Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market • Hacker News Board

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#311

Post by kelnos » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 8:26 AM UTC

jjav wrote: post #289

14 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While at the end of the day I don’t think people should be bailed out, I don’t agree that everyone who over paid is a speculator. Many people are just wanting to own their own home. The market has been crazy for the last 5 years. Many people are just buying to own not to flip it for a huge profit. So when a new home owner buys something and suddenly the value drops $100k and the bank wants the money I do feel slightl…

> So when a new home owner buys something and suddenly the value drops $100k and the bank wants the money That's not how mortgages work (in the US, anyway). If the value drops, nothing happens, you still have the same house and same mortgage. I've been underwater twice, in the same house, as prices go up and down over the years. As long as you still like the house and want to continue living there (I did), being unde…

That's the catch, though. What if you wanted to move? That would have sucked. What if you had to move? That could have been disastrous to you. What if you had lost your job, and defaulted on the loan. Apparently most states in the US are non-recourse, so how would you feel when your next job's wages are garnished, or there's a lien on the next home you buy?

When you have to put an "If" in front of "being underwater doesn't mean anything", then that means sometimes it really does mean something.

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#312

Post by kelnos » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 8:28 AM UTC

_carbyau_ wrote: post #230

petesergeant wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you buy a house for $400k, and suddenly it is worth $300k, you don't need to be "bailed out" for your purchase decision. You should have been certain that the house was worth $400k to you at the time of purchase. I think it's pretty normal for rational purchasers to consider the resale value of something that they purchase, and hand-waving that away doesn't make for a very serious argument.

I think it's pretty normal for resale to be less than purchase price. Considering it is important! Making any guarantees as to the future worth of these items is craziness.

In the case of housing, it is generally very not normal for resale to be less than purchase price. Sure, there are exceptions to that: market downturns happen, and sometimes regional issues (like the one big employer leaving town) can cause that. But in general, no, it's normal for the resale value of a home to be higher than when you purchased it.

That's dumb. But that's the reality we live in.

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#313

Post by kelnos » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 8:30 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #73

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because this doesn’t magically solve the housing crisis It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.) [1] http://censusreporter.org/pr…

> It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.) That is only if you believe that more capacity does not induce more demand, which really…

You keep building until supply meets demand, regardless of what that demand is or where it comes from.

We don't have an infinite number of people available to move into housing. There are only a certain number of people who will want to move into a particular region, and that number will stop growing at some point.

Granted, you don't want to build too much and end up with a ghost town. There's a balance to be maintained, and I think housing should be affordable, not a race-to-the-bottom cheap as possible.

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#314

Post by willis936 » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 8:35 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #128

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, pretty sure a government won’t bail me out if I invested in a stock so much that it would crush me if the stock went down. If buying a house is an investment and not for living, then it should be treated like it is.

> pretty sure a government won’t bail me out if I invested in a stock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspan_put More pointedly, you're not in a position to block equity capital markets reforms in the way homeowners are in respect of housing reform.

Homeowners shouldn't be either. Locals should have less of a say in zoning decisions since they've demonstrated they won't act in their community's interest.

Also, making the public hold the bag in a bubble is perhaps the most sinister form of theft imaginable.

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#315

Post by willis936 » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 8:38 AM UTC

susiecambria wrote: post #171

dingnuts wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people call buying a house to live in an investment but that's because they don't know the technical term is a "hedge" so you know: most localities do treat the house you live in very differently from a tax perspective than they do any additional properties you might have, because everyone is born short housing, until they own 1 place to live. so yes, the proposed bailouts up thread would be for people who bought a h…

Buying a house is more than an "investment" though: It's achieving the American dream. And while this dream might have been a farce, it's like everything else in that you hear it enough combined with not understanding the economics and policies underlying home ownership and the lie is reality. And let's not even get to your point about hedges. I don't know many people that can define it let alone consider housing as…

If the house price goes down you don't lose the house. You just end up paying more for it than you could have if the price was lower when you bought it. You are just keeping your promise to pay your mortgage. This whole "unrealized gains need to be compensated" thing is insane. Responsible policymakers would ignore such greedy, self-centered, anti-community sentiments.

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#316

Post by immibis » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 8:44 AM UTC

standardUser wrote: post #110

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because this doesn’t magically solve the housing crisis It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.) [1] http://censusreporter.org/pr…

> You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater If you buy a house for $400k, and suddenly it is worth $300k, you don't need to be "bailed out" for your purchase decision. You should have been certain that the house was worth $400k to you at the time of purchase. Otherwise you're a speculator, and we shouldn't be bailing out speculators. It's called buyer's remorse. We accept…

But the buyer probably didn't think it was actually worth $400k intrinsically. They were bullied into paying $400k because (1) they need a house no matter what and (2) at least the government guarantees that there will be a bigger sucker down the line who will pay $500k.

It's the government's fault that this bigger-fool game even exists, because the buck always stops there. They might want to consider compensating people for the misery they caused.

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#317

Post by immibis » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 8:48 AM UTC

franga2000 wrote: post #293

standardUser wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater If you buy a house for $400k, and suddenly it is worth $300k, you don't need to be "bailed out" for your purchase decision. You should have been certain that the house was worth $400k to you at the time of purchase. Otherwise you're a speculator, and we shouldn't be bailing out speculators. It's called buyer's remorse. We accept…

And it's not like the actual value has decreased. You still own the same house. It's the same size, location, build quality... That's the value of the house to you. If you're not currently buying a house, the price of a house should be irrelevant to you.

But the price you were strong armed into paying is more than the value of that stuff, and you only begrudgingly accepted the price that included a large speculative component, because you saw that the government has been guaranteeing that the speculative component only goes up.

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#318

Post by immibis » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 8:50 AM UTC

tpxl wrote: post #305

kelnos wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in principle that we shouldn't be bailing people out for the consequences of making purchases with their eyes open, but if something like this happened, a lot of people would be mad . And I get it. The problem in this eventuality is mobility: if you buy a house for $400k, live there for, say, 5 years and the resale value of your house is at $300k, that's going to be a big problem if you have (or just want) to…

> Losing a car or a TV is not going to make someone homeless. Your house losing 100k$ in value isn't going to make you homeless either (quite the opposite actually). If you buy a house and it depreciates, so what? Not to mention if everyone's house depreciates, your new house is cheaper to buy. You lose _nothing_, except imaginary dollar values. > Calling people like that speculators shows a severe lack of understand…

You lost the ability to even sell your house at all until you've paid at least $100k+interest on the mortgage. You are stuck in that house for good.

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#319

Post by msgodel » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 9:21 AM UTC

vkou wrote: post #288

dmix wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short term thinking dominates economics these days. Managing the current downturn is most important, when people ask about longterm implications do a bunch of hand wavy stuff about it being temporary and then kick the can to the next guys who do the same thing.

> Short term thinking dominates economics these days. Especially among people criticizing the response to 2008/2020. Failing to mitigate sickness in capital markets and the economy in the short term would have inflicted far more damage in the long term .

[flagged]

Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

#320

Post by MangoToupe » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 9:28 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #66

MangoToupe wrote: post #13

It's a nice victory story for the YIMBYs hoping to win over the upper-/middle class trying to retain the narrative that the market will provide "affordable" housing (not what this even demonstrates, but anyway), but this isn't going to get people off the street. We need a public housing sector to appropriately meet everyone's needs. Otherwise this is just a game of justifying "who deserves housing", a discussion over…

Until you reach transient shelter beds, which may not be saturated in a region (in some places in Chicagoland the work is going into outreach to get people off the street and into shelter beds as much as it is in expanding the number of beds), every additional unit of housing you build frees up some unit at or below that unit on the stack of housing. The effect percolates all the way down to long-term supportive hous…

I don't have the impression most of my "fellow" americans even gave a damn about homelessness to begin with, so perhaps what you read as misunderstanding the market might simply be a disagreement of values—one party cares about the homeless, the other cares about salaried employees. May we all truly rot in shit.