Earlier quoted context omitted.
God forbid bad parts of town ever get good.
[flagged]
Your comment violates site guidelines. "Assume good faith" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What did you hope to do by saying this?
Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
711–720 of 1001 posts
Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
#712Earlier quoted context omitted.
NIMBYism has never been about preserving neighborhood characteristic, or noise and traffic concerns. Menlo Park is not Big Sur. Sure, some concerns are reasonable and should be investigated, but most of the time they're bureaucratic distractions that's been weaponized by people who want to delay progress and protect their investment. For most Americans, A house is their primary savings account, retirement plan, and p…
I've never seen the evidence where density increases drive down existing land/home values.
You need to separate land value and house value.
When regulations are reduced to allow more density, the value of the land goes up because its productivity increases. The land can do more now, e.g. hold 10 apartments vs 1 house. The same land generates more rent so developers are willing to pay more for that land.
Meanwhile, the value of housing units goes down due to increased competition among sellers/landlords.
Consider two zoning changes.
1) You are a homeowner and more units are allowed on your parcel, e.g. single-family -> duplex. That increases your land value.
2) You are a homeowner and there is more density around you, but not on your parcel, e.g. apartments are allowed nearby but not on your street. Your land value does not increase. Your home value decreases due to increased competition. (Of course, there may be long term effects like the increased density actually leading to economic windfalls in the area, increasing its desirability, and then increasing your home value.)
Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
#713Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, people really need to be questioning econ 101 more often. It's built upon untrue assumptions - infinite buyers / sellers - perfect information - no switching / transaction costs --- The article itself has 3 different year ranges provided so I'm not sure how you can use it as evidence. Plus overall the rent is still up by a lot since 93% - 4% is still at least 80%. - Rents increase by 93% from 2010 to 2019 - Housi…
Ah yes, that 150 year old meme reflexively copy-pasta'd by internet commenters since the days of usenet to refute basic concepts like supply and demand. "Lol economists are dumb they think humans are robots!" No they don't. Sorry, we won't be throwing away an entire field of human endeavor based on a straw man caricature that isn't true. We don't call physicists dumb and throw out their ideas because the real world i…
I mean “Econ 101” is an equally dumb meme. The laws of supply and demand have their limits, otherwise there would be nothing to study after Econ 101.
Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
#714Meanwhile, California is also trying to build housing near transit, but Menlo Park wants to preserve the character of downtown by preserving dirty, cracked, flat, surface-level parking lots like it's 1950.
NIMBYism has never been about preserving neighborhood characteristic, or noise and traffic concerns. Menlo Park is not Big Sur. Sure, some concerns are reasonable and should be investigated, but most of the time they're bureaucratic distractions that's been weaponized by people who want to delay progress and protect their investment. For most Americans, A house is their primary savings account, retirement plan, and p…
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Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
#715Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's not that density per se drives down existing costs, but density almost always brings more housing stock to the market (unless they are simultanously tearing down housing elsewhere) and housing stock drives down the cost of housing, which is the point of the original article. So if we take it as an assumption that density increases housing stock, there is lots of evidence that density drives down prices of existi…
It seems like it would drive down housing prices, but (given limited zoning) drive up land prices?
Yes, that's correct. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47437907
Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
#716Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Why would you produce more bread, milk, eggs as prices fall? You would of course wait for the next-pig cycle - when the starving masses pay any price to you. The answer- essentials can never be a non-government interferring market. This can be by creating artifical oversupply by buying up oversupply for foreign aid or bio fuels(food production). In the case of housing, this is by having the goverment continually cons…
The government intervention in the markets for agricultural products is because farmers are often an important political base, not to keep prices low for consumers. Without the intervention, prices would fall and supply would have to fall too, which would be good for consumers and bad for producers.
Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
#717Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Investors add to demand for housing And here I thought people who want to live in houses add to demand for housing. Investors buy houses that people want to live in. If people don't want to live someplace, you won't see any investors there either.
1 house is built. Alice wants to own it to live in it. Bob wants to own it to rent it to Alice. 2 people want to own the house.
So build 2 houses.
Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
#718Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Then everyone is forced to buy a house to live in, no matter what their situation or desires are. Of course we can stop collusion. What are you even talking about?
> Then everyone is forced to buy a house to live in, no matter what their situation or desires are.
Great! Now we're talking real solutions that can actually help people :)
> Of course we can stop collusion. What are you even talking about?
Besides laws and regulation (which already exists and clearly isn't enough), what is your suggested solution for stopping collusion?
Price fixing is/was already illegal in the US (if I understand the Sherman Act correctly), yet the largest landlords in the US was found to engage in price-fixing and artificially raising rents. https://www.propublica.org/article/justice-department-sues-l...
Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
#719Re: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
#720Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah yes, that 150 year old meme reflexively copy-pasta'd by internet commenters since the days of usenet to refute basic concepts like supply and demand. "Lol economists are dumb they think humans are robots!" No they don't. Sorry, we won't be throwing away an entire field of human endeavor based on a straw man caricature that isn't true. We don't call physicists dumb and throw out their ideas because the real world i…
We do throw out everything from physics 101. The movement of satellites is not modeled using distance = speed * time. It would do well to consider if econ 101 is an accurate way to model the world since for other domains the 101 course is not.
Yet the overwhelming factor in modeling the movement of those satellites is still distance = speed * time.
The existence of nuance and external factors don't negate the original principle.
The equivalent to arguments made by 'economics deniers' in this thread would be if you argued: the satellite moving at 7.8 km/s actually causes the earth to spin 8 km/s faster, so trying to make the satellite move faster makes it go slower! Applying acceleration doesn't help!
No. Making the satellite move faster generally makes it move faster. Building more housing generally makes it cheaper.
Let's not do the HN thing and get lost in pedantry.