8 ms·
Rents are up 40 percent in some cities
- qwertyuiop_ 5y agoMy rent went up 29%. I have no choice because my kid is acclimated to the school.
- lurker616 5y agoBeing forced to make new friends builds social skills and character.
- brailsafe 5y agoYou're right, they're not happy enough about being forced out of their home, and care too much about the well-being of their kids. This is actually a blessing, and probably a boon to their community. /s
- Sebguer 5y agoYou must have never had to!
- lurker616 5y agoI had to twice, and both times it was traumatizing in the short-term but helped me gain strength and drive when I look back.
- asdff 5y agoI'm always surprised people are against rent control when instances like this are possible, while they turn around and pay their fixed rate mortgage that is the same price for 30 years straight. Rent control would have capped this increase to like 4% if that.
- bradlys 5y agoRent control would just create another class of citizens who would hold onto units for longer than necessary. The real solution is to build more housing. Many people don’t advocate for rent control because rent control placates the masses and doesn’t increase housing affordability in the long run. What we need is reasonable housing policies that increases the amount of higher density housing with good public transit availability. But no one wants to do it because they are gatekeeping.
- asdff 5y agoWe need both more supply and rent control. There has to be some mechanism to keep local rents from running away from local wages and that mechanism is rent control. If you don't have rent control, rents fall into an average point. This doesn't help because oftentimes the distributions of income in an area is bimodal or multimodal; you can have a renter making minimum wage and you can have a renter making substantially more and when rents hit the average between these two incomes, the minimum wage worker ends up rent burdened and the high income worker can comfortably absorb huge rent spikes. Rent control makes little sense to remove, but if you are also not building enough supply it makes even less sense to remove, as without it the rising rents are just crushing your working class who are essential in your local economy and also don't see wage increases along with cost of living like the high income earners do.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoRent control basically benefits only the renters in place when rent control is instituted, which will almost always excludes new projects since...no one would invest in new buildings if it didn't. Even for older buildings, new units rarely become vacant because renters do everything possible to keep their "much lower than everyone else" rents, including subletting to friends and families if they really move on. How hard to you think it is to get a rent controlled apartment in NYC? > as without it the rising rents are just crushing your working class who are essential in your local economy and also don't see wage increases along with cost of living like the high income earners do. Again, rent control simply creating a new class of winners who were in place when the rent control was instituted, at the expensive of everyone else. It doesn't actually solve any problems like say, public housing, would.
- Proven 5y ago
- kungito 5y agopaywalled
- NotJamie 5y agohttps://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fbusiness%2F2022%2F01%2F30%2Frent-inflation-housing%2F https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com...
- vsskanth 5y agoRents have risen so much even outside big cities that in some cases it's cheaper to just buy a Single Family Home (SFH), especially with low mortgage rates. In my area, it costs around $1600 to rent a 2BR2BA apartment in a good complex (no garage). 3BRs easily $1700+. SFH $1800+. A basic 1800 sqft 3BR 20 year old SFH with a 2 car garage is like $365K in the same area with 8+ rated schools. Its even lower if you don't care about schools. This brings your monthly PITI+HOA ex-utilities to like $1600 a month at 20% down (slightly higher now with interest rates going above 3.5%). Nice 2500 sqft ones at $450K. This is all in the past year. It wasn't this expensive to rent compared to buying pre-pandemic. My apartment rent went up like 15% when I renewed.
- beebmam 5y agoMost people need a down payment to buy a home. Most renters don't have enough to make a down payment, I imagine. edit: Wow, I'm probably pretty wrong about this. 3% loans are really quite affordable. Why aren't more people buying homes? Being a renter is total hell
- fnord77 5y agoIs this a consequence of demand, or is this a consequence of private equity buying up rental units and manipulating pricing?
- sparrish 5y agoI got a feeling it's because of the increased risk due to the eviction moratorium.
- Gigachad 5y agoEveryone has their own opinions on how important each factor is.
- chumich1 5y agoWhat’s the difference?
- pmorici 5y agoDemand and lack of new supply. After the housing bubble in 2008 there was a major contraction of new home construction. It has been slowly recovering ever since but is still off the highs by quite a bit. So the combination of very low rates of new construction for nearly a decade and a current rate of new construction that is still depressed. The notion that private equity is some how manipulating home prices independent of true supply and demand dynamics is largely a lie being told by people who’s politics fit well with that narrative. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
- acomjean 5y agoI would say private equity entering the single family home market is a factor in addition to the lack of supply. They’re not manipulating prices but they’re in the market now watching the mls (listing services) and can make an all cash offer quite quickly. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/investors-rental-foreclosure/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/inv...
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- djbusby 5y agohttps://archive.is/03rpD https://archive.is/03rpD
- csdvrx 5y agoThe correct strategy is not to rent, but to buy on credit at a fixed rate, then let inflation take care of it for you. There's no way governments can repay their debts (and not just in the US: EU, Japan... about anywhere!) So it make sense to act after having seen the writing on the wall: first, they said inflation wasn't going to happen because... reasons, then they said it was totally going to be temporary, now I'm sure they'll find other plausible excuses, but it looks to me they are trying to delay the inevitable and let the mortgage market adjust by stalling those who still think inflation is uncertain. So simply align your interests to the government interests, and manage your money just like they do: without a care in the world about the petty needs of say having a stable budget!
- technofiend 5y agoUnfortunately at least in Texas taxing authorities can outstrip annual cost of living increases and inflation by a wide margin.
- seibelj 5y agoThere was a popular internet sentiment ~10 years ago where everyone was convinced renting was superior to buying. "Invest the extra cash in an index fund!" Meanwhile housing is an amazing handout to the middle and upper classes through the 30-year fixed rate mortgage plus the mortgage interest tax deduction. Inflation increases rents, but the fixed-rate mortgage never increases. One of my property's mortgage is now only 40% of the rental rate after 8 years of inflation. It's like an annuity with an automatic inflation adjustment - I'm going to get rent until I die, which always goes up as the cost of living increases.
- refurb 5y agoIt’s clearly market specific. I bought a house 3 years ago, house is up ~15% but I would be ahead if I just put the down payment into the market instead.
- zaroth 5y agoYou act like home-ownership isn't an absolutely essential part of the economy, or like driving roughly half the population from their homes is not an undesirable thing? Of course there are compelling financial products which incentivize home-ownership. It's massively important for homeownership to be possible for as many people as possible. Homes are extremely expensive, but the down payment really isn't a problem, relative to the time and expense of keeping the damn thing running. The down payment continues to be reasonably proportional to home much money needs to be in place for someone to control the equity at stake. What you're actually asking for, I think, is for home building to be subsidized, in order to drive down the construction and sale price. Because it's not like home builders are earning 50% margin on these structures, the reason house prices rise is because prices rise. The reason home interest prices are low are also because prices rise, meaning risk at long timeframes is negligible. The only crucial point is to make a squeeze impossible and you can ride out anything - hence why it's so important for government to back-stop it, because if you can squeeze the US dollar we have bigger problems.
- throwawaysea 5y agoIs no one going to blame the unconstitutional seizure of private property that is eviction bans? Some cities previously banned background checks (https://reason.com/2017/08/18/seattle-bans-landlords-from-running-crim/ https://reason.com/2017/08/18/seattle-bans-landlords-from-ru...) and many are considering banning banning use of credit scores. Seattle also instituted a number of laws these last few years that restrict landlords in a number of ways (https://www.seattlepi.com/local/politics/article/seattle-city-council-approve-tenant-rights-bills-16233100.php https://www.seattlepi.com/local/politics/article/seattle-cit...). I imagine rents are going up in response to such laws and policies, which increase costs, and in response to inflation. Personally I see a mass move to lower cost areas as a good thing. People should move to cheaper places and live within their means instead of barely making it in high demand high expense locations, and then complaining when the costs outrun their means. A more distributed workforce means a more distributed economy and that’s great for everyone. We would have a more resilient society and people wouldn’t have to live packed densely like sardines either. And instead of having a handful of cities monopolize the economy, we will see a revival among otherwise downtrodden areas.
- brailsafe 5y agoSeems like the rents were probably within their means, and they're being forced out because now they're not. More sparsely distributed populations mean more socially isolated populations, more dependance on personal motorized vehicles, less cost savings at scale, more environment destruction, less interesting urban spaces, less access to specialist professions that demand close proximity
- throwawaysea 5y ago> Seems like the rents were probably within their means, and they're being forced out because now they're not. But that’s the thing. If they have little tolerance or flexibility to accommodate those costs, then they were living too close to their limits. As for the rest of what you said… I have lived in an urban environment for most of my life, and still do. But more recently I’ve come to feel that urban spaces are overrated - living in cramped apartments, huddled in wet and slushy subways, shadowed by tall buildings, is a certain kind of hell. You claimed that distributed populations are more socially isolated, but that’s not true. Having more space and slightly more physical isolation doesn’t mean you’re more socially isolated. Cities rarely have the sense of community and neighborly friendliness that rural areas have. Plenty of people are lonely in big cities in a fundamental way, and no, access to a collection of bars and restaurants does not make up for it. As for cost savings at scale - clearly that’s not true given we are talking about ballooning costs in cities. The environmental destruction is debatable - more people occupy cities, enabled by the model of living densely, and they still consume all the same plastics and electronics. Urban areas also have a massive amount of concentrated environmental impact, while less dense populations are more in line with their local environment‘s capacity. As an example, Seattle regularly has to dump millions of gallons of untreated sewage into the local waterways, leading to beach closures and marine life effects that are a result of the big concentrated impact (https://www.q13fox.com/news/heavy-rain-sends-11-million-gallons-of-untreated-wastewater-into-puget-sound https://www.q13fox.com/news/heavy-rain-sends-11-million-gall...). As for dependence on motor vehicles - that feels like a positive to me, as cars are fast and convenient and let me get to where I want when I want, instead of being restricted to the timetables and destinations of public transit. I get that there are other perspectives on all of this. But I wanted to share this perspective because it would be a mistake to take the alleged superiority of urban lifestyles as a foregone conclusion.
- frankfrankfrank 5y agoThe irony of this is that likely the very people most affected by this issue are the ones who supported the policies like loose monetary policy for social programs and uncontrolled immigration that has added tens of millions of more people to the USA, who, guess what, will drive up rents, doubly ironically, paid for by the governments welfare given to the millions flooding into the USA at an increasing rate.
- cobookman 5y agoI get the impression history is repeating itself. Are we repeating the same events that lead up to ww2? It feels a tad too similar for comfort. It's saddening that our government hasn't treated housing becoming un-affordable as a national risk. Somehow we can spend trillions on bailing out businesses and corporations yet we can't muster the strength to build additional housing? Is not the rise in housing cost the single largest contributor to many of our problems?
- jeffbee 5y agoEvery US politician in my lifetime has had the brain disease of believing that you build wealth by owning a home, even though this belief is fundamentally incompatible with affordable housing. We have to break this belief, somehow.
- asdff 5y agoIt's the other way around. Every homeowner wants the value of their home to appreciate and the politicians they choose to elect uphold these values. Politicians listen to these homeowners over renters because turnout and political contributions are both substantially higher among homeowners.
- ComradePhil 5y ago> Somehow we can spend trillions on bailing out businesses and corporations yet we can't muster the strength to build additional housing? Government "strength" doesn't encourage new buildings, it discourages it. It's extreme regulations which makes building houses expensive and unappealing for investors. So, a big rise in rents and housing prices is required to make it appealing again... which is happening... but it doesn't mean the rent is going to go down in the future.
- cobookman 5y agoGovernment "Strength" could offer zero down no interest loans for converting SFH to triplexes and duplexes. Government "Strength" could fund large scale public commuter rail projects to cheaper, more rural areas. Government "Strength" could inject cash to build lots of housing, similar to what we did with the national highways. There's much the federal government could do to alleviate the situation.
- taubek 5y agoI'm not familiar with housing market in USA. If the prices are going up so much does that mean that there are people that can afford housing at that price and that there is so much demand for it? Or do those houses/apartments stay vacant for a long time?
- fbrncci 5y agoI know this article is about rents in the US, but in many European countries we are dealing with the same situation. I'm in the Netherlands, and seeing quite some people leave for Germany where rents are much lower. But rents in Germany are the highest they have been. I'm personally moving to SEA soon, where I am paying for a 4br house what I'd pay for a 1-room student apartment in NL. I can actually save money there, and in a few years move back and buy a house in NL. I'm wondering how long this is sustainable though, isn't the exodus of people moving abroad (whether its state lines, country or continent) for these reasons slow cooking housing prices globally?
- gtsop 5y agoCan we fix the title of the article please? Landlords raise rents up to 40%. Rents aren't raised by themselves nor are they some sort of natural phenomenon. Real people perform these raises to benefit from the rest of the population that rents. Literally making more money from doing nothing more than before.