One of my new neighbors works for MaineHousing - they paid 750K for a sprawling three bedroom house, which the last owners bought for 400K a few years earlier. It's kind of funny to imagine this guy - with his fleet of Mercedes and Range Rovers out front - setting up in one of his spare rooms to write papers on affordable housing.

It also explains why this outlook report seems so out of touch, repeatedly using establishment reasoning to explain away the rapidly increasing costs of living. According to MaineHousing, high energy costs are a result of the Russian war, high rental costs are a result of inflationary pressures on landlords, increased evictions are due to landlords removing tenants from units to renovate them, and increased homelessness is due to a better way of counting the unsheltered.

By that logic, I'm sure if you asked their thoughts on the rising price of eggs, they'd tell you the high prices are due to the avian flu, or whatever the news said that day. Greed is hardly acknowledged in this report, despite being proven by data to be a major contributor to price increases across the board.