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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

#771

Post by taeric »

Nevermind the collapse of salaries flowing into the area which is destroying what the market demand is willing to pay for the existing stock? This crowd, of any, should be familiar with how many jobs flowed into that area and the promise of how many more it would be. Only for that to basically evaporate overnight.

Like, yes. At a base level, you need enough supply to keep prices down. But, the entire point of supply and demand is that it is two curves that intersect. And the demand curve, if pushed up, will also increase prices. Could you over supply such that you drive down the unit costs in a way that keeps prices down? Of course it is plausible. It is not typical market behavior, though. For that, you need excessive spending by someone.

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

#772

Post by taormina »

abustamam wrote: post #695
aqme28 wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the parent article basically evidence of this? Housing supply grew, and prices fell.

The article only talks about rent, not price of housing, which I think is an important data point. Homeowners don't want housing prices to fall. Ever. They don't care about rent prices (at least, not directly). But renters care about both — obviously lower rent prices are good, but many want to be able to enter the housing market but it's prohibitively expensive. Perhaps falling rent prices has a similar effect on ho…

The house prices DID go down here in Austin.

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

#773

Post by testing22321 »

lenwood wrote: post #736
torginus wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people who only own 1 house at most are still disadvantaged by this - sure, the value of their apt goes up, but if they want to switch to a larger house, the difference they're paying also increases, so do the property and wealth taxes, if applicable. There are many stories of solidly low-to-middle class families who lived in an area where property prices soared, and had to choose between bankruptcy or moving out…

> So allowing housing prices to surge is literally taxing the poor for the benefit of the rich. How do we limit home prices increasing? I see your point but solving this isn't trivial.

Housing can not be both affordable and a good investment.

If we want housing to be affordable ie “limit them increasing” we have to stop people using them as investments.

There are many ways. My favourites are:

- one human can own one residential property. No companies or businesses can.

-or, property tax doubles (or 10x) with every residential property owned.

- no foreign ownership (Canada does this now)

- government can own and rent residential property at no profit. They supply plenty of other basic necessities of life, why not houses?

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

#774

Post by testing22321 »

exabrial wrote: post #741
lenwood wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So allowing housing prices to surge is literally taxing the poor for the benefit of the rich. How do we limit home prices increasing? I see your point but solving this isn't trivial.

Build more housing

If investment companies that already own tens of thousands of homes buy them and keep increasing the rent, the problem has not been solved.

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

#775

Post by harrall »

dan-robertson wrote: post #716
21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And the biggest reason is, learning from history, the instability of food prices destabilizes nations.

There have been many “bread riots.”

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

#776

Post by balderdash »

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?

lower prices != unprofitable, it might, it may also mean lower, similar, higher margins / ROI

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

#777

Post by vel0city »

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.

> Texas led the nation in job creation in 2025, adding more nonfarm jobs than any other state and setting multiple employment records

https://www.wfaa.com/article/money/business/everything-bigge...

As someone who has lived here for a long while, it seems like there are lots of jobs in a lot of industries here. We're not all oil riggers and cowboys.

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

#778

Post by sidewndr46 »

giaour wrote: post #744
pj_mukh wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"typically own the houses and they obviously don’t want the prices to go down." I've never understood this: If I replace a single home with 20 apartment homes, I've raised the value of the whole property at purchase time no? You're already dealing with home valuations that have faaar outstripped wages, the only way you go any higher is to build more homes on the same property. Counterintuitively, the "I don't want to…

> I've never understood this: If I replace a single home with 20 apartment homes, I've raised the value of the whole property at purchase time no? It's a commons problem. In your scenario, you have absolutely increased the value of your property. 20 apartments is more valuable than a single family home. However, you have also reduced aggregate demand by housing 20 people. That reduced the value of your neighbors' pro…

It's not a common problems in Austin at least. You (a property developer) buy a single home in bad shape on a big lot in the city. Then you redevelop the single home into 20 apartments, greasing the wheel appropriately (of the local government) to get the needed rezoning and permits. No one else can do this because they don't have the connections and monetary resources you do. You pocket the increase in value of that property (minus the cost of grease) by selling it off as "condos" which have dubious maintainability going forward. You never lived here anyways, you have a ranch in Bastrop.

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

#780

Post by harrall »

left-struck wrote: post #669
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.

It’s a difficult problem not because we don’t know the simple solutions (supply and demand). It’s difficult because the people who have the majority vote also typically own the houses and they obviously don’t want the prices to go down. This is not just speaking about the US, many countries are facing this issue

That’s why California has had dozens of state laws passed in the past 3 years that override many city and county ordinances to force additional supply. Lawmakers knew the only solution was more housing.

These bills permit the construction of denser housing near transit, force cities to actually meet housing quotas, allow the state to override a city’s zoning to permit more housing if they don’t make a good faith attempt, loosen the rules to build ADUs, and many other changes.

Is it ideal that we had to get to this point? No, but housing wasn’t being built.

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