-base, and distribution partners–do is the ultimate staple of society.
No homes? No economy (literally $7 of every $10 GDP). No homes? No U.S. Treasury with the capacity to debt-finance the nation’s next 60 or 90 or 120 or 180 days through Covid-19 pandemonium.
Going big, for home building leaders, would be to reset terms, big time. To lay out a vision in three bold long-term pillar areas that would resonate now as perhaps never before in the last half-century or more of American history.
- Jobs
- Shelter
- Land-use reform
Crises tend either to diminish or to unleash undreamed of opportunity.
Prior to the novel coronavirus pandemic, home builders and their real estate ecosystem of players were looking down the barrel of having to compete with one another for a shrinking percentage demand universe–thanks to economic mobility traps, land-use traps, and skilled labor capacity constraint.
Best-case scenarios–over the long-term–may look like a few, bigger, locally-scaled players being able to amass clout to monopolize product and production offerings for a shrinking, albeit well-heeled, new home buyer base.
That now can change.
The nation needs home builders and community developers like it’s never needed them.
Homeless, overburdened households, and a massive and expanding population–in housing’s nether-world of “missing middle” worker households–priced-out of safe, decent, healthy homes and communities were a growing universe all through the record-length economic recovery period that created 22 million jobs from 2009 to 2020.
What are COVID-19’s best bets on Wall Street right now, even among “bears?”
- Utilities
- Consumer staples
- Tech firms that our times and this moment have transformed into utilities
The ultimate utility and staple and infrastructure of society is safe, healthy shelter.
No infrastructure is better positioned to meet the need to “unpause” the economy right now–to put people back to work, to put people into homes that are safe and healthy, and to begin to heal a social fabric made vulnerable by disease and by harmful political polarization, than the nation’s home building and development community.
Going big would be mapping out a bold blueprint for the next 24 to 36 months.
- 5 million jobs
- 3 million homes
- $1 trillion in economic activity
Sometimes, rather than to simply lower expectations, leaders need to raise others’ solid sense of what could be accomplished, and then lower the barriers in the way of achieving what needs to be done.
The moment may be now or never.
