171–180 of 352 posts
Very few trust that supply vs demand doesn't work, but it absolutely does. Sure there will be temporary spikes in price, but as rents go to ridiculous heights (I think $5000 for a 2 br condo is utterly ridiculous, and that prices is about 5 years old in SOMA), it will abate at some point. As long as there isn't a monopoly, or people aren't manipulating the markets, fair and properly functioning markets will self-correct.
Always.
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…
HN will make this a SFO story because it's HN. The reality is, rental housing is a canary and shifts quickly based on market conditions. The market is flooded nationwide, and if you look closely at newer projects, the better banks have slowed down investment.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...
I like the idea of 'economic canaries'. There has been a bipartisan effort to ignore fundamentals for the past 36 +/- years [1]...
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…
Isn't this just called a hostel? That just sounds like your friend is living in a hostel dorm. $20/day actually sounds cheap now that I'm looking at hostel rates in LA: http://www.hostelworld.com/search?search_keywords=Los+Angele...
Article: "East Harlem rents are among Manhattan's fastest-rising this fall" http://ny.curbed.com/2016/11/21/13703220/fall-market-report-...
so I have no idea where business insider is getting it's data from. Also here is a lovely map of the subway stations and the median rents near by.
Notice that Bronx hardly exceeds $2000 (compared to the reported NYC median of $3100).
http://ny.curbed.com/2016/4/29/11535674/map-nyc-subway-rent-...
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…
I've heard of "hacker house" type places in the Bay Area which sound exactly like this. I think the rate was something like $30/day or so. I've also heard of operators of these places who will sign a regular rental contract with a landlord, "convert" the place to such a high density dorm, milk it until the landlord finds out, and when the landlord does, apologize, end the contract, then find another rental to rinse a…
Mine is a 5 bedroom that fits 15 people (one of the 5 bedrooms is for the guy who runs it + his gf). He himself is renting from a landlord who knows that it's a hacker house and is completely happy with that--the landlord gets paid rent while the host takes care of everything that goes wrong (when all utilities get 5x normal use, things break all the time). The host does all this and makes $27/day from each tenant. The whole setup is through Airbnb, and he's made sure he complies with Airbnb rules as well as San Jose rules for renting out houses.
I, too, first rented this place because it was cheap and available on 1 days notice, and while I had planned on moving out to find an apartment, I ended up staying for months because the community is good, the house is well maintained, and the rent really is affordable compared to the cost of most places on Craigslist (which would all be shared houses anyway).
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> 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…
I'm not some anti-government zealot, but think about what you are saying/asking for here.
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So you're arguing that demand increased more than supply in the same period? By your logic, that's the only way that prices could fall while the new housing was built.
I'm not sure what you mean, but I'll try to express myself more clearly. In the most basic sense of economics for prices to fall supply has to increase more than demand. If demand increases more than supply the opposite is true. There's nothing saying that a more supply can't also increase demand or even increase demand more than supply. When more wealthy (or ambitious) people move into an area it often leads to that…
Manhattan is a particularly stark example because not only did its 20th-century building boom go along with long-term price increases, but it also went along with decreased population density. Compared to year 1900 Manhattan, year 2000 Manhattan had more square feet of residential space and fewer people living in it! (The reason for that is that wealthier families demand more square feet of living space per person, and in the case of Manhattan this effect outpaced the net increase in residential space.)
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Isn't this just called a hostel? That just sounds like your friend is living in a hostel dorm. $20/day actually sounds cheap now that I'm looking at hostel rates in LA: http://www.hostelworld.com/search?search_keywords=Los+Angele...
The loan repayments on my three bedroom house are AU$47 a day, or about US$35. ($215,000 purchase price in 2016).
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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.
> protect Curious about what exactly does it mean in this content. Is it about banning full grown and consenting adults from signing a deal because government think it knows best what's good for them?
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This is a theory, but wouldn't dropping upper quartile rents automatically flow down to lower quartiles? Let's say you have a market with 3 apartments for rent. $100, $200, $300 per month. Luxury apartment is created and starts at $400 per month, but no one rents, so they drop it to $300 per month. The guy renting a non-luxury apartment for $300 says "screw that" and moves to the luxury apartment. Plus, the guy renti…
I get the chain effect, but because of the scarcity of land zoned that way, the buildings that are currently the bottom end up torn down rather than rented for less, and the land re-used because the base value of the land doesn't allow the rent to drop. So you see drops across most of the market, except at the bottom. This market effect is actually good! It keeps land cycling to be productively used and everyone gets…