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It has nothing to do with inept laws. It has everything to do with the corrupt behavior of often large companies that own all of these rental units. Like I get

It has nothing to do with inept laws. It has everything to do with the corrupt behavior of often large companies that own all of these rental units. Like I get the feeling you don't rent. When I was living in Austin, my apartment rent shot up over 30%, in an area on the outskirts of Austin near nothing. It's nice to think that this problem could be solved by simply dumping supply on the market, but even in areas where that's being done or where there isn't significant demand rent is skyrocketing. And even when supply is dropped, it's bought up by said large corporations and investment groups that price fix it anyways. It's occurring throughout the entire US regardless of local laws, though some areas are gouged even further. We know large landlords collude on this sort of thing to the point there's an actual term for it called warehousing [1] [1] https://www.fox5ny.com/news/nyc-warehousing-empty-apartments https://www.fox5ny.com/news/nyc-warehousing-empty-apartments

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> When I was living in Austin, my apartment rent shot up over 30%, in an area on the outskirts of Austin near nothing. Austin's population has been increasing by ~4% annually for decades, which is high. Construction responds to that but it has a lead time. And Austin has zoning restrictions, but notice that it also has lower rents than cities that have more. > It's nice to think that this problem could be solved by simply dumping supply on the market, but even in areas where that's being done or where there isn't significant demand rent is skyrocketing. Can you name any US city where the amount of net housing growth exceeded the amount of population growth over the last 30 years? > And even when supply is dropped, it's bought up by said large corporations and investment groups that price fix it anyways. Most of them are buying it to rent it out, which adds supply to the market. The problem, regardless of who the buyer is, is that they're not building enough pretty much anywhere. > "They're sort of not advertising their full inventory," Walkup said, "simply because they don't want to overwhelm the idea of what the supply currently is." That's something else entirely -- they have a bunch of empty apartments and they wait to put some on the market until they fill the others, because why pay to advertise multiple units when they're all about the same? They're effectively all still on the market because as soon as anyone actually rents one they start advertising another one. What you should be asking is, why don't they lower the prices some so they can rent them all out quickly and get some rent instead of none? But that is the bad laws. If there is a short-term reduction in demand for urban apartments because of COVID, normally the incentive would be to lower the rents to whatever it takes to fill the units and then raise it again if the demand recovers. But if you have rent control or similar, once they rent it out they'd be stuck getting the short-term lower prices for decades to come, so they'd rather stick it out until they can find a tenant at a higher price. Get rid of the bad laws and that incentive goes away. But you still need to allow more housing to be built, because otherwise the rents would go back up as soon as COVID is over and people start moving back into cities. Urban landlords don't have any kind of market power outside of control over zoning boards -- there are too many of them and none of them own a high enough proportion of the units to make a dent. Which is why they capture zoning boards to prevent supply from increasing to satisfy demand.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> When I was living in Austin, my apartment rent shot up over 30%, in an area on the outskirts of Austin near nothing. Austin's population has been increasing by ~4% annually for decades, which is high. Construction responds to that but it has a lead time. And Austin has zoning restrictions, but notice that it also has lower rents than cities that have more. > It's nice to think that this problem could be solved by simply dumping supply on the market, but even in areas where that's being done or where there isn't significant demand rent is skyrocketing. Can you name any US city where the amount of net housing growth exceeded the amount of population growth over the last 30 years? > And even when supply is dropped, it's bought up by said large corporations and investment groups that price fix it anyways. Most of them are buying it to rent it out, which adds supply to the market. The problem, regardless of who the buyer is, is that they're not building enough pretty much anywhere. > "They're sort of not advertising their full inventory," Walkup said, "simply because they don't want to overwhelm the idea of what the supply currently is." That's something else entirely -- they have a bunch of empty apartments and they wait to put some on the market until they fill the others, because why pay to advertise multiple units when they're all about the same? They're effectively all still on the market because as soon as anyone actually rents one they start advertising another one. What you should be asking is, why don't they lower the prices some so they can rent them all out quickly and get some rent instead of none? But that is the bad laws. If there is a short-term reduction in demand for urban apartments because of COVID, normally the incentive would be to lower the rents to whatever it takes to fill the units and then raise it again if the demand recovers. But if you have rent control or similar, once they rent it out they'd be stuck getting the short-term lower prices for decades to come, so they'd rather stick it out until they can find a tenant at a higher price. Get rid of the bad laws and that incentive goes away. But you still need to allow more housing to be built, because otherwise the rents would go back up as soon as COVID is over and people start moving back into cities. Urban landlords don't have any kind of market power outside of control over zoning boards -- there are too many of them and none of them own a high enough proportion of the units to make a dent. Which is why they capture zoning boards to prevent supply from increasing to satisfy demand.