The U.S. has a chronic shortage of reasonably-priced housing. Decades of policy and program intervention at federal, state, and local levels has not substantively alleviated this problem. Consequently, alarmingly high proportions of the population spend over 30% of their income on housing costs and are deemed housing cost-burdened. Housing cost-burdened households have a much lower quality of life than those that are not. Thus, the housing affordability problem is a serious social concern. Jerry Anthony explores whether the lack of reasonably-priced housing adversely impacted per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the 100 most populous metro areas of the country. They  use publicly available data for three time points (2000, 2010, and 2015) and changes in the proportion of cost-burdened households in metros as the experimental variable. Results show that decreases in housing affordability had a statistically significant negative effect on economic growth in these metros. Over 80% of the national GDP is generated in U.S. metros, and increasing housing affordability there may help grow the U.S. economy. Therefore, policies to increase housing affordability, long seen as a social imperative, may well be an economic imperative also.

https://www.nlihc.org/sites/default/files/Housing_Affordability_Economic_Growth.pdf