About Housing Unpacked

Housing affordability debates often focus on who is to blame. Housing Unpacked focuses on the numbers. Housing is produced through an interconnected system of land costs, construction costs, financing, regulation, taxes, infrastructure, operating expenses, investment requirements, public policy and market demand. Change one variable and something else usually changes with it. Housing Unpacked exists to explain those relationships. Our goal isn't to tell readers what housing policy they should support. Our goal is to make the tradeoffs visible.

What we cover

We write about the inputs that determine what a home costs to produce and to operate, and about how those inputs turn into a rent or a price. Most of our work concerns rental apartment development, because that is where the arithmetic is most visible and where the author’s experience lies, but the same logic applies to for-sale housing and to older buildings.

• Analyses that take one input, such as a parking requirement, an interest-rate move or a year of approval delay, and follow it through to the monthly rent a project would need.
• The Housing Breakdown, a visual series that takes a representative development and shows where the money goes.
• Housing 101, an eight-lesson sequence for readers who have never seen a pro forma and want to understand how housing actually gets built and financed.
• Tools that let readers change the variables themselves.
• A glossary that defines the terms developers, lenders and planners use.

Our topics span affordability, construction costs, financing, interest rates, land, zoning, parking, taxes, regulation, development, supply and demand, public policy, incentives, affordable housing, public finance, insurance and utilities.

How we work

Show the numbers

Every quantitative claim we make can be traced to an input we have stated. Where we model a result, the assumptions appear next to it and the arithmetic is shown. Where a number is illustrative rather than observed, we say so. Our shared model for turning capital cost into rent is described on the Methodology page, and the inputs to it are printed with every result.

Explain the incentives

Developers, lenders, investors, landlords, tenants and governments each respond to the incentives in front of them. Most outcomes in housing that look like bad faith are the predictable result of those incentives. We try to explain what each party is optimizing for and why, without treating any of them as villains or as victims.

Identify the tradeoffs

Rules, subsidies and market forces all have costs and benefits. We put the costs into dollars per unit and dollars per month wherever the inputs allow, and we describe the benefits fairly, so that readers can weigh them. We do not tell readers which side of a tradeoff to choose.

Who writes Housing Unpacked

Housing Unpacked was founded and is edited by Max Benedict, a multifamily real estate developer based in Michigan. He writes in a personal capacity. His professional background is the reason the site exists and also a potential conflict, which is why every article he writes carries a standing disclosure and why our Conflicts & Disclosures page explains how we handle it.

We expect to publish work by other authors over time. Every contributor will be identified by name, with their background and any relevant interests disclosed on their author page.

Independence

Housing Unpacked is independently owned. It is not affiliated with any development company, trade association, advocacy organization, political campaign or government body, and it does not accept payment for coverage. There is no advertising on the site at launch. If sponsorship is ever introduced, it will be visually distinct from our analysis, clearly labeled, and subject to the limits described in our Editorial Standards.

Our commitment to readers is simple: state the assumptions, show the work, correct the record when we get something wrong. Our Corrections Policy explains how.

Contact

The best way to reach us with a question about housing is the Ask Housing Unpacked form; reader questions shape what we write next. To report an error, see the Corrections Policy. For anything else, write to hello@housingunpacked.com.

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