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Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

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Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

#181

Post by Tiktaalik »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #39
xwowsersx wrote: post #5

You mean to tell me that increasing supply lowers price? Fascinating.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of people -- especially further left -- who fight this kind of reasoning. They insist that the housing market is different , and that just building more private housing won't help. No amount of evidence will convince these people, because they already made up their mind ahead of time: their ideology says the market can't help, so the market can't help, period. Any evidence to the contrary…

There's a lot of talking past each other on this issue. Sure there's probably clueless people out there, but a lot of left wing housing activists that are skeptical of free market housing liberalization understand very well economics and the benefits of housing supply, but are concerned about the time horizons involved and concrete near term impacts on low income residents.

It is of overall net benefit over the long term to raze a small three story walkup apartment and build something denser, overall increasing the amount of housing.

However, in the short term it's immediately quite (sometimes existentially) bad for affordability if existing affordable housing is destroyed and replaced by brand new (and thus inherently luxury) housing.

So accordingly we naturally see low income housing activists push back against some redevelopment and ask why development is not occurring in wealthy single family home areas where the amount of people impacted is less and class those that are not remarkably negatively impacted.

Personally I think the data shows that in general it is still really beneficial to build out as much housing as possible and avoid the negative impacts of a shortage, but I do think there are people validly pointing at a real problem of displacement.

Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

#182

Post by rcpt »

nomilk wrote: post #118

Dumb question, many cities suffer from extremely high property (i.e. land) prices. I understand the NIMBY barrier. But I don't understand why it isn't more common to simply.. start a new city. Especially in countries like Australia where property prices are sky high and alternative places for setting up a new city are abundant. Maybe internet connectivity was previously a barrier, but now.. starlink. I put this quest…

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Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

#183

Post by hammock »

pclowes wrote: post #176

Its wild how the solution to housing costs is really just: Build more housing. Keep law and order. No it doesn’t need to be “affordable”. Yes rent control is a terrible idea. Just build more housing. Note: that the US already has plenty of housing and housing costs basically go up in areas of low crime relative to economic opportunity. If you build housing, but allow crime to rise, you have wasted everybody’s time.

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Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

#184

Post by BenFranklin100 »

wcfrobert wrote: post #169
rconti wrote: post #11

Meanwhile, California is also trying to build housing near transit, but Menlo Park wants to preserve the character of downtown by preserving dirty, cracked, flat, surface-level parking lots like it's 1950.

NIMBYism has never been about preserving neighborhood characteristic, or noise and traffic concerns. Menlo Park is not Big Sur. Sure, some concerns are reasonable and should be investigated, but most of the time they're bureaucratic distractions that's been weaponized by people who want to delay progress and protect their investment. For most Americans, A house is their primary savings account, retirement plan, and p…

It’s going to take a SCOTUS decision overturning Ambler vs Euclid in my opinion.

We certainly will not see zoning reform until the Boomers die.

Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

#185

Post by svpk »

cyberax wrote: post #164
lumirth wrote: post #12

I mean… duh? Genuinely baffled at people struggling to understand this. When there’s more of a thing, it costs less. Which is good when that thing is essential, like housing. Not sure the idea of housing being an asset which endlessly accrues value is good for anybody involved, long-term. Open to disagreement, though! I’m no economist.

> When there’s more of a thing, it costs less. Yeah, and when we add lanes to roads, the average speeds increase and commutes get shorter. Right? Also, if the government gives me $1 billion, then I'll be rich. But what happens if the government gives everyone $1 billion? Everyone will be rich, right?

... Your examples seem to undercut your point if I'm understanding what you're trying to say.

In your first example the "cost" in the form of traffic etc. was reduced so more people "buy" in the sense that they go on the road until you reach a new "cost" equilibrium. In practice that equilibrium is quite close to the original cost so it doesn't fix the issue traffic. But if that same number of people had driven before the high way expansion traffic would have been way worse; the cost would have been too high so they previously opted not to drive.

In your second example by increasing the supply of money the money ends up costing less; it becomes worthless due to inflation.

When there's more of a thing it cost less.

To be fair, building more housing can be like highway example. If there's tons of pent up demand of people looking to move somewhere increasing supply dramatically can fail to move the needle on cost because there's many marginal buyers who all have basically the same price. If you've got a million people who want to move somewhere and are all willing to pay up to 500k for a house the price of a house won't fall under 500k until you've built at least a million more homes.

Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

#186

Post by jfoster »

nomilk wrote: post #118

Dumb question, many cities suffer from extremely high property (i.e. land) prices. I understand the NIMBY barrier. But I don't understand why it isn't more common to simply.. start a new city. Especially in countries like Australia where property prices are sky high and alternative places for setting up a new city are abundant. Maybe internet connectivity was previously a barrier, but now.. starlink. I put this quest…

> Crazy that the reason we can't have an order-of-magnitude reduction in the cost of the most important thing people need (shelter) is not due to resource constraints, but man-made ones.

You say that as though reduction in cost of housing is a universal desire, but it isn't.

Suppose a couple of years ago you took a $500,000 loan to buy a $700,000 house, which you'll be paying off for the next 10 years. Would you like the market value of your house to decline substantially during that time?

If there's enough of the population bought into property, it won't be politically feasible to allow the value of homes to decline.

Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

#187

Post by jojobas »

nomilk wrote: post #118

Dumb question, many cities suffer from extremely high property (i.e. land) prices. I understand the NIMBY barrier. But I don't understand why it isn't more common to simply.. start a new city. Especially in countries like Australia where property prices are sky high and alternative places for setting up a new city are abundant. Maybe internet connectivity was previously a barrier, but now.. starlink. I put this quest…

There is no shortage of cheaper existing cities in Australia, but everyone wants to live in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth.

The existing smaller cities just slowly wither.

Existing homeowners of the capitals have little interest in real estate prices dramatically dropping - would you?

Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

#188

Post by pclowes »

lelandfe wrote: post #65
TulliusCicero wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's typically local residents who fight this. There's a "fuck you, got mine" tendency to pull up the ladder once you've made it.

It's just as much "change is scary" and "I like this as it is." It's a very human reaction.

I dont think its just that. Nimbys also see:

- many new building being very ugly (side note: ugly buildings no matter how green get torn down and are this not as green as building that are beautiful)

- increasing density bringing increased crime

- increased density actually turning out to be less efficient on a per capita tax basis (this is always wild to me, cities should be spending much less per capita than rural areas but arent)

Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

#189

Post by fragmede »

0_____0 wrote: post #45
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, do we just need to nationalize housing construction? If the free market apparently just can't handle it?

Public housing projects were and sort of still are a thing. Glass Amendment limits the number of units that can be produced but most areas are well below those limits and the larger issue is that there's no budget or political willpower for social housing projects right now.

There wasn't, but given the housing market right now, I don't know that there isn't.

Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

#190

Post by [deleted] »

pclowes wrote: post #176

Its wild how the solution to housing costs is really just: Build more housing. Keep law and order. No it doesn’t need to be “affordable”. Yes rent control is a terrible idea. Just build more housing. Note: that the US already has plenty of housing and housing costs basically go up in areas of low crime relative to economic opportunity. If you build housing, but allow crime to rise, you have wasted everybody’s time.

[deleted]
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