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Rents are plunging in the most expensive U.S. markets

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Re: Rents are plunging in the most expensive U.S. markets

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I pay a $800 a month mortgage for a 3500 square fort castle with 5 beds and 4 baths on 1/2 acre in BF Indiana. Doesn't mean I am getting a good deal though, just where I happen to be. I would way rather be paying more for a city home :)

But how many tech jobs are located within a reasonable commute of your home?

Since I do remote work, I would say somewhere within 5 to 10% of US jobs.

Re: Rents are plunging in the most expensive U.S. markets

#152
post #139
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rents are set by wages as you have to pay them out of your wages. Are you implying that there's some sort of grand-scale collusion on rent prices? If most rent takers think "hey, the median salary is X so I'll just charge X * 0.33" then what's stopping another rent taker from drastically undercutting that price?

You could argue that home prices are tied to wages and rent is tied to home prices.

I would say that easy access to loaned capital has perversed the connection between wages and house prices a bit.

Re: Rents are plunging in the most expensive U.S. markets

#153

Amazing, supply and demand actually works! Someone should tell all the protestors who opposed construction of new luxury condos because they thought it would somehow increase rents.

Yes, rents are set by wages as you have to pay them out of your wages. Supply and demand also works for buying. Because central banks have ran with ultra-loose monetary policy since forever credit supply is huge and prices detach from wages. What a total mess these guys have created. Easy on the way down, chaos on the way back up.

Wages are a factor of demand (and hence help to drive rent prices), but they're far from being the only factor. Supply is also a key factor though: there is far from being a perfect correlation between wages and rent.

Re: Rents are plunging in the most expensive U.S. markets

#154

Have there been any experiments in legislating ceilings for housing prices? If so, what has been the effect?

> Have there been any experiments in legislating ceilings for housing prices? If so, what has been the effect? As Assar Lindbeck put it, "next to bombing, rent control seems in many cases to be the most efficient technique so far known for destroying cities." For instance, in 1970s when the Bronx was burning, a major contributing factor was New York City rent control. In some neighborhoods of the Bronx and in Harlem,…

"In some neighborhoods of the Bronx and in Harlem, fully a third of the housing stock was literally abandoned by its owners: it was easier to just walk away and let the building rot than to take any action to repair it and continue to collect rent-controlled rents."

It's absolutely scandolous that landlords would be allowed to get away with doing that.

They should be taxed severely if they don't rent out the property within a certain amount of time, or perhaps just have the government take over ownership in that case.

Re: Rents are plunging in the most expensive U.S. markets

#155

Amazing, supply and demand actually works! Someone should tell all the protestors who opposed construction of new luxury condos because they thought it would somehow increase rents.

Yes, rents are set by wages as you have to pay them out of your wages. Supply and demand also works for buying. Because central banks have ran with ultra-loose monetary policy since forever credit supply is huge and prices detach from wages. What a total mess these guys have created. Easy on the way down, chaos on the way back up.

This is a false dilemma. Higher wages cause rent to increase (as you mentioned), but new housing causes rent to decrease (as OP mentioned). If high wages are making housing unaffordable for people, you can increase the housing supply.

I think with the existing situation in SF where you have a lot of young people with high wages who will live in a run-down place in the mission and pay $2-5k, if you build a bunch of luxury condos and need people to fill them, those people will move out of the mission and into a luxury condo. As buying pressure for lower quality housing e.g. off Mission St. is released into the luxury market, prices come down and schoolteachers can once again afford the Mission, or Lower Haight, or wherever.

One valid point I see coming from the anti-development camp is that the new surge in tech jobs is caused by a credit bubble, and once that crashes, you'd have all this excess supply, and it will tank the SF housing market, making the NIMBYs worse off than if expansion happened gradually.

I guess it comes down to whether you "believe in" the sustainability of bay area tech.

Re: Rents are plunging in the most expensive U.S. markets

#156
post #122

Los Angeles though... :( One of my friends just moved here and is sharing a 5-bedroom home with 25 other people. I thought he was bullshitting me, and I still couldn't believe it when I went over. He's paying $600 a month to share a bedroom with four other guys. He told me it was the best thing he could find on 1-day notice. He pays for rent online, and he has no idea who the actual owner is, nor who is actually rece…

Woah, I knew about things being bad in the USA, but I didn't know living conditions are going towards third-world standards :/ Where I live (The Netherlands) there are laws that even protect foreign workers (i.e. from Poland) from all being stuffed in a single room. At this point it's starting to look like even jail cells have more room and privacy.

Where I live (The Netherlands) there are laws that even protect foreign workers (i.e. from Poland) from all being stuffed in a single room.

How do those laws work in practice? Everything I've seen about these sorts of tenant protection regulations make them infeasible to enforce in the case where the tenants are migrant workers who might even be working illegally. The idea is that if a person is already running afoul of the law personally, they will keep quiet about the law-breaking of their landlord lest they upset the apple cart and cause everybody to get kicked out.

Re: Rents are plunging in the most expensive U.S. markets

#157
post #122

Los Angeles though... :( One of my friends just moved here and is sharing a 5-bedroom home with 25 other people. I thought he was bullshitting me, and I still couldn't believe it when I went over. He's paying $600 a month to share a bedroom with four other guys. He told me it was the best thing he could find on 1-day notice. He pays for rent online, and he has no idea who the actual owner is, nor who is actually rece…

Is this place in Santa Monica? Think I know what it is.

Re: Rents are plunging in the most expensive U.S. markets

#158
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, rents are set by wages as you have to pay them out of your wages. Supply and demand also works for buying. Because central banks have ran with ultra-loose monetary policy since forever credit supply is huge and prices detach from wages. What a total mess these guys have created. Easy on the way down, chaos on the way back up.

This is a false dilemma. Higher wages cause rent to increase (as you mentioned), but new housing causes rent to decrease (as OP mentioned). If high wages are making housing unaffordable for people, you can increase the housing supply. I think with the existing situation in SF where you have a lot of young people with high wages who will live in a run-down place in the mission and pay $2-5k, if you build a bunch of lu…

Opposition to development from existing homeowners is entirely logical. They're the ones who have the most to lose.

It's disguising of this NIMBYism as looking out for low-income renters that is ridiculous.

Re: Rents are plunging in the most expensive U.S. markets

#159
post #122

Los Angeles though... :( One of my friends just moved here and is sharing a 5-bedroom home with 25 other people. I thought he was bullshitting me, and I still couldn't believe it when I went over. He's paying $600 a month to share a bedroom with four other guys. He told me it was the best thing he could find on 1-day notice. He pays for rent online, and he has no idea who the actual owner is, nor who is actually rece…

Woah, I knew about things being bad in the USA, but I didn't know living conditions are going towards third-world standards :/ Where I live (The Netherlands) there are laws that even protect foreign workers (i.e. from Poland) from all being stuffed in a single room. At this point it's starting to look like even jail cells have more room and privacy.

This is not representative of the US.

Re: Rents are plunging in the most expensive U.S. markets

#160
post #157
post #122

Los Angeles though... :( One of my friends just moved here and is sharing a 5-bedroom home with 25 other people. I thought he was bullshitting me, and I still couldn't believe it when I went over. He's paying $600 a month to share a bedroom with four other guys. He told me it was the best thing he could find on 1-day notice. He pays for rent online, and he has no idea who the actual owner is, nor who is actually rece…

Is this place in Santa Monica? Think I know what it is.

Hollywood, but I'm sure there's plenty like it all throughout LA.
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