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.
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.
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.
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.
Median rent dropped from 2600 to 2250 per zillow which updates their numbers more frequently and is available to the public unlike dwellsy. If Austin continues their YIMBYism, their housing market will continue to respond to supply/demand issues, which is the fundamental reason why housing prices continue to forever climb.
Housing is such an inelastic market because government policy has made it so. There’s nothing magical about it, it will respond to market forces so long as you actually allow the market to actually function… which requires increasing supply.
Unfortunately that remains very unpopular among a super key political demographic: homeowners.
Oh and the frustration for me is that this position makes no sense. Per your opinion, housing doesn’t track with supply and demand. So why do you want people to build more? It doesn’t matter right? So you’re just adding pollution and not having any positive affect on prices.
There are, in many places, forces preventing rent prices from responding to market forces that would decrease rents. Ie collusion, being levered up against properties at valuations based on higher rents, etc.
That doesn’t mean market forces never have or never will matter or that building is bad. It means that in many places, those issues need to be fixed before the market forces matter.
Pretty sure I’ve explained this before, and I’m pretty sure my record is clear that I’m in favor of building more housing.