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

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

#261

Post by evantbyrne »

mindslight wrote: post #61
jmye wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just residency. Fix the cost (and capacity) of the education system as a whole, especially for mid-levels. There’s no reason this country should have such a chronic NP shortage, and you don’t need MD/DOs for most of the healthcare gaps we have. You also make rural care viable when you don’t have folks who need to pay off astronomical loans.

How are NPs not just the trend of enshittification? Most doctors already aren't very engaged in the tiny 15 minute slices of appointments, and now we're supposed to be happy that they'll be even less educated? The most straightforward way to address the doctor shortage is to make it so doctors are spending most of their time on healthcare, rather than appeasing "insurance" company bureaucrats with onerous paperwork.

Finding good (and available) primary care providers has always felt like going to the casino in my experience. Currently seeing an older NP who has been great. I could see a future with many more NPs. Obviously, if you know a guy or need a specialist, then do what makes sense.

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

#262

Post by marcus_holmes »

phkahler wrote: post #185
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…

Nope. Smaller more affordable homes would be a better solution. Most people who rent cant afford to buy, but rent is a worse deal long term.

This is only true for two reasons:

1. House prices have risen consistently for the past ~50 years. This is an anomaly (various theories why, my favourite is because women entered the workforce so the income per household increased and we spend as much as we can afford on housing). If/when house prices stop rising consistently then buying doesn't look much better than renting from a financial perspective.

2. Existing laws tend to favour the landlord over the tenant. In countries where this is not true (e.g. most of Europe) and the tenant is favoured, then renting is not so precarious and has lots of advantages.

I lived in rented accomodation in Berlin and it's a completely different experience from renting in the Anglosphere (UK or Australia for me, I don't know about the USA).

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

#263

Post by bombcar »

arcticfox wrote: post #252
bombcar wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s actually quite hard to definitively quantify if renting or owning is better in a given area/scenario. Obviously the case near me where the mortgage payment on a house would be $2600/mo but the rent for the identical one next door is $2000 is going to swing heavily toward renting, but there’s more to it than just that. Maintenance is huge and real and people just seem to ignore it on the “own” side, but 5-10% of…

> but 5-10% of the value of the house a year in maintenance isn’t unheard of. I assure you I am not paying ~$30k in maintenance on my ~$400k house every year... that would be comical

Add it up and work it out; factor out the land if you must (e.g., pretend it’s a landlord business and you’re renting to yourself).

Maintenance items add up, and some only happen every 20-30 years, it can hit hard. A new roof every 30 years at $10k is already noticeable.

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

#264

Post by smus »

dingnuts wrote: post #149
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

people call buying a house to live in an investment but that's because they don't know the technical term is a "hedge" so you know: most localities do treat the house you live in very differently from a tax perspective than they do any additional properties you might have, because everyone is born short housing, until they own 1 place to live. so yes, the proposed bailouts up thread would be for people who bought a h…

Many people have places to live without owning a house. Me for example!

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

#265

Post by Gibbon1 »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #204
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that rents I have little sympathy for people paying property taxes annually that are less than what I have to pay in one month. There should of course be sanity in the system. If you’re retired and can’t the afford property taxes on your home it’s not okay to squeeze you for that little bit of money.

You're not making any sense. Someone paid for a house, they fully expect to pay a lot less than renters do. That's the point of buying a house.

What I realized when I bought a house was for an owner occupier buying a house is the only way to 'invest' the money you'd otherwise spend on rent. You'd never make such a low return illiquid investment otherwise.

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

#266

Post by majormajor »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #54
aynyc wrote: post #33

Just because this doesn’t magically solve the housing crisis, doesn’t mean it’s not a good start. We have to stop looking at magical solutions that will solve all our problems in one shot. We have to start somewhere.

> 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…

> 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.)

"Committing to doing this every year" is VERY different than doing it in one particular year. Yes, that would solve it. But of course, 2022 was part of a very unusual cycle including a lot of migration and you should note the last line in the article:

> Meanwhile, the pipeline of new apartment buildings is drying up. The number of properties under construction is down by roughly one-third from the peak in 2023, the report found. That likely means fewer units coming available in the months ahead, potentially giving landlords room to start raising rents again.

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

#267

Post by deathanatos »

akudha wrote: post #208
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…

How is it fair to compare buying a house to buying a TV? One costs 500$ and the other costs 500k plus ongoing costs like repairs and taxes. Not saying you’re wrong, just that the comparison isn’t apt

Because if you're buying a house for a house, then it (mostly, generally¹) doesn't matter that the housing market has moved downwards and you'll be underwater until you pay down a bit on the house. You still have a house! So long as you can afford the mortgage — something you should have already planned for given you bought the house — you can still afford it. You might have remorse at having paid +$100k right before the market moved, but that's what the parent is saying: that's buyer's remorse, that is speculating on the price, when instead, you should be saying "am I willing (and financially able) to trade $400k for a home to live in?"

(¹I don't want to get too much into the sidetrack that is "but if you're underwater you could lose your home" — yes… that's possible. The example here is a 20% fall in prices — which would be astounding to those of us wanting a home, the thing of dreams — but you put 20% in the down payment, so a single mortgage payment & you're no longer underwater. In reality, the price drop (in rent, but let's work with what we got) was 3.7%. (Don't get me wrong, I'd take that too, as a renter.))

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

#268

Post by majormajor »

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.

This Colorado story includes construction already slowing so why should we be convinced this is the start of a downward trend toward affordability vs a corrective blip after the Covid-era remote work migration trend?

Affordability and desirability are always going to be in constant tension, and any given change - including construction - can tip things more one way than the other. The long-term affordability trends are poor even in states like Texas - is that purely because of construction? No, it also has to do with policies like trying to poach established businesses from other states and importing wealth and high salaried individuals. But it shows that development is no panacea and that even in areas with more open land to build more new construction on there are still powerful trends in the US towards sprawl, low-to-medium density, and rising cost of living. Without explicit intervention like subsidies or direct government construction development will slow - focusing on higher-ROI units for the same spend vs pure unit count - as developers worry more about not being able to command the per-unit price they want if they were to aim for quantity.

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

#269

Post by 7e »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #54
aynyc wrote: post #33

Just because this doesn’t magically solve the housing crisis, doesn’t mean it’s not a good start. We have to stop looking at magical solutions that will solve all our problems in one shot. We have to start somewhere.

> 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…

It is instructive to look at how we got expensive housing in the first place. Expensive housing comes from a surplus of people. How did we get all those people? By building more housing and having people breed there.

New housing is only a temporary salve and perpetuates a vicious cycle. The people who move into these new units will have more babies, because they have new habitat. These babies will grow up and eventually drive up housing prices. Even before then, people will move or emigrate into cheap housing and fill it up. Housing then becomes expensive again, only with more people filling up the earth: polluting the air, straining water supplies, clogging roads, uglifying neighborhoods with massive buildings, overrunning parks and trails.

Thankfully, expensive housing, in part, has reduced American baby making to 1.6 per woman, a sustainable rate. Unfortunately, because humans are living longer, the US population still continues to rise. The U.S. Census Bureau currently projects that the resident U.S. population will peak at nearly 370 million around the year 2080, before it gradually declines to about 366 million by 2100. If immortality is invented before 2080, the population may never go down, ever.

Meanwhile, the latest estimates put the current U.S. population (as of mid‑2025) at approximately 342 million. The population has increased roughly 4.5x since 1900. From building new housing.

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

#270

Post by davidw »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #161
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

> I moved from midtown Manhattan to western Wyoming. If I could afford to live in Jackson, I would love to someday. But alas, Jackson real estate makes Seattle look cheap.

Really? It's very small, isolated and while there is a ton of outdoor stuff, I don't think there's much else. There are tons of people who enjoy the urban amenities in places like NYC or San Francisco who would have fun for about a week and then be desperate to go somewhere with more going on.

Just as there are plenty of people from outdoor towns who would enjoy hanging out in NYC for a week but then miss mountain biking or something.

I couldn't stand the rain in Seattle. You'd have to pay me to live there. Some people apparently like it or at least don't mind it much, though!

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