Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market • Hacker News Board

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#121

Post by ozgrakkurt » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:45 PM UTC

standardUser wrote: post #110

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because this doesn’t magically solve the housing crisis It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.) [1] http://censusreporter.org/pr…

> You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater If you buy a house for $400k, and suddenly it is worth $300k, you don't need to be "bailed out" for your purchase decision. You should have been certain that the house was worth $400k to you at the time of purchase. Otherwise you're a speculator, and we shouldn't be bailing out speculators. It's called buyer's remorse. We accept…

Yeah, pretty sure a government won’t bail me out if I invested in a stock so much that it would crush me if the stock went down. If buying a house is an investment and not for living, then it should be treated like it is.

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#122

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:46 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #116

davidw wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument always comes up when discussing a specific place. "Everyone would move to ________ because it is the best place in the spiral arm of the Milky Way", where ________ is Boulder, Bend, Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Hawai'i, Santa Fe, etc.... etc.... It cannot be true for all of them. So they all need to build and people will figure out where they actually want to live. Bozeman, Montana, a…

If everyone could live where they wanted to live, then ya, why wouldn't everyone want to live in the best cities? If you have fixed demand, then you can definitely "build" your way out of a housing crisis. Bozeman, for example, doesn't have many jobs, so you can't really live there if you don't bring your own money. A big city like Seattle or Denver... they have lots of jobs, so they will grow at least to the point t…

> If everyone could live where they wanted to live, then ya, why wouldn't everyone want to live in the best cities?

I moved from midtown Manhattan to western Wyoming. People have diverse preferences. (Even if we assume uniform preferences, densifying the population into a few cities so we can reclaim our wildlands sounds like a dream.)

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#123

Post by AnthonyMouse » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:46 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #81

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.) That is only if you believe that more capacity does not induce more demand, which really…

Induced demand can only function if there's a scarcity to begin with, and it's premised on increased supply increasing affordability (that's the mechanism by which it works), but these axiomatic derivations don't matter because we have case studies (in MN, in TX, and now CO, a story we're literally commenting on). Empirical observations win.

> Induced demand can only function if there's a scarcity to begin with, and it's premised on increased supply increasing affordability (that's the mechanism by which it works)

I don't think that's how the theory is supposed to work. It's more along the lines of, if you build more housing in a place then more people live there and then the higher population density can sustain more shops and jobs, and then people want to live near shops and jobs so the local demand increases.

There are two reasons the theory doesn't actually mean that you can't solve the problem with more housing.

The first is, the effect isn't infinite. As the reductio, if the entire New York Metro area had the population density of Manhattan, it would house 450M people, which is more than the entire US population. So you can build more housing than you have people to move into it even if that would literally cause the entire national population to move to the same place, and of course building that much housing in one place wouldn't cause literally everyone to move there anyway, so the amount you need in practice is far less than that.

And the second is, it's a local effect that comes from net migration. If you build more housing in Denver and that causes people to want to move from Austin to Denver, even if you don't build enough to overcome that in Denver itself, you'd still be lowering housing costs in Austin. And if you're simultaneously building new housing everywhere then there is no net migration and therefore no induced demand anywhere.

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#124

Post by davidw » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:46 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #116

davidw wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument always comes up when discussing a specific place. "Everyone would move to ________ because it is the best place in the spiral arm of the Milky Way", where ________ is Boulder, Bend, Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Hawai'i, Santa Fe, etc.... etc.... It cannot be true for all of them. So they all need to build and people will figure out where they actually want to live. Bozeman, Montana, a…

If everyone could live where they wanted to live, then ya, why wouldn't everyone want to live in the best cities? If you have fixed demand, then you can definitely "build" your way out of a housing crisis. Bozeman, for example, doesn't have many jobs, so you can't really live there if you don't bring your own money. A big city like Seattle or Denver... they have lots of jobs, so they will grow at least to the point t…

The population of Bozeman is still growing, albeit more slowly. It's not like people left. They just built a lot of housing, vacancy rates increased and prices dropped.

Same thing happened in Austin, Texas, which is a much bigger city with lots of jobs.

The underlying story is that building enough housing is a good way to fix a shortage of housing, which is what causes high prices.

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#125

Post by jmyeet » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:47 PM UTC

Developers don't build units to lower prices. If prices go down, it's because developers overbuilt or there are other macro factors at play. I suspect it's a bit of both.

A core tenet of capitalism and neoliberalism is private property. We're rapidly approaching a point of land reform. I think private property is a mistake. Note: this is distinct to personal property. You can own your own home, maybe even a second home. Anything beyond that should be outright disallowed or taxed into oblivion.

We should simply not allow people to hoard property. It is state-sanctioned violence to deny people shelter by intentionally driving up the price of a basic need. Housing unaffordability is the number one contributor to homelessness, which I think is up 18% last year.

I realize that's a pipe dream. What can we do instead? Do what Vienna does. Austria is a social democratic country that's still capitalist in nature. Yet ~60% of the housing stock is owned by the government. It is remarkably cheap to do so.

Public-private partnerhips or simply looking to the private sector to solve these problems are nothing more than wealth transfer from the government to billionaires.

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#126

Post by tptacek » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:48 PM UTC

FireBeyond wrote: post #78

jmye wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a weird comment. What do you think you need an MD for, in your primary care visit, that an NP can’t do? What do you actually know about their education? What do you actually know about licensing? How much time, in a day, do you think doctors are spending on “insurance”, and what specific experience leads you to believe that? (Because the actual answer is “near zero for literally any provider who isn’t completely…

You can be an NP in as few as 4-5 years out of high school with some courses. That’s to me the definition of not knowing what you don’t know. I’m a critical care paramedic who has corrected many NPs on fairly fundamental learning. I’ve found that nurses with significant field experience do very well, but there are plenty of courses who will “zero to hero” you fresh out of high school. Meanwhile, PAs go through a prog…

Doctors begin delivering clinical care in year 3 of med school. You're doing a sleight of hand with this "out of high school" thing; doctors are also educated "out of high school", the difference between the two roles is 1-2 years before clinical practice, and NPs tend to practice supervised for longer periods of time than doctors.

And, obviously, NPs cover a smaller range of conditions than doctors.

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#127

Post by next_xibalba » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:48 PM UTC

MangoToupe wrote: post #57

next_xibalba wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're telling me if an additional, say, 100k units came on the market in Denver in the next year, housing prices wouldn't fall dramatically such that all working people could afford housing? Working people should be able to afford housing near where they work. So let's press the gas pedal on building. The mentally ill and drug addicted should be subject to mandatory treatment or jail until such time as their unde…

> all working people could afford housing? Hey, if that's the metric you're pushing for, good for you. I'm pushing for housing as a human right. I never caught the calvinist bug of "torture the non-productive until they conform and perform" method of population management.

Human rights don't depend on the compulsory labor of others. They are inherent. Housing doesn't qualify.

"torture the non-productive until the conform or perform" is possibly the most inflammatory framing of "you should not make other people pay for your housing" I've seen.

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#128

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:48 PM UTC

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #121

standardUser wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater If you buy a house for $400k, and suddenly it is worth $300k, you don't need to be "bailed out" for your purchase decision. You should have been certain that the house was worth $400k to you at the time of purchase. Otherwise you're a speculator, and we shouldn't be bailing out speculators. It's called buyer's remorse. We accept…

Yeah, pretty sure a government won’t bail me out if I invested in a stock so much that it would crush me if the stock went down. If buying a house is an investment and not for living, then it should be treated like it is.

> pretty sure a government won’t bail me out if I invested in a stock

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspan_put

More pointedly, you're not in a position to block equity capital markets reforms in the way homeowners are in respect of housing reform.

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#129

Post by tptacek » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:50 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #123

tptacek wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Induced demand can only function if there's a scarcity to begin with, and it's premised on increased supply increasing affordability (that's the mechanism by which it works), but these axiomatic derivations don't matter because we have case studies (in MN, in TX, and now CO, a story we're literally commenting on). Empirical observations win.

> Induced demand can only function if there's a scarcity to begin with, and it's premised on increased supply increasing affordability (that's the mechanism by which it works) I don't think that's how the theory is supposed to work. It's more along the lines of, if you build more housing in a place then more people live there and then the higher population density can sustain more shops and jobs, and then people want…

A longer r/AskEconomics thread on this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/y3ywl2/why_wo...

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#130

Post by standardUser » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:52 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #118

standardUser wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater If you buy a house for $400k, and suddenly it is worth $300k, you don't need to be "bailed out" for your purchase decision. You should have been certain that the house was worth $400k to you at the time of purchase. Otherwise you're a speculator, and we shouldn't be bailing out speculators. It's called buyer's remorse. We accept…

> If you buy a house for $400k, and suddenly it is worth $300k, you don't need to be "bailed out" for your purchase decision...we shouldn't be bailing out speeculators When the speculators vote, yes, you need to bail out the speculators. > It's called buyer's remorse It's called building consensus. At the end of the day, if it costs making homeowners whole to gain their buy in to solve the housing crisis, that's mone…

I agree there are political considerations, but we are talking about a scenario where the only damage done is that the buyer must continue to live in the home they purchased at the price they purchased it for, and where the recipient of government benefits is a household capable of purchasing a house, presumably at the height of the market. Is a tax dollar better spent placating grumpy homeowners who already have a place to live they can afford, or by more directly building more housing and infrastructure?