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Do you believe that is a credible source?
More than random theory by those without access to the info and dedicate their time, as a team, to produce the resource, in a manner accountable to others. So, yes.
Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore
451–460 of 550 posts
Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
Permitting admin is part of regulation, which in turn is required for construction.
yeah for sure and i didn't say that isn't a cost. i said it's a small part of the cost, almost negligible compared to the cost to actually build
> i said it's a small part of the cost, almost negligible compared to the cost to actually build
Actually building is the same as building to regulations. Regulations make it more expensive. You can't just hand-wave separate them.
Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is very simple. Housing is not built.
I don't think it's that simple. In my town, we're building like mad (thousands of units) and it is possibly slightly impacting pricing in that the rise is not as meteoric as it was 7 years ago. But new buyers are still priced out. Houses are vacant. There must be other factors.
The cost of land and labor to build a house is relatively the same no matter what house you build. This also applies to apartment buildings.
Fancy it up a bit (mostly nicer appliances) beyond that and you take a $300k house to a $1M house.
Developers make about 20% on the total ( https://www.nahb.org/news-and-economics/press-releases/2025/... ). They'd rather make 20% of $1M than 20% of $300k. Same work crew either way.
Next question then becomes "is it better to sell 3 houses at $1M each ($600k for the developer) out of 10, or all 10 houses at $300k ($600k for the developer)?"
This also applies to apartments. Do you build 200 "luxury" units? or 200 affordable ones?
Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
The underlying issue is that converting single-family suburbia to medium-density multifamily ‘ruins the neighborhood’, and cities don’t have the courage to eminent domain homes and replace them with apartment buildings themselves, so they outsource the housing function to the Free* Market, which is most definitely not interested in terminating the SFH market. Between the profitless-ness of apartments for the real est…
Commercial new-build apartments happen elsewhere in the world, plenty of them in my city.
And then it’s $2000/m for paper thin wall and cheapest materials possible and has more stringent qualification requirements than a mortgage.
Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore
#455Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore
#456[flagged]
While i appreciate that this is a valid link. I would argue that its political stance is clear: its framing of this as "Biden’s border crisis", and its sourcing is poor: referencing fox news but no other news sources, and no links to primary documents or data, especially around the causality. Additionally it doesn't appear to reference the actual HUD report from 2025 https://www.huduser.gov/portal//portal/sites/defau…
You're right. The leap from that to “illegal aliens caused 100% of rental price growth in CA/NY” is politically charged, underspecified, and overclaimed. I jumped the gun on that.
Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
The market rate and supply and demand are going to determine the price of housing whether or not you have landlords. Remove landlords from existence and the alternative is to make everyone buy homes. I guess that would drive housing prices down a little because so much of the population would be living with their parents until they save up enough for a down payment, which might not occur in their lifetime. So demand…
> I guess that would drive housing prices down a little because so much of the population would be living with their parents until they save up enough for a down payment, which might not occur in their lifetime you mentioned supply and demand, if everyone is struggling to buy houses, downpayments wouldn't just go down a little. in the end, everyone needs housing, every single house would be occupied just as now, but…
> in the end, everyone needs housing, every single house would be occupied just as now, but instead of having renters being squeezed by supply and demand you would have owners.
Not every house is occupied now. Not everyone will sell at loss if they can't rent out. So more homeless people?
What about people who don't have any savings living paycheck to paycheck? There is clearly some floor on housing price and not everyone can afford housing even at zero margin. Giving out free mortgages like it's 2007?
What about new housing? With lower prices supply will further decrease, and in places with high prices it's usually already insufficient.
Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer is still build more (which you basically admit yourself in your first sentence). Homes skew larger and more expensive precisely because it's so hard to build them so developers need to make more money from each one. The fixed costs per unit are too high, so the ones that need to be lowered or eliminated should be. That will incentive building more units not just more expensive units. You'd see a lot more 1…
Build Moar seems to be too simplistic. There's just too much demand and too much investment capital seeking profit. No matter how much you build, most of the housing supply is going to get sponged up by investors, landlords, and private equity, and the price isn't going to go down. You'd probably have to 4X to 5X the current housing supply to make a dent in prices.
It's interesting to say something sounds simplistic when your argument is basically "I feel like __________" and in fact the evidence shows exactly the opposite.
Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are talking about America. In your case housing would be even higher if it were not built. People continue to make things more complicated than it is. Build, and keep building until it is cheap. Also, you would need to consider the specific places.
The claim is that if you increase supply the price will drop. The counter-example is a case where supply was increased and the price doubled. The question is why did that happen? It very much looks like the "just build" model is insufficient to explain what's happened in that case.
Demand for housing increased faster than supply. As people gain wealth they demand more housing, so just looking at population changes doesn’t tell you much about housing demand.
Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is very simple. Housing is not built.
Every amount of new housing will be purchased by competitive investors. You are heavily underestimating the amount of money unsophisticated investors have, and the psychological effect of owning more and more of territory. Most people will never say no to owning more money and territory.
You don't tend to see a lot of this in expensive cities - the acquisition cost is too high. Investors tend to buy in lower cost areas.