NPR.

This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrienne Ma.

And I'm Waylon Wong.

One of the hot topics of the U.S. presidential campaign was housing affordability.

Both candidates talked about what they would do to boost the supply of homes and bring prices down.

The search for affordable housing is a major concern for a lot of people in the U.S.

People like Olivia Garcia. She's from Los Angeles, and earlier this year, Olivia and her

fiancé opted to sell their stuff and travel

overseas instead of paying L.A. rents. We did our traveling because we were like, oh my God,

it's so expensive. Just like living here, being in L.A., you know, might as well go spend our

savings doing this because it'll be cheaper anyways. We're making girl math would state that I am making

money traveling. Do you have to take a course in girl math to do it? Some of us were born doing

girl math, Adrienne. But, you know, Olivia and her fiance did eventually return to the U.S.

so that Olivia's fiance could start a new job.

And back in L.A., the apartment search was grim.

It's just all around really nightmarish.

Like, the options are pretty slim.

Olivia was feeling what politicians have identified as a housing shortage.

But how many homes would it take to fix the problem? This gets us into another kind

of mathematical conundrum. A girl math conundrum? No, housing math this time. And it turns out,

trying to calculate the size of the problem is a bit of an economic brain teaser. So today

on the show, we explain the tricky business of quantifying the U.S.

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