Yeah this is the kind of shit that’s contributing to screwing over the renting class and keeping them stuck as renters. Rent prices are not actually responding to free market forces.
This collusion as outlined is a problem, but the larger problem remains the artificial scarcity of housing propped up by local governments and NIMBYs
Austin is doing great because of changes they made to up scaling and approving of actual building
Well, that and everyone leaving because prices are too damn high…
Pretty sure we already dispelled this myth. Austin is doing great relative to other places, and there is reason to believe the trend will continue and it will actually be doing well… but still doing poorly relative to housing prices pre-COVID for the working class, housing still kept pace with overall inflation which was very high, etc. At least as of when we argued about this a month or two ago.
and…
This also is like, not great. Part is that the prices got too high, part is also probably because the appeal of the area went away somewhat when so many people moved there at once.
Austin is a really interesting case study in housing costs/policy, but also a unique situation given what went on with tech jobs there.
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fyp
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https://www.costar.com/article/1733116465/population-growth-remains-strong-in-austin-texas
To sum up:
- People are, in fact, not leaving austin. There’s been a small decrease in travis county (~2500)
- Housing, both rent and buying, are down.
- People leaving would be responding to market forces
Housing responds to market forces, but you have to let market forces actually react. If all you do is subsidize demand, prices will continue to skyrocket. To appropriately address housing, you have to increase density and new construction.
We already did this, pretty sure you posted the exact same chart or a similar one, and I ran it against inflation and showed that even after the drop it matched overall inflation from 2020 to 2023 or whenever the chart ended.
Again, building is good, increased density of housing is good, I’m not arguing against that.
Also going from +30K people a year (avg 2010-present) to -2500 is not nothing, especially when a lot of housing is being built projecting continued increases.
Also regarding market forces, I told you previously it doesn’t respond in reality - and now we’re seeing an investigation into price fixing to deny market forces on possibly/probably a national scale.
While I’d love for this type of collusion to be the cause of widespread rental issues, it simply isn’t. The underlying forces of nimby-ism and collusion through government limitation on building is orders of magnitudes larger.
Austin’s market has continued to become more renter and housing friendly, with literal negative drops in cost. Again, if austin’s rental market kept up exactly with inflation, they would be massively outperforming the rest of the country.
Please look at the actual numbers presented. Rent isn’t not keeping up with inflation, it’s currently dropping at ~10% in one year. That isn’t being caused by a 0.2% population drop. You never actually properly looked into the Austin market at all.
can someone explain how evidence from hunter’s laptop is admissible? the chain of custody on this thing has huge gaps and we know it was in rudy’s possession for some period of time, right? the whole thing has to be completely contaminated
Did you memory hole the entire argument before? Or did you just not read it in the first place? We ran the numbers. Not doing this again. This kind of bad faith shit is why I stopped responding to your posts on these subject matters.
Literal rent drop of 10% the past year. No evidence to rebut. Just namecalling.
Lame.
In 2021, rents rose at the most furious annual rate in the city’s history. In 2022, rent growth exceeded every other large city in the country, as Austin’s median rent nearly doubled.
…
But Austin—and Texas more generally—has defied the narrative that skyrocketing housing costs are a problem from hell that people just have to accept. In response to rent increases, the Texas capital experimented with the uncommon strategy of actually building enough homes for people to live in. This year, Austin is expected to add more apartment units as a share of its existing inventory than any other city in the country. Again as a share of existing inventory, Austin is adding homes more than twice as fast as the national average and nearly nine times faster than San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. (You read that right: nine times faster.)
The results are spectacular for renters and buyers. The surge in housing supply, alongside declining inbound domestic migration, has led to falling rents and home prices across the city. Austin rents have come down 7 percent in the past year.
The Atlantic strangely is ‘bad faith shit’ in the exact same way I am!
Source of the data is the chart from your own source in the post I’m replying to.
Always bad faith man. You just wait a little while, make the same false claim, then pretend you don’t remember the last time you took an L on the exact same point and make someone dig up the post.
Maybe Austin rent has come down sharply the last three months, maybe it’s now a tick below overall inflation since 2021, it really doesn’t matter. The point is the same: what they’re doing there is good, and their situation is good relative to the rest of the country. But overall, it’s still bad. When exhibit A of the good situation is just that one of the hottest housing markets only kept pace with inflation instead of outpacing it, overall you’ve got a housing cost problem.
You keep pointing to 2021, but when rents and housing demand increased prices, Austin allowed supply to appropriately respond, which caused stabilization and then a drop in prices.
These are exactly the supposed market forces that do not apply in real estate. Bad faith indeed. You just can’t admit you’re wrong.
Let me help you out. If rent doubles, then comes down 7%, it’s up 86% overall. I kind of doubt the double number, more likely it doubled the overall national rate of rent price growth, but regardless the concept applies and…
If the shoe fits. Proclaiming -7% an unmitigated success on the heels of a waaaay > 7% increase is bad faith, yes.
Austin stopped massive costs of housing increases in it’s tracks in ways that basically no other functioning city in America has. It is a massive success, and is a great example of the market forces that you say don’t exist in housing.
A drop in prices that still kept them waaaay higher than before!
You either can’t read, can’t do math, or you’re strawmanning. Either way, knock it off.
Stopped in it’s tracks! According to your source, stopped in it’s tracks a mere 86% higher. Did income increase 86% in Austin in that time? No? Oh well, not your problem, just throw some more shit at the wall.
Any investment goes up at the fastest rate ever to the highest value ever and then retreats 10-15% and thus the sky is falling.
I don’t think it mentions Austin but Hamilton Nolan on housing is good
In the meantime, where should politicians direct their energy so that it hits the sweet spot between “truly improves people’s economic lives” and “is not so inscrutable that the angry public thinks they haven’t done anything and votes them out of office?” Here is my answer: housing.
Housing is everything. Well it’s not everything, but if you were to pick a single aspect of the economy that has the biggest effect on people’s lives and that drives their perception of the economy more than anything else, the answer would be: housing. Housing is the biggest expense most people have. It is the most inviting target for the government to make people’s lives more affordable. And it is an area that we, collectively, have really fucked up in recent decades, in a way that is crying for a political solution.
Instead of rapidly building a lot of new housing to account for the influx, residents typically channel their resentment into a determination to keep everything as it is, which means a continuing lack of adequate new housing construction, which only serves to drive up rents and home prices further. And the cycle continues, from one city to the next to the next. People leave San Francisco because it’s too expensive and they move to Denver and then they make Denver too expensive and then those people move to Boise and make Boise too expensive and then those people move to your small town. Uh oh! You will teach them a lesson, by organizing your neighbors to fight against the damn new luxury condo building they want to build downtown. Eventually your town will become too expensive as well.
We need to build more housing. If your city is too expensive it is because there is not enough housing to meet the demand. Build more housing. Stop being selfish.
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