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San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

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Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#171

Post by afpx »

darksaints wrote: post #118
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is abundance of housing. It's just that people want to live in big metro areas that have extreme concentration of economic opportunity and amenities. I don't understand how transforming every urban area into Kowloon Walled City will solve that unless your plan is to make it so dense that people will finally find it undesirable to live there?

At the density of Kowloon Walled City, the entire population of India could fit within the city limits of San Diego. Nobody is asking for that, silly. We could 1.5x the density of San Diego and still have the livability of Copenhagen. We could 3x the density of San Diego and still have the livability of Vienna. We could 5x the density and still have the livability of Paris. 8x and still have the livability of Tokyo.…

That's the issue. Most Americans don't want the entire population of India to be in San Diego. To some of us, San Diego is one of the best areas in the country. Why destroy it?

Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#172

Post by wallst07 »

littlexsparkee wrote: post #42
nemomarx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very off the cuff but I do see some news about shrinking population - https://www.reddit.com/r/sandiego/comments/1s71z3a/san_diego...

That says more about affordability than desirability since rents have gone up over the decade but there's been a steady trickle out to cheaper locales

You are reversing cause/effect though.

SF rents have gone up, that didn't decrease demand. Why did SD rents drop, not because people left because it was too expensive, that doesn't make sense.

Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#173

Post by wallst07 »

tptacek wrote: post #72
quacked wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I think you need to look at rate of change ( 1st derivative ), not net terms.

Meaning population increase slowed down relative to new housing builds. OP didn't say this, but it's what I assume.

Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#175

Post by mothballed »

anal_reactor wrote: post #169
EduardoBautista wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who grew up in San Diego and now lives in Dubai, I point towards how much of the construction companies in Dubai are partly government owned and were at once fully owned before the government sold shares in their IPOs. I really don’t understand why the California government doesn’t just build luxury condos at a large scale for profit. The state will get revenue and lower housing costs overall.

Private companies are good at removing inefficiencies. As long as there is competition, private companies will offer better service at lower price. State-owned companies work better in cases where maintaining healthy competition is not possible, or where inefficiencies are not a concern. In particular, Gulf states have virtually unlimited money, which means that it doesn't matter whether a new construction costs $400…

It's 'easy' if you have inside connections with the planning and zoning committees and utility companies. I recently developed a property worth about $250k for about $100k. The building process itself is relatively cheap (land + cost construction way cheaper than value of a finished property) and straightforward, everything else is not.

The only reason why I was able to get it done as a random person was because I used a non-commercial loophole to not have to get the inspections that are used as hostile clamp on disfavored competition, and the utility companies that could have charged me a gazillion dollars saw that I was just a guy with a family and took pity on my situation (they are used to dealing with large commercial developers) and gave me the easiest out at every opportunity.

If you are a favored developer you can get things done as easily and almost as cheaply as I did and make vast profits. If not you are fucked and you barely break even because either government workers, or government franchised utility monopolies fuck you at every turn. I lost count of how many times I basically saved $20k-$30k because someone decided not to fuck me that day over some inane detail that in the end doesn't actually make any meaningful difference (the only time I got unlucky -- a utility worker made me redo a survey which cost thousands and then LOLed later that I never needed it, eventually it turned out this person was literally just making shit up which is an astonishingly common tactic when some asshole just wants to delay dealing with you. I was only able to fire this utility company because I was on the border between two monopoly lines which created an unusual point of actual competition, and the next one used a ton of creativity to get the same thing done for relatively next to nothing).

Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#176

Post by wallst07 »

acdha wrote: post #47
ivewonyoung wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A mainstream view on one side of the political spectrum that increase in new home supply(especially if high end) does not lower prices or reduce shortage. > One well-worn refrain of progressive urban politics is that new, “luxury” housing will not help solve the housing shortage. A 2024 study of U.S. voters found that 30 to 40 percent believed more housing would, instead, increase prices, and another 30 percent belie…

Those people aren’t progressives: they’re NIMBYs who learned that certain language can make it easier to get the policies they want. We have a ton of them here in DC, and you can tell by seeing what else they support: they’ll talk about affordability to block luxury apartments, flip to pretending to be staunch environmentalists to block an affordable housing project, talk about traffic or “the poor” when protesting a…

No True Scotsman?

They are progressive (Statistically)... it's just that they are human too. Meaning they can have progressive ideology and vote for weed, pronouns, but when you touch the wallet, not so much.

Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#177

Post by jhbadger »

wallst07 wrote: post #164
tsimionescu wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taken to extremes you'll have all wealthy people living in California, and the rest of the country available to us plebs. Which is exactly what people are afraid of happening, and what they mean by the crisis of housing affordability. You can go and buy or rent a cheap house today in probably 90% of the localities of the USA. Of course, if you already live in those places, you probably don't have the money, because…

"The problem of housing is that regular people want to live in NYC, and Chicago, and LA, and all of these places, and relatively near to where their jobs are" It's not clear in your phrasing, but it sounds like this is a casual correlation. It's not... Many people only want to live in these cities because it's the ONLY way to get work, given a choice they would quickly move out.

Or, maybe the jobs are there because people companies want to hire want to live there. We have a way of testing this now given that remote work is a thing. We can see if people would rather work remotely from a cheap house in rural Kansas and have nothing to do in the evenings or live in an expensive apartment in an exciting city where their job is.

Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#178

Post by acdha »

wallst07 wrote: post #176
acdha wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those people aren’t progressives: they’re NIMBYs who learned that certain language can make it easier to get the policies they want. We have a ton of them here in DC, and you can tell by seeing what else they support: they’ll talk about affordability to block luxury apartments, flip to pretending to be staunch environmentalists to block an affordable housing project, talk about traffic or “the poor” when protesting a…

No True Scotsman? They are progressive (Statistically)... it's just that they are human too. Meaning they can have progressive ideology and vote for weed, pronouns, but when you touch the wallet, not so much.

You raise a fair point but I think you can draw a line between people who actually do progressive things in other areas and those who sometimes use the language but never show up for anything other than preserving the status quo.

Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#179

Post by jareklupinski »

darksaints wrote: post #48
exabrial wrote: post #10

Incredible. So what you're saying is... we should just build more housing? Who would have thought that was the answer?

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?!?

you're not the one with stuff to reconcile

simply ask the people on the vested side: "why do you want rents to stay high?" and stand back

Re: San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

#180

Post by pydry »

nostrebored wrote: post #114
pydry wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

This is empirically not supported. Relaxing zoning rules works extremely well. Look at Japan, look at any metropolitan U.S. city that has actually leaned into it. Europe has had mixed use zones for effectively centuries and is not the dystopia that NIMBYs proclaim will appear in the absence of zoning. It is unpopular because we subsidize the lives and assets of people who “have things” through zoning policy that they…

Taxing land works better. Look at Japan where property taxes encourage development.
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