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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

#561

Post by TurdF3rguson »

vkou wrote: post #509
TurdF3rguson wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Also why should cities prioritize protecting residents based on how long they've lived there? Everyone counts the same. That's a great question. Why do countries prioritize existing citizens over all people who want to move into them? We are, after all, all the same. Two legs, two arms, just under a dozen fingers, most of us aren't destructive shitheads. If we just let in anyone who wants to emigrate, you wouldn't…

You're not emigrating anywhere, lol. Should I be treated like trash when I move from Bronx to Queens? How about SoHo to Tribeca? All US citizens have the same rights and every vote counts the same as every other vote.

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

#562

Post by donkeybeer »

rayiner wrote: post #451
adrianN wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is the possibility that the government builds housing, since the government doesn't have to care about direct profits and can include the overall economic effects of affordable housing in its calculations. We don't expect much direct profits from roads either, but we keep building more and more of them.

That only makes sense if there is a positive externality from housing. Is there?

Why shouldn't housing, like any other goods, be as cheap as possible for as high quality as possible?

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

#563

Post by inglor_cz »

idiotsecant wrote: post #406
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused by this objection, if you draw a stereotypical supply and demand curve, you can see how prices settle to an equilibrium point. Of course reality has more complications, but I think your objection is 95% answered by a supply and demand curve. You keep building houses when it is profitable. You stop when it is not. This naturally keeps everything in balance.

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

Where does this happen, in presence of a reasonably free market?

I can only think of extremely land-limited places like Monaco and Gibraltar. Where the answer is "not everybody should live in Gibraltar".

But the US has a lot of land. So much land that it can afford wasting it on endless sprawl of single family homes, which is the least efficient way of providing housing. Most Asian megacities would not be able to exist if they had as strict zoning principles as the US has.

Maybe you should also think about barriers such as "bans on boarding houses". This is what messes with poor people the most. A room in a house full of rowdy individuals sucks, but it is still a room. Possibly you may spend just a year there, then find something better. A tent in an encampment of rowdy individuals is strictly worse on all accounts except cost, and bouncing back from that is harder.

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

#564

Post by simianwords »

cyberax wrote: post #555
simianwords wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many mistakes here. The population numbers you have reported are misleading because they use 5 year estimated numbers. The better estimate is 993,588. The population actually grew from 2021. Even if you were right, the rents fell down by more than 19% after accounting for inflation. I’m not sure what you are trying to say?

> The population numbers you have reported are misleading because they use 5 year estimated numbers. I specifically chose consistent data series. While each one of them can't represent the true population, they absolutely do illustrate the trend. The number you're quoting is from the Census, which only happens at 10 year intervals. If you have better population estimates for these years that use the same consistent m…

> I specifically chose consistent data series. While each one of them can't represent the true population, they absolutely do illustrate the trend. The number you're quoting is from the Census, which only happens at 10 year intervals.

False. You are comparing 5 year estimates with 1 year estimates so it’s not consistent.

With SF I agree that it went down because of population but I’m not sure how that explains 19% reduction in rents in Austin with higher population.

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

#565

Post by simianwords »

cyberax wrote: post #557
simianwords wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your previous comment is misleading and incorrect. Even then, I’m curious as to what point you were trying to make with the building roads thing. Isn’t it a good thing that more roads are built even if induced demand is observed? More people are able to use the roads.

Come on, think about it. You got more people into the place. Now more employers move in, as they have access to a bigger pool of employees. What's next? Put yourself into the shoes of a real estate developer.

Yeah that’s induced demand and it’s a good thing for the economy.

The rents are supposed to reduce only temporarily. But the goal is to not reduce is permanently. The goal is to increase land utility. Building houses helps with that cause.

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

#566

Post by hunterpayne »

triceratops wrote: post #142
orangecat wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. So there were a bunch of people who wanted to live there and now can.

Nobody lives there anymore, it's too expensive. /s

Note to the mods, /s is Reddit for sarcasm and this post is a good example of the psychology that leads to people support policies that increase housing costs even though they are designed to decrease housing costs.

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

#567

Post by jdasdf »

kleiba wrote: post #527

Before moving to Europe, I always had this conception of Germany as being very good at organizing things, especially anything involving engineering. It doesn't take long to set this picture straight. > From 2015 to 2024, Austin added 120,000 units to its housing stock—an increase of 30% Compare that to the following [1]: > The [...] government [...] intended to build 400,000 new homes annually, including at least 100…

>But it does show a number of problems inherent in Germany's current situation: (a) shortage of skilled laborers; (b) high cost of labor; and (c) exorbitantly much red tape. These three points alone are among the most frequently cited factors that companies feel inhibit business, and it holds across disciplines.

There are 9 billion people in the world, roughly half of them are perfectly capable of doing manual labor.

There is plenty of skilled labor, and the cost is frankly not that high, you just need to let them work.

Can we be serious here? There is one and only one cause of "high housing prices" and that is a political choice to make housing expensive.

Don't tell people what they can or can't do with their property.

Don't prevent people from being brought in to build stuff.

Do these 2 things and housing will be built if the price is truly high. Anything else is bullshit.

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

#568

Post by CalRobert »

kleiba wrote: post #527

Before moving to Europe, I always had this conception of Germany as being very good at organizing things, especially anything involving engineering. It doesn't take long to set this picture straight. > From 2015 to 2024, Austin added 120,000 units to its housing stock—an increase of 30% Compare that to the following [1]: > The [...] government [...] intended to build 400,000 new homes annually, including at least 100…

While it’s a different country my experience in Ireland and the Netherlands has been that there’s this bizarre contempt for builders. Like “I build homes and sell them to people for money” basically makes you satan incarnate. So housebuilding is bogged down in x% social, y% “affordable” (because apparently the goal of making all housing affordable by actually building enough is unthinkable) and very little gets built .

In Amsterdam the Green Party is celebrating making homes more affordable to buy…. By kicking out the people who were renting them. And they continue to say only 20% of developments can be market rate, aka for everyone. When you’re new to the city because you just got a job at booking.com or whatever you only can hope to get a flat in that 20% - the rest isn’t for the likes of you!

https://youtu.be/t05cFv02pzY

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

#569

Post by danavar »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #502
danavar wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For most Americans, A house is their primary savings account This is true for California, where people (foolishly) rely on their home value as their retirement plan, which further incentivizes NIMBYism. But in places like Texas (and other areas with affordable housing), the house is just treated as something you pay off to have a low housing cost in retirement. And your investments are your retirement+savings accoun…

I'm not from Texas or California but it doesn't intuitively feel true to me that Texans are better at investing and saving for retirement. According to the first relevant search result I can find https://www.cnbc.com/select/average-retirement-savings-by-st... the retirement savings per dollar of median annual income in California is $1.44 and in Texas is $1.17 Do you think that's wrong? Or do you think it's a mislead…

I wasn’t trying to say one was better or not, just different. Californians wrap up a large amount of their retirement savings in their houses though, so keeping those home prices high is important to them and that’s a reason for stalling development.

I think Californians do, a lot of time, retire with a higher net worth. But most of them do that because they’re more relatively house-poor during their lives - they take out larger mortgages, and save more into their net worth.

As opposed to Texans, who have higher disposable income since they have smaller house payments. It’s less incentive to save so they may spend more.

So that’s a partial advantage to California - the expensive homes force a higher savings rate, naturally.

But, at retirement age, a lot of their net worth is tied up in their home. So to unlock a lot of those savings they need to move to a lower cost of living state like Arizona, Nevada, Florida, etc.

While the Texans can just stay in their paid-off house.

So yeah it’s just different.

Texans are just paying off their home throughout their life and staying in it. They have larger disposable income to go towards other stuff (kids, lifestyle) while Californians gotta pay that mortgage

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

#570

Post by zozbot234 »

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…

> For most Americans, A house is their primary savings account, retirement plan, and probably where they keep majority of their wealth.

If you allow for increases in density, that house (actually the land beneath it, but still.) becomes more valuable as it's redeveloped. So that American homeowner does benefit, by unlocking the upside of "evil gentrification" (or actually, density increase).

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