Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

kpbs.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 253 posts

Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#71

Post by pydry »

darksaints wrote: post #64
pydry wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If demand for cars skyrockets then you (eventually) get more cars at the same price coz the manufacturer can just make more. If everybody wants to buy up land because "god isnt making it any more" you get less land at an even higher price which makes it even more attractive as a store in value. So no, supply and demand doesnt really work for land the way it works for everything else. Land needs to be taxed a lot to c…

Zoning that reduces buildable footprint and/or height artificially increases demand for land. If the only way to build a home is to buy a 9000 sqft lot, then my demand for land is 9000 sqft. If you can build 18 homes on that same lot, my demand for land is 450 sqft. Land definitely needs to be taxed, but not without the zoning changes first to allow more to be built on less.

Zoning is the hobby horse of property developers. They're endlessly frustrated by the way zoning prevents them from building the most profitable construction - no matter whether there is a good or a bad reason for it (sometimes it's good sometimes it's not).

This inspires a lobbying and public outreach effort to try and convince people that relaxing zoning rules will fix everything.

As with many corporate lobbied for campaigns, it may be a good idea in general (e.g. net neutrality) or it may not be but it's definitely never the panacea it's sold as by the well funded PR campaign.

Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#72

Post by tptacek »

quacked wrote: post #49
Apreche wrote: post #21

But what about the desirability of San Diego? Was the decrease in rent only because of the increase in supply, or is there also lower demand?

The majority of the "more housing = cheaper rent" success stories crowed about on the internet correspond with net population exodus. Austin, Minneapolis, now San Diego. Edit: I think we should build several million more units of housing in the US. I'm salty because all the new housing I've seen is ugly shitboxes owned by national property firms that make everywhere feel like nowhere.

Austin does not appear to have undergone a "net population exodus", at least not one visible on any of the charts I found (I stopped after FRED).

Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#73

Post by darksaints »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #54
darksaints wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been told repeatedly by people who have a vested interest in maintaining high housing prices that supply and demand don't work at all, ever, for any reason, and high prices are no reason to build more housing. How do I reconcile these facts?!?

If demand picks up because supply increases, you will reach the previous equilibrium even with more supply. It isn’t rocket science, there is a price people are willing to pay to live in SD, and the market will keep gravitating to that price unless demand is somehow limited. The price people are willing to pay can even increase as density makes brings in things (eg culture, job opportunities) that make the city more…

At the levels of density seen in Paris, San Diego could house 16 million people. That's city proper. The metro area could house 226 million people.

You're gonna have to do a lot better job convincing me that 16 million people would move to San Diego if they just built more housing. Let alone 226 million.

Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#74

Post by chao- »

rossdavidh wrote: post #14

Should note that "top US markets" really means "most expensive US markets", not for example the largest by population.

I agree, comparing to other expensive markets seems a bit odd, rather than comparing to markets with some other similarity (population, geography, median income, et cetera). The full table in the original report is much more interesting:

https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/national-rent-report

Many interesting comparisons to be made, especially places where rents fell YoY despite population growth.

Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#75

Post by tptacek »

nemomarx wrote: post #18
Detrytus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, building luxury housing still helps, to some degree: the richest residents of the area would buy it, and they would sell their old house to someone slightly less rich, who in turn would sell their old house… At the end of this chain you get affordable housing.

I think the steelman argument is that maybe you induce demand and it's a wash on housing costs as rich people move into the city or etc to use the new condos But you do at least get more property taxes?

How does the induced demand argument not apply to AMI-median affordable housing as well? Demand is demand.

Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#76

Post by noosphr »

darksaints wrote: post #65
noosphr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a NIMBY I want to live in the neighbourhood I bought a house in, not the one someone who can leave with a months notice feels like turning it into.

Being a homeowner, you get a title to your lot, not your entire neighborhood. You have no legal claim on your neighbor's home. If you want a legal claim on your neighbor's home, join an HOA. Or just buy it.

You do. It's called zoning.

Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#77

Post by verteu »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #54
darksaints wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been told repeatedly by people who have a vested interest in maintaining high housing prices that supply and demand don't work at all, ever, for any reason, and high prices are no reason to build more housing. How do I reconcile these facts?!?

If demand picks up because supply increases, you will reach the previous equilibrium even with more supply. It isn’t rocket science, there is a price people are willing to pay to live in SD, and the market will keep gravitating to that price unless demand is somehow limited. The price people are willing to pay can even increase as density makes brings in things (eg culture, job opportunities) that make the city more…

No, this is a false belief known as supply skepticism: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=supp...

Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#78

Post by jmyeet »

So the source for this (which is stated and linked in the article) is something called the Zumper National Rent Report [1]. For anyone curious, this is their methodology [2]. This seems to be a measure of active listings based on advertised prices. So it's not necessarily an indicator of if those listings close and at what price (eg in hot markets, people can offer above the listed price). But it seems reasonably well-regarded.

I'm not sure where the "19 of 20" comes from because I grabbed the data from the report into a Google Sheet and sorted and it's not #19 by 1br Y/Y, 2br Y/Y or average rent. What it shows is 1br -5.6% and 2br -7.5% Y/Y. LA was -3.6%/-2.5%.

It's hard to find a comparable city to this because there aren't actually a lot of coastal cities in the US that aren't mega-cities (eg Boston, New York, Miami, Houston).

It seems like San Diego built ~4000 new housing units in 2025 with a population of ~1.4M. For comparison, Miami seems to have added ~18,000 but it's population also exceeds 6M so is that a fair comparison?

My point here is that the direct evidence linking building new housing units to changes in rent is weak.

Not that I'm opposed to building by any means but simply blindly building more units is by itself not an answer. It depends on what you build, where you build it and whether you allow effective or actual cartels to monopolize that supply.

Take Manhattan as an extreme example. There has been a ton of building along so-called Billionaire's Row and also some pockets in the Financial District, West Chelsea, the UES and so on. A lot of this stock is the so-called ultra-luxury market. Prices for some of these new units are now exceeding $7000/sq ft.

That is going to help absolutely nobody. Ultra-wealthy non-residents will park money there and that's it. This blind assumption that it will eventually become prole housing is ludicrous.

Housing should primarily be for shelter, not a speculative asset or investment vehicle to get wealthy by denying someone else shelter.

[1]: https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/national-rent-report

[2]: https://www.zumper.com/blog/our-methodology-empowering-the-r...

Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#80

Post by tptacek »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #17

What is this country's allergy with public housing? Not pursuing that feels like jumping in water with our hands tied behind our backs

The obvious reason is that to a first approximation nobody is building public housing, and so appeals to public housing, especially from owner-residents, read to housing activists as a dodge, a way to perform advocacy for housing without actually providing housing.

A subtler reason is that public housing is drastically more expensive to build than private housing. There's multifarious reasons for this, and the underlying problem is absolutely worth solving (it's one of the three big prescriptions in Abundance), but it's a bigger problem than housing. Right now, people are focused on whatever's going to bring the most units online fastest.

Post reply on HN