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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

#491

Post by hunterpayne »

barry-cotter wrote: post #442
slg wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is productive to decline to use propaganda terms. If, every time someone says they support affirmative action they are asked if they support having higher standards for Asian applicants to medical school than for white applicants that’s good because forcing people to defend their support of racist policies reduces support for them. By the same token pointing out that affordable housing doesn’t mean housing people…

Its also helpful to know that there is a specific (US) program called "affordable housing" that subsidizes rents for low income people. The economic effect of that program is to increase rents (but not home prices). This especially hits the working poor who make just a bit too much to have subsidized rents.

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

#492

Post by CalRobert »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #207
muyuu wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's crazy that people nowadays seriously question basic market pressure being a thing

Who are the people that “seriously question basic market pressure being a thing”? Am I missing something?

Every leftist European nimby party comes to mind.

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

#493

Post by hunterpayne »

7speter wrote: post #407
triceratops wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God forbid bad parts of town ever get good.

[flagged]

Can you guess what the #1 source of wealth increase in the AA community has been over the last 20 years? That's right, grandma's house...guess where she lived.

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

#494

Post by KellyCriterion »

tirant wrote: post #467
idiotsecant wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do when that equilibrium point is hopelessly above what the average person can afford?

That means there’s an invisible hand keeping prices up, or basically that the market is not free enough. That’s caused most of the time due to excessive regulation. Another reason is high demand in locations where offer is limited due to physical limitations. There’s always demand to live in Broadway, and offer can never catch up due to its physical limitations.

This is theoretical MBA101 speech:

In reality, those ideas do not apply to the housing market, esp. as there is no real competition; and because the demand is absolutely inelastic (if we are already applying in MBA-wording universe)

Also, that this is true you can see if you compare to housing markets which "are more free than the Australian"

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

#495

Post by TurdF3rguson »

vkou wrote: post #396
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.

> Yes rent control is a terrible idea. When you aren't building more housing, for whatever reason, rent control is the only thing that prevents domestic 'immigrants' into your city from making all the residents homeless. Since cities can't stop migration into them, it's the only tool they have to protect their existing residents. --- PS. If you believe in trial-by-combat for housing, why not a similar approach to bor…

The problem is, rent control scares away developers and traps tenants in apartments that they've grown out of.

Also why should cities prioritize protecting residents based on how long they've lived there? Everyone counts the same.

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

#496

Post by jen20 »

alephnerd wrote: post #115
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Menlo Park has a higher population density than Austin... The majority of it is not Bel Air...

> The majority of it is not Bel Air... Menlo Park was never a "middle class" town. The 101 was always the (literal) redline. The median household income is $210K [0] and it's the same demographic, unlike historically lower middle class but now upper middle class San Mateo [1]. A Menlo Park home address that is on the correct side of the 101 opens the same doors in the Bay that a Bel Air address does in Los Angeles or…

> opens the same doors in the Bay that a Bel Air address does in Los Angeles or an Austin Hills address does in Austin.

West Lake Hills perhaps (which is not technically Austin) - Austin Hills is not remotely prestigious.

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

#498

Post by protocolture »

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.

>If you build housing, but allow crime to rise

Building enough housing that rents go down is the same thing as lowering crime so not much of an issue there.

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

#499

Post by locknitpicker »

ghufran_syed wrote: post #445
nsnzjznzbx wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I grew up in the UK and there is a fuckton of government housing from 60s and 70s. It is ugly but it is housing people. Government doesn't need to make a profit due to taxation.

[flagged]

> like the fine example of Grenfell tower

The Grenfell tower fire was caused by a renovation intended to improve thermal insulation.

The renovation project used an external thermal insulation system that failed to meet both the manufacturer's recommendation and building regulation requirements. The particular system was actually banned in the UK while it was installed.

Tell me why you believe this has anything to do with public housing.

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

#500

Post by jmyeet »

pclowes wrote: post #461
jmyeet wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So pretty much everything you've said here is wrong. Build more housing? In a place like Austin, you can just keep building out, basically. To a point. Eventually cities doing this reach a limit. Houston and Atlanta are pretty much at or beyond that limit. And it's not that building low-density SFH housing is the most economic. It's simply the most subsidized . Every road, every parking space, every sewer pipe, every…

I dont understand your solution, houses are expensive because there are too few of them in desirable places (otherwise we have plenty). The govt becoming a command economy wrt to housing does not fix the supply. If the govt is just supposed to handle all the supply and demand aspects of housing well I have good news, there is a lot of very cheap housing in former Soviet Republics just not desirable housing. Also taxi…

There's no reason for houses to be as expensive as they are. They are expensive because we've created incentives to make them more expensive. This is because we treat houses as investments, allow people to hoard housing, build the wrong tyhpe of housing (because it's more profitable), allow non-residents to use housing to park wealth, etc. So voters vote in politicians who put up barriers to build more housing and to defeat any kind of public transit infrastructure even though it would absolutely benefit people who still want to drive (by removing people from the roads who don't). Why? Because taxes.

Housing should be for residents of that city to provide a utility: shelter. Not as an investment vehicle.

It simply doesn't have to be this way. The poster child for this is Vienna [1][2].

Increasing house prices are an illusion of wealth creation. Let's say you buy a house for $200k but over the years it goes up to $800k. But every house costs $800k so you still have only 1 housing unit's worth of wealth. You've simply increased the barrier for younger people to buy houses.

Put another way: increasing house prices are simply stealing from the next generation and that money is really going to the already-wealthy and, to a lesser extent, the old. Just look at the median age of homebuyers in the US, currently 59 [3].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...

[3]: https://www.apolloacademy.com/median-age-of-all-us-homebuyer...

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