Kingsport Spirit

I follow a TikTok account of a former New Yorker now living in Charleston. She shares her day-to-day discoveries of Southern culture and colloquialisms—often framed as, “Here’s what I assumed before I lived here.” Bottom line: she’s completely bought in. She doesn’t want to change the South; she wants to explain to her followers outside the region why it feels like a welcome breath of fresh air compared to what she left behind.

The Census Bureau regularly releases a new residential construction report—one of the most reliable economic indicators available. I got the latest one in my inbox this week, and the same thing jumped out at me again: the often-stereotyped South is still outbuilding the rest of the country combined. This is not a one-off. I’ve been seeing the pattern for most of the past two decades.

And the South is adding more units to an already larger base.

As future Censuses are taken, population shifts will inevitably reshape representation at every level of elected government based on the concept of “one person, one vote” that we learned in school.

And yet the South is often dismissed. Some observers point to higher poverty rates, lower educational attainment, and our seemingly relentless quest to categorize real people as red, blue, or purple. It’s as if to ask, “Who would want to live in the South?” But those points often miss important nuance.

Take poverty. The official poverty measure has limits, and it doesn’t fully capture differences in local costs—especially housing. That can shape perceptions across regions, even as hardship remains real. Places with higher wages can appear less impoverished even when housing consumes a larger share of the household budget, while places with lower wages can look worse on paper even if day-to-day costs are meaningfully lower.

Or take educational attainment. Counting degrees is easy; measuring financial outcomes is harder. A college diploma can open doors, but it can also come with a long tail of student loan debt. Meanwhile, many trades—electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs—offer strong, stable earnings with little or no college debt. I’m not knocking higher education. I’m simply saying that “more degrees” doesn’t automatically equal “more prosperity,” and it certainly does not capture who is actually financially secure. At the same time, degrees do correlate with higher earnings on average; the point is that outcomes vary widely once you account for debt and local wages.

The lived reality—and a lot of the data—tell a more complicated story. The South continues to perform well on the basics that matter to families: a realistic path to homeownership, comparatively attainable rents, and the ability for working households to earn a living.

I’m a firm believer that people vote with their feet. And because a home is the largest investment most families ever make, where they choose to buy tells you a lot about what they value—and what they can afford.

Which brings us back to the heart of the affordability debate. It often circles the same familiar cast of culprits—investors, landlords, and developers—but the underlying math hasn’t changed. Supply and demand still rules the day. Prices rise fastest when demand is strong and inventory is tight—and inventory stays tight when we are not authorizing and building enough homes in the places people want to live.

That is why the South matters so much in the current cycle. In October 2025, the nation authorized 1.412 million housing units (annualized), and the South accounted for 731,000 of them—just over half of the U.S. total. But the trend line is softening: from September to October 2025 the national total was essentially flat (-0.2%), while the South fell -3.3%. Year over year, the U.S. total is down -1.1% from October 2024, while the South is down -3.9%. If the South is America’s supply engine, those are signals worth paying attention to.

The broader scholarly context is straightforward. Multiple credible estimates put the U.S. short millions of homes, which means we start each demand upswing with too little slack. In that environment, modest shifts in mortgage rates, household formation, migration, or labor markets can translate quickly into price pressure—because there simply isn’t enough inventory to absorb the demand.

Post-2008, we also made it harder to respond. Tighter credit and heightened risk controls after the Great Recession changed the economics for homebuilders—especially smaller builders—while local land-use constraints in many markets continued to accumulate. The research consensus is that restrictive land-use regulation reduces the elasticity of housing supply; when demand rises, constrained supply shows up as higher prices rather than many more units. This is not just a housing story; it is an economic growth story. Work by Hsieh and Moretti links tight housing constraints in high-productivity metros to broader national economic costs by limiting where people can afford to live and work.

Faced with rising rents, some states and cities turn to rent control, while others float more sweeping ideas about social housing. If you haven’t paid attention to what’s happening in New York City lately, it’s worth watching—it has become a high-profile test case for competing housing approaches. In a resurfaced interview from 2021, the mayor’s newly appointed tenant-protection director, Cea Weaver, described a vision that goes well beyond traditional rent regulation: “I’m envisioning a world in which the housing is owned by a collective and people are paying 30% of their income… If your income is zero, you pay zero. If your income is $500,000 a year, you’re paying 30% of that… and the government… is what’s making sure all of that sort of works and cash flows.”

For now, it’s an expressed viewpoint—not enacted policy. But the devil is always in the details. As a long-time student of government, I can reliably say that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Well-intended programs will almost always have unintended consequences.

That brings us to the latest political move. The President has said he is taking steps to bar large institutional investors from buying additional single-family homes and has urged Congress to codify the idea into law. But as of now, the White House has not released clear details or a final legal mechanism, and reporting suggests an executive order is still being drafted as part of a broader housing-affordability package. Even if this policy advances, most analysts note that large institutional investors own a relatively small share of the nation’s single-family housing stock overall—though their presence can be much more concentrated in certain Sun Belt metros. In other words, restricting corporate buyers might help at the margin in a handful of overheated markets, but it cannot substitute for the historic solution we’ve gradually stopped delivering at scale: building enough homes to meet demand.

So, what’s the solution? Make it feasible to build—while setting clear, predictable guardrails. That means sufficient zoning capacity, faster and more transparent approvals, and consistent standards that builders and neighbors can plan around, paired with targeted tenant protections where they’re most needed. Preserving affordability—nationally and in the South—will depend less on arguments about ownership or rent-setting and more on whether communities actually allow enough homes to be built, with infrastructure timed to growth instead of forever playing catch-up. Supply is not a slogan; it is the one lever that reliably bends the long-run curve.

For as long as I can remember, Kingsport has aimed to be “developer-friendly”—not as a giveaway, but as a discipline: an attentive city staff, committed boards and commissions, creative problem-solving, and a streamlined review and permitting process. That common-sense approach has helped keep housing options relatively attainable for both longtime residents and newcomers.

But we can’t take our eye off the ball. If we want affordability to remain a strength, we have to keep expanding supply in practical, balanced ways—building new homes in new neighborhoods, filling in vacant lots and underused parcels in existing neighborhoods, renovating older homes with good bones, and thoughtfully increasing density downtown and along commercial corridors where infrastructure already exists.

As my grandmother used to say, “All things in moderation.” We don’t need to put all our eggs in one basket. We need a diversified housing portfolio—new construction, infill, rehabs, and a mix of housing types—that meets the needs of people at every age and income level. And Kingsport has—and is—doing that.