921–930 of 1001 posts
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> what they didn't mention is that supply didn't impact rents until the large remigration back out of Austin This has been studied to death. But just like soybean farmers in Idaho voting for tariffs on China it seems a category of urban renter is more wedded to ideology than self interest. The Austin metro area's population is up [1][2]. Austin's GDP is up [3]. Migration per se doesn't explain a phenomenon that is ro…
2-3% is a margin of error compared to 20-40+% y/o/y growth. That means the influx ceased, some left, some had babies. Meanwhile housing was built. Of course rents will crash if everyone anticipates 20-40% growth and it’s suddenly 0 . Let’s see in a few years if the pricing trend continues downward or upward. If it’s downward, yes we’ve solved the rent problem by “building”. If it’s upward, as it has been, it’s not ju…
This was the argument of the tobacco companies in the 1980s. This experiment has been run many, many times and only had one outcome. Overwhelming housing markets with a supply influx absolutely works. It cuts against ideology, however, so you’ll always have folks who want to wait for more data while properties appreciate.
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.
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You can always work full remote. Or maybe you're an elderly retiree.
Elderly retirees seldom move. They’ve long paid off their mortgage and we keep property taxes extremely low so they are pretty much immune to the cost of housing. Once you put down roots in a community it’s hard to leave.
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"There is no downside to endless growth" ... lol
Is this supposed to be a reply to me? Who are you quoting? No one ever said "no downsides", no one said "infinite growth" and the comment I replied to was just talking about standard apartments being "souless".
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Who builds them? Private party. What’s their incentive? Making money.
It's not the 'building' that's the problem - it never wars. It's property ownership this is the core problem. It's a zero sum game, of no value creation and mostly just economic rent extraction. It's the 'property problem' not the 'thing on it'. We have no problem getting people to 'make stuff and sell it'.
Land IS zero sum. Land I own is land you do not own, and does not serve you, and I should not profit from the value of the LAND, only the value of the property I build / maintain / manage.
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It would be far more efficient to simply tax away all rent collected from land instead of grossly warping markets and creating terrible incentives for all involved. The reason is that you can’t produce more land. Fixed supply will also warp economic markets and create terrible incentives (land speculation). If you want the best solution, you implement a land value tax. If you want the 2nd best solution, tax property…
Rent control is not 'warping markets' - it's the notion that 'homes are markets' that is 'warped' - that's the basis of the problem. The workaround is to build more dwellings, and rc generally is not an inhibitor there. Funny enough 'wealth taxes' may actually be the worst of tax of all - aka a double negative - like a double negative. What we want to do is make it so that 'rich people get rich' not from rent-seeking…
something can be essential + morally important + still governed by supply/demand constraints, this is such a silly statement to make. If there was no market, there would be no efficient allocation of resources. You need to make homes abundant to have the most economically (and thus, morally) efficient outcome.
> What we want to do is make it so that 'rich people get rich' not from rent-seeking but from real value creation.
Agreed! Tax the full rental value of land (rent seeking) and do not tax the value of the productive value creation that happens on it (building, capital, labor).
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I'm confused by this objection, if you draw a stereotypical supply and demand curve, you can see how prices settle to an equilibrium point. Of course reality has more complications, but I think your objection is 95% answered by a supply and demand curve. You keep building houses when it is profitable. You stop when it is not. This naturally keeps everything in balance.
Free markets for housing are likely to settle into an "optimum" where some percentage of people cannot afford housing at all, because while construction/rental of housing for them would net a return, it's not worth the opportunity cost. Plus you should not wait for the market to respond to a lack of housing: people will be homeless in the meantime. Supply/demand is mostly reactive, because building for anticipated fu…
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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
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…
Because if you forcibly keep housing prices low, you have a shortage.
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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.