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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

#211

Post by tptacek »

tsunamifury wrote: post #208
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.

[flagged]

There isn't affordable housing in areas of opportunity. You can easily find cheap housing if you don't care about proximity to jobs or to good school districts.

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

#212

Post by CharlieDigital »

williadc wrote: post #202
CharlieDigital wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more complicated than that. A few years back when my youngest entered 1st grade, I attended some meetings where the superintendent talked about school expansions in the pipeline due to confirmed property development projects. Namely, when new housing is added, there are infrastructure considerations and corresponding expenses that translate to higher taxes . Civil planners have formulas for how much the student…

This is a really well-thought out comment, and I agree with just about everything in it. One comment I'd like to call out for additional consideration is the comment on retirees being priced out due to rising property taxes. In my experience, most retirees have more rooms/land than they can make productive use of. I feel that there should be some pressure for them to sell that property to families who can use it more…

    >  I feel that there should be some pressure for them to sell that property to families who can use it more productively.
I agree to extents. One lives in NY/NJ/CT because this is a big finance and pharma hub and it makes sense to live here while one works and eventually leave when that resource is no longer necessary.

But there's nuance here, too: families. My wife's side is a big Italian family. Everyone's here. What do you do if your grand kids are all here? How do you support your adult kids and help them achieve financial security? Or leave and secure your own? Neither is an easy choice.

    > There are retirement communities...
There are here as well. The reason they work here, as far as I understand it, is that they count towards "affordable housing" units that are mandated by state law here in NJ. But I put that in quotes because these units in 55+ communities are often honestly still quite expensive, especially if you've already paid off your mortgage decades ago.

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

#213

Post by lasky »

The laws of supply and demand don't apply to housing in the Bay Area.

We need affordable housing, not more housing for rich people, made by rich developers. Just because my house is worth $3M and I have $3M in stock options doesn't mean I'm rich. I'm working class, I had to come back from paternity leave to log-in to Slack on my laptop every damn day, and tell Claude how to write this damn software!

Did you sign the petition to block the apartment building down the street? It would RUIN our neighborhood!!

As an aside, I am not part of the problem!! I care about poor people!!! I am a good person!!!!

Oh you want proof? Look at my front lawn: "In this house we believe black lives matter, science is real, love is love..."

Proof point 2: look at my Tesla! "I bought this Tesla before I knew Elon was crazy!"

Plus I voted for Kamala. I'm GOOD. People in Kansas are DUMB and BAD.

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

#214

Post by bitmasher9 »

tsunamifury wrote: post #208
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.

[flagged]

What do you mean by "economic singularity"? If your goal is being near economic opportunity then Austin has plenty.

It’s not NYC or SF, but this suggests that those would be more affordable if they just built more housing.

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

#215

Post by tkel »

kortilla wrote: post #136
tkel wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's loads of other inefficiencies as well. Moving is a huge hurdle. It's difficult to find housing that meets dozens of conditions, and even then you don't respond to supply + demand imagined equilibrium, you pay more or pay less to live near friends or family. It's something you only do a handful of times in your whole life. Trying to use the same analysis as for buying a can of beans is absurd. You might need t…

“People like to drink certain kinds of beer” and “some people don’t drink beer often” are not arguments against supply and demand driving beer prices.

Prices in massively inefficient markets do not follow the supply + demand equilibrium. Beer is not an inefficient market. You're doing the absurd comparison.

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

#216

Post by CyberDildonics »

mountainriver wrote: post #96
nemomarx wrote: post #3

Good news - experimental verification of the law of supply and demand! I'm sure the analysis is welcome though and I hope policy makers try to learn from this. We could densify most american cities quite a lot more.

We could but it’s not always just “good” to make things dense. My hometown has had a huge push to add more housing to make things more affordable. What happened? Rents went down for a couple years then right back up. Except now the city has a bunch of more soulless condos and is horribly congested. Sometimes preserving things and keeping them nice and simple even if it’s costs a bit of a premium is better.

more soulless condos

If you want soul move to New Orleans. Meanwhile people need comfortable places to live that don't make them indentured servants for the rest of their lives. I'll take a neighborhood with walkability and density over an old drafty brick building with no grocery stores any day.

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

#217

Post by slg »

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.

This comment is phrased as if the article is confirming these points when it either doesn't mention them or even directly refutes them. First there is no mention of either crime or rent control in the article. But more importantly, it states that "A key piece of Austin’s strategy has been to encourage the construction of affordable housing." So why are you concluding that affordable housing isn't needed?

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

#218

Post by tharmas »

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.

You have to restrict investors buying up that newly built housing too.

Homes for people. Not investors.

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

#219

Post by CharlieDigital »

jltsiren wrote: post #206
CharlieDigital wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more complicated than that. A few years back when my youngest entered 1st grade, I attended some meetings where the superintendent talked about school expansions in the pipeline due to confirmed property development projects. Namely, when new housing is added, there are infrastructure considerations and corresponding expenses that translate to higher taxes . Civil planners have formulas for how much the student…

The real issue seems to be the top-heavy tax system that forces local governments to rely on property taxes. A local income tax would make them more capable of building and maintaining infrastructure, but that would require lowering taxes at higher levels. (Income taxes are superior to wealth taxes in the sense that income tends to correlate better with the ability to pay tax.) If the demand for housing is high, zoni…

    > If the demand for housing is high, zoning fees can also be used to make developers pay for the infrastructure upfront...
It's not that simple because these often end up as legal battles and in some cases, there are laws already on the books at the state and municipal level that would have to be changed.

The developer for sure does not want to build a school and even if they build the school, they are not going to be paying for the teachers that are going to need to support the increased student body for every decade into the future; that's on the taxpayers.

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

#220

Post by pibaker »

tsunamifury wrote: post #208
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.

[flagged]

It is not affordable if it is located somewhere with no job.
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