What about housing have you always wondered?
Reader questions shape what gets published here. A good deal of what ends up on this site began as somebody writing in to say that something did not add up.
Send a question
What makes a good question
- Specific beats broad
- "Why is housing expensive?" has no answer short enough to be useful. "Why does the new building on my street rent for $600 more than the one behind it?" has one, and working it out teaches more than the general question ever could.
- A number beats a grievance
- A figure you have actually seen — a rent, a permit fee, an assessment, a line on a listing, a quote in a local news story — gives us something to take apart. Send the number and where you saw it.
- The thing that did not add up
- The best questions usually start as a contradiction. Rents are called unaffordable and developers are called greedy, and yet nothing is being built. If something you have been told does not square with something else you have been told, that gap is the question.
What we do with them
Every question is read. We cannot reply to each one, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we do instead is keep them, notice which ones keep coming back, and answer those in full — with the arithmetic shown — as published analysis that everyone can read rather than as a private note to one person.
We do not publish your name or your email address. Neither is required to send a question. If you include an email, it is used for one thing only: asking you what you meant when a question is ambiguous and worth getting right.
Some questions already have answers here. If yours is about what a term means, the glossary defines it plainly; if it is about how the pieces fit together, Housing 101 works through them in order.