Is Oklahoma City housing in one extreme or the other, or neither?

Is housing "broken" or "exciting"?

Both extreme views hit my email box this week.

First, the bad news, from Ralph Bivens' RealtyNewsReport.com in Houston:

The nation's housing market is "broken" because buying a new home is out of reach for too many middle-class Americans, said John McManus, vice president and editorial director of Washington, D.C., construction data firm Hanley Wood's residential group.

"Housing is broken because businesses — when they add up what they have to pay for land, fees, people, materials, and capital — are finding their margins bend toward non-viability," McManus said at Hanley Woods' recent Hive Conference in Austin.

"Housing is broken because the only housing builders, developers, architects, distributors, and investors can build right now profitably is unaffordable to people who earn average salaries, take home median wages, live normal lives," he said.

"Housing is broken because the only way that housing becomes affordable is to wait 25, 30, 40 years, when the new housing today is old, used, in need of repair. We have to change that."

Now, the good news — if disruption is good, and that depends — from the New Homes Insight Podcast of John Burns Real Estate Consulting, Irvine, California:

Homebuilding is in upheaval, with new technologies improving quality of construction as well as quality of living in a new home versus a resale home, said C.R. Herro, vice president of innovation, Meritage Homes, Scottsdale, Arizona:

“The housing industry has changed more in the last 10 years than it changed in the 100 years before that, and it is positioned to change 10 times more in the next 10 years,” Herro said. "Everybody that is in the space recognizes that the industry won't look the same in 10 years, and they are either going to be displaced or participate in their own disruption. ...

"We are the last industry to build something in the dirt and in bad weather.”

Amazon, Google and Apple keep developing technology to make smart homes smarter, and to help homeowners live "conveniently, comfortably, and safely."

Whatever comes next, builders who stay ahead of the tech curve and are able to educate buyers, rather than the other way around, will have the most success.

Now, just looking at raw numbers of building permits, construction was up 4.9 percent through November in the Oklahoma City area compared with the same period last year, according to The Builder Report by Dharma Inc. in Norman.

Builders started 4,526 houses, compared with 4,315 through November 2017, in Oklahoma City, unincorporated Oklahoma County, Bethany, Blanchard, Choctaw, Edmond, Midwest City, Moore, Mustang, Newcastle, Noble, Norman, Shawnee and Yukon, according to the report. Not as great as in the same period 2016-2017, when the number of starts went up 7.4 percent — but plumb promising compared with 2015-2016, when starts fell 17.3 percent.

Oklahoma City is almost always out of step with national business and economic trends. Even the national housing crash 10 years ago showed up here as just a slump:

Credit froze, development stopped, mortgages defaulted, houses went to the lender or to auctions — and construction and sales slowed, but didn't stop, and values pretty much held.

So, between those two extremes, "broken" and "exciting" (as in disrupted), are we both? Neither? In between or out of step as usual?

Builders, speak.

Readers, what do you think?