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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

#321

Post by tharmas »

triceratops wrote: post #248
tharmas wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to restrict investors buying up that newly built housing too. Homes for people. Not investors.

No not really. You just have to restrict the same investor from buying all the housing in an area, and prevent investors from colluding on rents.

Investors add to demand for housing. This will help drive up prices. And no, builders will not necessarily increase supply if they can realise increased margin of profit due to increased demand. We see that with RAM manufacturers. RAM suppliers constrain supply to boost margins. Same with house builders. The difference is people can go without RAM but everyone needs a place to live.

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

#322

Post by diogenescynic »

Wow it's almost like the law of supply and demand is in fact accurate. Who would have thought basic economic 101 would be proven out? It's almost like when you allow supply to increase to meet demand the price equilibrium can move down. Shocking.

I say this with a bit of righteous anger though because the moronic democrats in California want to virtue signal about housing and homelessness but they make it downright as difficult and expensive as possible to increase housing supplies. The democrats in California have done nothing but make our problems worse, even as there are states we can look to with proven examples to solve our problems. Nope... more housing lotteries and BMR units will be required instead of just making it easier to actually build..

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

#323

Post by cuuupid »

slg wrote: post #306
cuuupid wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affordable housing = housing that regular people can afford The only silly thing here is that "low income housing" got rebranded as "affordable housing" and absolutely everything else got rebranded as "luxury homes" for political reasons. "Market-rate housing" is even sillier given that it is literally the opposite of what "affordable housing" policies dictate

I'm not going to debate what the definitions should be, I'll just say I don't think it is productive to join an existing conversation using terms with different definitions than everyone else uses. Defining all housing as inherently "affordable" makes the term meaningless and even if you disagree with the motivations behind the desire for "affordable housing", at least the term has meaning in the way it's typically u…

You are quite literally debating what the definition should be, because this is _not_ the existing definition of affordable housing, it is legally what OP is saying. "Affordable housing" is just when the household spends What >youIn recent years, most 'affordable housing' policy has been advanced by progressives, who use that term for marketing purposes, whereas the actual policy primarily relates to 'low income housing' or even 'very low income housing.' This does not mean 'affordable housing' = 'low income housing', it just means the term 'affordable housing' is used in the title and the actual measures advanced are related to AMI and 'low income housing.'

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

#324

Post by easterncalculus »

Austin is not a success story. It is a treading water story, and an example of lying with statistics because most of where it's cheap to live in "Austin" literally wasn't Austin when these measurements start. They just literally redrew the lines in part to make this headline.

If you want a success story, look a Vienna. That's what actual community and housing looks like and its because of the exact opposite of what econ clowns on here believe, non-market housing.

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

#325

Post by mmooss »

triceratops wrote: post #302
mmooss wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for whom? If it's good for the residents, that's great. If it's bad for the residents, who get driven out, but good for some developers and outside rich people - that's what gentrification is.

Unless all of the housing is owned by non-residents prior to gentrification, some residents always benefit from their neighborhood going upscale. Either through increased home values, allowing them to sell and improve their lives. Or because it's now a more pleasant area to live in. Even renters in gentrifying areas may profit if housing construction outpaces population growth. Yes, they may have to move, but also th…

> increased home values, allowing them to sell and improve their lives

That also raises property taxes, making the neighborhood unaffordable and driving them out.

> it's now a more pleasant area to live in.

For new wealthy residents. People who have spent lifetimes there don't want everything to change and have their communities destroyed.

> Yes, they may have to move, but also the places they move to on their current budget may be nicer - because the people who can afford better have moved too.

These are theoretical and very general averages. The actual individuals often do not benefit. Being forced to move is not a mere inconvenience to your theory.

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

#326

Post by verteu »

caditinpiscinam wrote: post #282

You say progress, I say enshittification. What this article says: *The median apartment rent in Austin has dropped X% over the past 5 years* What this article does not say: *Apartments in Austin cost X% less to rent now than they did 5 years ago* It's completely possible for the cost of the average apartment in a city to go down, while the cost of existing apartments increases. How does this happen? The enshittificat…

No, plenty of indices use a "repeat-rent" methodology (comparing only prices changes across the same unit) to address the problem you describe.

They show Austin rents going down, eg Zillow's Observed Rent Index: https://www.zillow.com/research/data/

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

#327

Post by pclowes »

easterncalculus wrote: post #312
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.

And also expand the city line for what "Austin" is so you can include the cheaper, far from everything housing that you refuse to build. Yes, it does need to be affordable, and a certain percentage of it needs to be non-market housing. Housing isn't an elastic commodity. Get real.

But where do you draw the limit on moving the line in?

Do I get to demand affordable housing overlooking Central Park in NYC? Beachside in Malibu?

If you want large incentive for development at scale you need to allow developers to make fat margins or else you wont get too many of them. Yes you can use affordable housing to do that. Eg: in the article they got higher density and exceptions (aka “fat stacks”) for building affordable housing units.

This is all policy tradeoffs at the end of the day. Eg: a tent is not “housing”, why? Because of reasonable policy. Same thing with housing codes etc. All directionally wise/good. But at the same time you can have bad affordable housing policy.

I do think housing is elastic and a cities policies around that elasticity determines if they will thrive or stagnate.

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

#328

Post by bluGill »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #238
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…

Water. You need clean water to grow a city. There isn't much of that to spread around anymore.

most people posting here are talking about california or texas - desert or near deserts where there isn't enough water.

however there are many places where there is more than enough water. East of the mississippi for example. other continents also have areas where there is plenty.

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

#329

Post by tadfisher »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #108
rconti wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in Menlo Park they're just flat surface parking lots, not even multi-story structures. The planned development is multi-story housing with parking underneath. To be fair, I am boycotting the (similar) underground garage over at Springline because they're clearly made only for people in Range Rovers or whatever. They have those AWFUL ticket machines, set too far back (to avoid getting hit) and too high to access…

> They have those AWFUL ticket machines, set too far back (to avoid getting hit) and too high to access from a normal car. Are you sure it's the ticket machines? Around here, the ticket machines have stayed the same, but it's now impossible to use them without stopping the car and getting out, because car manufacturers have decided I need eight inches of empty space between myself and the side of the car.

That eight inches is called "side impact protection" and, while it sucks to not be able to comfortably rest your arm on the window sill, it is pretty important to have in the event of an impact to the side.

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

#330

Post by CharlieDigital »

jltsiren wrote: post #272
CharlieDigital wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

The underlying assumption is that laws will be changed when necessary. If it's not possible to do that, most issues probably can't be fixed. More fundamentally, this is related to the principle of subsidiarity that is occasionally popular in the EU. Everything the government does should be done by the lowest level that can reasonably do it. And to enable that, local and state governments should have sufficiently wide…

Laws are voted on by the people. And if the municipal elections are scoped to current residents, they will vote to not expand in almost every case.

At the state level, we have housing laws that mandate ratios of affordable housing. Many townships faught this in court (and lost) because schools and infrastructure are capital projects. Bonds are secured today against some future tax base.

Don't forget that developers and investors are voters too (and lobbyists) who are going to vote against the municipalities.

My point: it is a nuanced situation and not as simple as "Got mine FU" or "just build more". Build where? How do you pay for it fairly?

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