Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents • Hacker News Board

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

#791

Post by bombcar » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:34 PM UTC

loudmax wrote: post #728

philipallstar wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people have kids and want them to be able to a) not be a victim of crime, and b) be able to afford a house. Anyone who has loads of money to afford high house prices and private security can afford luxury beliefs, as espoused in Oscar acceptance speeches, but everyone else with housing and kids is either voting for less crime and better affordability, or is not yet voting for those things.

Plenty of people with kids are voting to block new housing. It's not that they don't want their kids to be able to afford to pay rent. They're just not making the basic connection between supply and demand. This just happened in my neighborhood. There was a proposal to build low rise apartment buildings about a mile from the detached single home neighborhood where I live, and people had lawn signs opposing the constr…

In an area entirely filled to the brim with the "evil" Trump supporters ... new housing is going up, apartments, row homes, single family homes, it's all there.

Nobody really seems to care ... yet.

It's often very instructive to find out who is "behind" both promotion and resistance; because both groups will attempt to find ways to "play both sides" and get opposition moving.

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

#792

Post by salawat » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

jaapz wrote: post #640

taffronaut wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have struggled to understand why houses don't get built and land sits idle for years. I can only assume that it's significantly more complicated. I'm not trying to excuse the complications. I guess if the house prices are forecast to go up, you build some houses, but not all that you can because the longer you wait, the higher the profit will be on the ones you start later. If house prices are going down, even if i…

Why would you build on a plot of land when the plot of land itself is already appreciating in value with you doing nothing to it Building is risky and costly Having an asset that appreciates on its own regardless of what you do with it is not

In Texas, at least, the lack of income tax is made up for in property taxes. Just owning that plot with nothing on it is still going to be a sizable liability.

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

#793

Post by vel0city » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

eks391 wrote: post #342

gnopgnip wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dr Horton is the largest builder in the US. In q3 2025 they had a 21.8% gross margin.

As someone who is not versed in real estate, I don't see why your comment and parent couldn't both be true. Is Dr Horton building homes in Austin ? Are the margins in Austin pulling down their average margin ? That could explain high profit while dissuading new construction in Austin. *I don't know the answers to either of these questions, but of you do, that could provide some "proof" for either side of the argument…

> Is Dr Horton building homes in Austin?

Yes, a ton.

https://www.drhorton.com/texas/austin

> That could explain high profit while dissuading new construction in Austin.

Given they're still building a ton in Austin, there doesn't seem to be a dissuasion for building there. I do not have any idea about their average margin in the Austin market versus other markets though, but if that was a major decider on whether to build or not the answer is they're still choosing to build.

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

#794

Post by bpt3 » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:37 PM UTC

unethical_ban wrote: post #672

bpt3 wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I declare a right to immortality, then no one dies? It's almost like those words are the product of useless bureaucrats, rather than an actual right.

That is a disingenuous counterexample.

It's really not.

What happens if everyone takes this declaration at face value and decides to be unemployed? Who pays for all the services that every person is entitled to?

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

#795

Post by bombcar » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

testing22321 wrote: post #773

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.

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) - governmen…

It can be both affordable and an investment - it cannot (and will not) perpetually be a market-beating top-tier investment.

All of the items above can have drastic unintended consequences; the way to keep prices affordable is to make sure that supply is always outstripping demand by a bit.

Some examples of unintended consequences:

* I can't add an ADU to my existing property which would add one more dwelling unit

* Subdivision of property is discouraged; combining parcels reduces tax even if no new dwelling units are created

* This might be the closest to doing something though it could substantially discourage non-citizen immigrants (legal or not)

* This has been tried before and had well-documented issues, but might be doable if they can provide a "floor"

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

#796

Post by ccppurcell » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

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

A related idea: politicians know how to fix the problems, they just don't know how to get re-elected after doing so.

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

#797

Post by bombcar » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

hunterpayne wrote: post #493

7speter wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Can you guess what the #1 source of wealth increase in the AA community has been over the last 20 years? That's right, grandma's house...guess where she lived.

This is a huge important part - if gentrification of an AA community occurs in an area where the homes are owned by the residents, it's a great wealth-growing event; generational even.

If the gentrification of an AA community occurs where the residents rent then they capture none of it and are forced out.

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

#798

Post by rootusrootus » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

ccppurcell wrote: post #796

left-struck wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A related idea: politicians know how to fix the problems, they just don't know how to get re-elected after doing so.

I occasionally wonder if it would be a net positive to make political office terms a little bit longer, but limited to exactly once. No reelection pressure.

Same part of my addled brain that thinks we should increase dramatically our count of representatives, abolish in-person legislating, and then fill the roles with sortition.

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

#799

Post by bombcar » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

terminalshort wrote: post #287

KPGv2 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what gentrification is. Relevant to this article, I lived through the gentrification of large parts of Austin in the early 00s. What happened was that good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives began gentrifying, driving up property values, which drove up property taxes, which became unaffordable to the existing residents (who had owned their homes for a long time). Many (…

My heart breaks for those poor people whose houses became worth multiple times what they paid for them. A true tragedy. I would be devastated if my house became so valuable that the property taxes were more than I could afford.

Even if we don't enact Prop-13-like things to keep property taxes reasonable I'm sure we could get a compromise where your property tax remains stable as long as you deed the appreciation over baseline to the city/county.

Win/win, right?

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

#800

Post by dkarl » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:45 PM UTC

wcfrobert wrote: post #169

rconti wrote: post #11

Meanwhile, 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…

Anecdotally, what we found in Austin was a combination of two factors:

First, awareness of the futility and selfishness of "growth elsewhere" as a solution is much higher in younger people — and by younger, I mean currently under fifty. Generational turnover in Austin had been eating away at the NIMBY majority, and conversations about housing in Austin have long been polarized more by age than by left/right political sentiment. There's a caricature, with a strong vein of truth, of the old Austin leftist who has Mao's little red book on their shelves and thinks apartment buildings are an abomination, and Austinites of that generation are experiencing mortality. At the same time, younger people are adopting more and more urbanist mindsets compared to their parents.

However, I think a much much bigger factor was the influx of younger people, especially young people with experience of larger cities, diluting the votes of the older NIMBYs. Austin has been shaped by growth for half a century, but its "discovery" in the 2000s and very brief status as a darling of coastal hipsters (remember that term?) has had a lasting effect on Austin's popularity and its demographics. It's been twenty years since it was the "it" place for Brooklynites to visit, but in that twenty years, it's had a lot of exposure for young urban dwellers, and some of them discovered they liked it and moved here, bringing their comfort with dense living and their appreciation that growth can bring a lot of positives.

Personally, every homeowner I know in Austin has seen their houses depreciate significantly this decade, and I don't think it changed a single person's mind about Austin's housing policy. People who opposed the reforms are bitter about the outcome, and people who supported the reforms say it sucks for us personally, but it's what we set out to accomplish, and we're glad that it worked.