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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

#621

Post by donkeybeer »

pembrook wrote: post #608
donkeybeer wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because "cheap" government housing has never been "high quality" in the history of the world. Those two properties are antithetical. Humans don't have a ton of preferences for the electricity they consume or the water they drink, just that it exists. It's a commodity, so a good task for government. Housing is not an undifferentiated commodity and is subject to extreme variances in preference. Markets do differentiati…

Not just government made housing but any housing. Housing market needs don't seem to have as much wide fragmentation as eg most of the Western world seems quite happy with suburb style housing and most asia seems content with apartment though aspiring to owning houses.

I am saying just like any other capitalist endeavour, where things that barely existed or were quite expensive many years ago eventually reached a point where both the price became so low and quality so good that it became a mindlesss thing eg sawblades. And housing for whatever reason has been an extremely anticapitalist market. Even if we take the exact same houses people want today, their execution seems far from optimized. Think of something like precutting all the timber and sheets at a factory and doing some light adjustment and fitting on site, developing new materials that are cheaper or easier to work with tools, etc there are countless angles of attack.

In optics for example, it was mostly this rather bespoke work by a few artisans and people back then might have said this needs a fine touch that can't be done on mass scale. And then Carl Zeiss emerged. I feel housing is in the pre Carl Zeiss era.

EDIT: Neither example looks bad to me. The russian looks denser but both look clean and well organized. It doesn't at all look like blight to me, any more than a grid of houses in a suburb does. It's clean and geometric just like rows of houses in suburbs. If you like one but have a problem with another, I think you are trying to get offended deliberately.

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

#622

Post by Ekaros »

chii wrote: post #433
TimorousBestie wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not half, but it’s pretty common around here (generic midwestern city) for renting to be more expensive than a comparable mortgage. Many landlords seem to expect to pay their mortgage and property taxes and maintenance with the rental income, and still net a profit, if r/landlord is to be believed.

> renting to be more expensive than a comparable mortgage. that doesn't sound plausible. May be for a select few properties that are in some unique circumstance (e.g., the seller of the property would sell underpriced because they needed quick sale). And often, in arguments like these, the rent is the rent, but the mortgage is purely the interest on the loan, and doesn't count the maintenance cost, and doesn't count…

I fundamentally agree on statement that rents are more expensive than mortgages. As capital is involved and landlords want premium on capital.

Still, things can go either way. And well renting is lot more flexible and less risky. So there is really nothing wrong with that option existing. And many times it is the better pick of the two.

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

#623

Post by scoofy »

watwut wrote: post #609
scoofy wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing where? Is housing for me in Malibu a human right? There's plenty of places to live in Texas for basically nothing. I'm honestly trying to take this seriously, but I really can't square the problem of location and utility. On of the reasons why West Virginia has such a low homeless rate is just that mobile homes and manufactured housing is pretty much legal in many areas around the state. One of the reasons wh…

> There's plenty of places to live in Texas for basically nothing. What are the employment options there? If I move to a cheap house somewhere where there are no jobs for me, I just moved somewhere where I cant afford.

>If I move to a cheap house somewhere

Again, I'm not trying to be difficult here, but "where" is "somewhere." There are jobs in Austin, San Antonio, Kerrville, Marfa, and El Paso. They might not all be for me, but they exist in all these places. Where you live and what your commute is, again, is not exactly something that's particularly trivial to define. At what point should I start looking in San Antonio rather than Austin?

These are hard questions. This is what I mean when I ask whether I have a right to housing in Malibu? At what point should I be expected to just move to East LA?

At the end of the day, housing in Austin is relatively inexpensive. There are real options below $300K. Living in SF, it's pretty astounding that that's even possible within the city limits, much less at reasonable commuting distances.

I certainly think incentivizing subsidized low income housing is worthwhile, and I think even incentivizing builders to just target the low income price points is also worthwhile. I just think that focusing on subsidizing the lowest income folks, rather than letting markets actually work for most people has been shown to trivially fail in CA where I live at actually accomplishing anything. A lot of "ugly" 5-over-1's have been built in Austin, and it's working to keep the place affordable for working class people. I'm absolutely fine with that.

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

#624

Post by zozbot234 »

cyberax wrote: post #615
simianwords wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Yeah that’s induced demand and it’s a good thing for the economy. No, it's not good. It leads to nothing but urban decay. That's how you get Tokyo with a crazy price bubble, while beautiful traditional houses decay into dust just 3-4 hours away. > The rents are supposed to reduce only temporarily. Except that they don't even decrease. If your population is growing, so is your rent. And it doesn't matter how much yo…

> That's how you get Tokyo with a crazy price bubble

Are you really making an argument that rents in a place like Tokyo are not supported by real value creation? Are we supposed to all live in "beautiful, traditional" heritage houses? Those houses are often a luxury, and favored by the wealthy who can live with the resulting inconveniences. They're not a sustainable solution for the masses.

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

#625

Post by hunterpayne »

bartlebyS wrote: post #178
rgovostes wrote: post #144

I'll admit ignorance here, but I've been skeptical of the claim that new construction drives rents down. What I actually see is: a luxury apartment building goes up, surveys the market, and sets its rents 30% higher for the privilege of living in a new building with a gym for dogs or ball pit or whatever. Then the older buildings say, "Well, we can raise our rents 20% and still be the best deal in town," and so on. M…

In my neighborhood in NYC, I've also observed that rents increased after luxury apartments were built here. In fact my landlord cited the increased median rent in the neighborhood as a reason to raise my rent. My understanding of the situation is that luxury apartments do indeed gentrify neighborhoods (i.e. they increase the local rent and drive displacement of locals that can't keep up with those rent increases). Ho…

"In fact my landlord cited the increased median rent in the neighborhood as a reason to raise my rent."

Your landlord lied to you to get you to pay the increase. You had little choice because finding a cheaper apartment probably wasn't possible/desirable and you probably didn't want to argue with him in front of the rent board. Understandable but that doesn't mean your landlord's explanation has any validity.

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

#626

Post by nsnzjznzbx »

vasco wrote: post #450
nsnzjznzbx wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I grew up in the UK and there is a fuckton of government housing from 60s and 70s. It is ugly but it is housing people. Government doesn't need to make a profit due to taxation.

Hello https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/abstract.asp?index=1... UK public housing is widely known for being shit. Unsafe, puts all the poor people together in a block. There's bunch of crime, and your kids will be likely to stay stuck there or go to jail due to bad influences. Social housing should be sprinkled around it has been found. So nice example of what I was saying.

I would rather have more housing than less though. Government can build it at scale without worrying about profit.

And privately built appartment blocks are awful. One cracked in Sydney had to be evacuated. Concrete cancer and water ingress issues. It is concrete enshittification.

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

#627

Post by PowerElectronix »

estearum wrote: post #221
pclowes wrote: post #176

Its wild how the solution to housing costs is really just: Build more housing. Keep law and order. No it doesn’t need to be “affordable”. Yes rent control is a terrible idea. Just build more housing. Note: that the US already has plenty of housing and housing costs basically go up in areas of low crime relative to economic opportunity. If you build housing, but allow crime to rise, you have wasted everybody’s time.

New construction has already decelerated in Austin due to falling prices, which compresses already-near-zero margin on real estate development. So yes, it really is "just build more housing." The problem is: why would you build more housing as prices fall?

That sounds like they could use some deregulation to keep margins healthy.

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

#628

Post by embedding-shape »

triceratops wrote: post #248
tharmas wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to restrict investors buying up that newly built housing too. Homes for people. Not investors.

No not really. You just have to restrict the same investor from buying all the housing in an area, and prevent investors from colluding on rents.

Sounds easier to just outlaw investor from owning houses they don't live in themselves. Seems we can't really stop collusion, only real way to win there is to not make that possible in the first place.

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

#629

Post by fyredge »

solatic wrote: post #507
bluegatty wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problems that rent control creates are far smaller than the problems that exist without it. To start - your 'very first example' is not even really 'a problem'. 'Without rent control' - you get kicked out of your abode every few years if your salary doesn't keep up with housing inflation. With rent control, you have the option of 'having a home; you decide when you want to leave (for the most part). The answer to…

> 'adversarial tenant/landlord' is that the theory doesn't line up with reality So disconnected from reality that it beggars belief. Anytime you put two or more adult people into a relationship together and at least one person feels like they do not have the option to leave if things get bad (e.g. landlord feels like the tenant is wrecking the property but has no right to evict, tenant feels like landlord is not taki…

Why is right to evict tied to rent control? Seems irrelevant

"Pressure to stay" can certainly be alleviated, rent control all properties. Half measures do not necessarily solve half the problem.

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

#630

Post by simgt »

pclowes wrote: post #176

Its wild how the solution to housing costs is really just: Build more housing. Keep law and order. No it doesn’t need to be “affordable”. Yes rent control is a terrible idea. Just build more housing. Note: that the US already has plenty of housing and housing costs basically go up in areas of low crime relative to economic opportunity. If you build housing, but allow crime to rise, you have wasted everybody’s time.

You may be implying it but you also need to make sure this new housing goes into the long term rental market, instead of being secondary residences or airbnbs. I've seen it happen first hand in my home town. That may not be a problem for Austin though.
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