4 ms·
> By why does bidding have to happen in the first place? Because there isn't enough supply. If increase of supply matches increase of demand, the price doesn't
by adt2bt 8y ago
> By why does bidding have to happen in the first place? Because there isn't enough supply. If increase of supply matches increase of demand, the price doesn't go up.
Housing isn't as easy to create as normal products. There's a multi-year lag time to get new housing built. Here in Seattle we just had a number of high-rise luxury apartments open right next to Amazon's HQ within ~6 months of each other. As a result, rents in the area flatlined for a period. It was a good thing.
Those apartments were initially conceived probably ~3-5 years ago. 5 years ago AMZN was a $150B company, now it's worth 6x as much. If you had a time machine and could go back 10 years and look at how fast Amazon would grow in the 2010s, you'd absolutely invest massively in housing. We didn't have one, instead housing prices skyrocketed along with the rise of this one company that dominates our local economy.
> probably because the fallacious belief that well paying jobs causes costs to rise is generally more prevalent among so-called progressives
Are you trying to argue that Amazon's growth has no impact on the cost of living in Seattle? How is this a 'belief' thing? There is a preponderance of evidence that the rise in the tech sector in Seattle has dramatically increased housing prices here.
- manfredo 8y agoA growth in jobs can lead to increased demand, but that alone isn't enough to make prices rise. What caused the increase in price was the failure to accommodate that growth. You pointed this out yourself in your first two paragraphs, I'm not sure why you turned a 180 in this last one.
- adt2bt 8y agoI didn't turn a 180. I laid out that housing supply cannot keep up with the rise in demand in my first two paragraphs, which leads to the conclusion that the rise in demand will result in a rise in prices.
- manfredo 8y agoHousing supply can keep up with rising demand of enough of it gets built. If not enough of it is being built then Seattle needs to address why construction is too slow, to expensive, etc. There are individual cities that have larger populations than the entirety of Washington State that have lower rents than Seattle. Demand does not cause higher prices , lack of supply causes prices.
- adt2bt 8y agoIt takes a long time for housing to get built, or rather upzoned, bought out by a private developer, deconstructed and then rebuilt. It would have looked absolutely foolish 10 years ago to start the process of upzoning and building as much housing as we'd have needed to keep housing prices flat over the last decade. Like I said in my original comment, if we had known how much was coming down the pike, we'd have started the process of building more housing immediately. We did not (and could not) know, so we're doing the next best thing and building as much as possible right now. Your argument about individual cities is a red herring. Show me a city that went through a similar level of high wage worker growth in such a short amount of time and somehow managed to build enough housing to keep housing prices flat.
- manfredo 8y agoSure it may be difficult to accommodate the demand quickly. But at this point you've agreed on the point I'm making: the lack of supply - not the demand - of housing is what causes rents to rise. There are cities with orders of magnitude greater demand for housing that have low rents because the supply exists. A rapid spike in demand will probably be accompanied with a temporary increase in cost as supply catches up, but it will not result in long-term cost increases unless the supply is constrained. Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, etc. are not dense cities by any means. If apartment buildings are taking 10 years to get built then there is massive mismanagement or onerous regulation going on.