Heart and Home: A column by Josh Ishimatsu

For me, eating breakfast is a solitary activity.  I wake up hours earlier than everybody else in my household.

When I eat breakfast (which is almost every morning, these days), I like something that I can hold in one hand so I can eat at the same time I doom-scroll the news on my phone.

One of my favorite breakfasts is to toast an english muffin, crack an egg in a bowl and microwave it for 30 seconds (the yolk will still be runny), throw all that together with a slice of cheese and maybe a couple shakes of Tapatio or a squeeze of sriracha.  This, in my book, is a good start to the morning.

So, believe me when I say that I like eggs and I am feeling the pain of the high price of eggs.  BUT, I will still argue that the price of housing is more important than the price of eggs.

I wrote a little about this in an earlier column in November but I want to dive deeper on this.

Housing Prices Have More Real World Impact than Egg Prices

If you’re wonky, here’s the math:  In 2021, a dozen eggs cost approximately $1.50 per dozen (according to the St. Louis Fed).  Now, eggs can be somewhat north of $10 per dozen – which on the order of a 700% increase.  This translates to roughly $600/year in increased costs based upon an average household’s consumption of eggs. Over the same 5-year period, national median rent increased by an aggregate total of approximately $500 per month (or $6,000 per year) and local median rents increased by approximately $600 per month (or $7,200 per year).  Not the same as eggs in terms of a percentage increase, BUT substantially more in terms of actual financial impact on everyday families.

There Are No Substitutes for Having Housing

As much as I enjoy my morning egg sandwich, I can also eat peanut butter toast or a quesadilla or a protein bar or a spam musubi and have a similar one-handed breakfast experience.  I can live comfortably without eggs, (even though I’d prefer not to).  In contrast, we don’t have the same range of options when it comes to rising housing costs.  If housing were to become out-of-reach for me and my family, what would we do?  We could double or triple up with other families.  We could move out of California (not something I want to do because I am a San Jose native and most of my extended family still lives in the area).  We could live out of our minivan.  The options are much more dire/serious than eating a bowl of cereal or oatmeal or a yogurt cup in the morning.

The Egg Crisis is More Likely to “Fix Itself”

This point is esoteric but still important.  It has to do with the nature of the product.  Think of all the eggs that get laid in a single day.  Within a matter of days, all of these eggs are gone.  Consumed or thrown out, the supply of eggs is constantly being replenished.  On a slightly longer time frame, the chickens that lay these eggs are also constantly turning over.  And, avian flu, like human flu, is seasonal/cyclical.  At some point, the current version of bird flu will run its course through the industry.  We will have all new chickens producing all new eggs and prices will re-equilibrate, likely at some number lower than they are now.

Housing, on the other hand, takes much more time, money, materials, and labor to produce.  A single housing unit – in contrast to a single egg – lasts decades and decades.  Disruptions to the supply of housing (think the recent fires in Southern California) take substantial amounts of time and money to rectify.  Housing moves on the time scale of years, not days or weeks.  Moving the needle on our current housing crisis will take substantial investments of time, money, and attention.

The Public Conversation Needs to Reflect this Reality

As compared to eggs, housing affects everyday people’s pocket books more deeply, the stakes of losing housing are higher, and we will need more widespread buy-in to make changes to the housing system.  All of this to say that the price of eggs is too much in the public consciousness and the price of housing is not enough in the public consciousness.  So, my ask of you, dear reader, is that the next time someone starts talking about the price of eggs, also bring housing into the conversation.