71–80 of 352 posts
Do we know what policies are genuinely effective at improving housing affordability? This is the one biggest thing the (proverbial?) middle class have been struggling to make gains on over the last generation in a lot of otherwise successful places.
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I've heard similar reports about the London rental market, but then again when it comes to the housing market, the UK press report on every scrap of noisy data they can get their hands on. London has also seen a huge glut of (supposedly) high-end property come online. Builders are struggling to sell, so they're now starting to offer discounts on the new housing stock [1]. If what the article says is true, I would be…
London, I believe, has a big problem with the Brexit because many banks plan on or are already leaving the country. No banksters, no tenants for outrageously expensive properties.
Where in Boston could someone possibly find a two bedroom for $2600? Shenanigans
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Its the land not the apartment which is expensive. Land, especially in cities, is finite. This makes it different to other mass produced products
So build up. Here in London people don't build up, for some reason (I mean other than office spaces, obviously). I think it's this nefarious british mentality that old is good. So you never demolish any 2 story buildings, you just build more outwards. Then you complain that the prices are insane.
I know nothing about the San Francisco housing market apart from what I've heard in discussions here on HN. The received wisdom here seemed to be that powerful NIMBY lobbies in SF were preventing needed development and causing the sky-high rent. But this article is talking about an "historic construction boom". Did something change regarding development in SF? Or was the NIMBY effect always a bit over-stated? Anyone…
The "historic boom" is big compared to the very low rate of new construction of the last few decades, but still small compared to the need and potential. There is a fair amount of construction downtown, but most of the city remains frozen in time. That said, I wouldn't blame it all on NIMBYs. Few changes of any kind get done in this town.
Zumper is pretty inaccurate when it comes to SF I have found. The influx of new residents still vastly outpaces new construction + people leaving SF. As such, rents are not going down. The easiest way to verify this is just to ask anyone trying to rent in SF.
A friend used to rent out a spare room in SF on a regular basis. Two years ago, he could get $1850 for a single room with it's own bath room, furnished. We're talking 6-10 replies from a Craiglist post within 24 hours. Stopped renting it out about a year ago. He just posted it again. Zero takers at $1850. Finally got someone for $1600 (-13% decrease in rent) after a month. A dramatic change. The rental market in SF i…
Yet $1600 is still absurdly high for such a simple living space.
Let's hope it starts approaching Newport prices soon :-)
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There are two kinds of real estate "prices": rental rates and property sales prices. Ceilings on property sales prices are very rare. Probably the most common example is resale price caps on government sponsored housing for lower income buyers. Price ceilings on rent are more common but still rare. This is commonly known as rent control. Like all price caps the result is shortages in varying degrees depending on how…
Hum, interesting. I think of rent control differently, but maybe the way you describe it is what is normally meant. When I hear rent control, I hear controlled increase in rent over time for existing rental units. You make sure all rental units are profitable, but you protect existing tenants from being able to afford their rent to not being able to in a year, simply because a neighborhood has increased in desirabili…