7 ms·

Yes, its just price fixing, bypassing laws by using 3rd party tools. And with no increase in supply and the increase of people needing housing, the prices can

Yes, its just price fixing, bypassing laws by using 3rd party tools. And with no increase in supply and the increase of people needing housing, the prices can go only go higher. Infrastructure designed for populations 30-50 years ago, city planning didn't foresee the need for the public transportation and housing needs for these mega cities. And then the increase in local taxes to try to compensate for the mass costs, and hurting the current tax base, is a major issue. Top if off with the increasing inflation and interest rates which is also compounding the situation.

jimbob45 2y ago
Price fixing and no penalty for leaving units vacant.
- natoliniak 2y ago
  question: how can a municipality determine if a unit is vacant?
blakesterz 2y ago
> And then the increase in local taxes to try to compensate for the mass costs I don't know if it's like this everywhere, but our local taxes have gone up by a big percentage over the past several years. They say they haven't raised our taxes, but since valuations go up, our taxes go up... by thousands of dollars.
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  If valuations are up across the board, and the revenue requirements remain fixed, then your mill levy should be lower and your tax burden should be the same as the past. It should be pretty clear that your municipality is collecting more taxes than they were previously from published reports. If they aren't, then that means your property valuation has gone up more than others in your region...that should be considered a good thing, even if you have a slightly higher tax burden because of it.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    In what conceivable reality could housing costs go up across the board but municipal revenues remain flat? Municipal employees need a place to sleep, so housing costs lead directly to new revenue needs.
    - IncreasePosts 2y ago
      If municipal revenue doesn't remain flat, then you can't say taxes haven't gone up.
- nradov 2y ago
  This was the main reason behind California's Proposition 13 in 1978. At the time, homeowners were seeing their taxes go up and up every year just based on valuation increases. Meanwhile their incomes weren't necessarily increasing at the same rate. Prop 13 has had some negative effects but the anger by voters at the time is entirely understandable.
  - asdff 2y ago
    The biggest issue with prop 13 is they also rolled it out for commercial properties not just your primary residential home. So much prime land is squandered as a result by things like 1950s era single story retail at best or just a surface lot that sees minimal overhead but a lot of upside for the absentee owner.
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    Deferring taxes until death or home sale seems like it would work better. Now, you just have a system where the newest members of a neighborhood pay way more for services than extant members of the neighborhood.
    - nradov 2y ago
      Deferring taxes does nothing to prevent wasteful over spending by local governments. For all of its faults, Prop 13 was effective in capping spending.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    Well sure but its basically a system where you massivly, massivly benefit people already have property, and literally take a huge shit on everybody else. Its basically a "lets give property owners billion and billions in subsidies" and make everybody else pay.
- tnel77 2y ago
  Exactly. Our tax rates were cut (very slightly) this year, but valuations are still up so the tax bill is up as well. The city acts like we should be super grateful.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Seattle keeps raising property taxes in order to reduce the housing shortage.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    My property taxes have gone down for the last few years, probably because King County has moved the equation to taxing land more than structures (and I live in a town home on a small piece of land).
doctorpangloss 2y ago
On the other hand, the main reason the landlords using RealPage were not raising rent, seemingly, when they could, was vibes.
jasonjayr 2y ago
And don't forget stagnant wages, forcing desperate sales to those with capital in the bank go acquire property, and then rent it back for even more money....
- bequanna 2y ago
  > …forcing desperate sales Are you referring to single or multifamily property? Either way, demand is strong and prices are high. Sellers still have a lot of power in this market and I haven’t really seen examples of anyone selling a property being taken advantage of.
throwaway44773 2y ago
Not to mention that construction has seen little gains in productivity over the past few decades resulting in the Baumol effect in the industry. There's little reason that constructing new housing cannot be automated to the degree that car construction is automated, but a variety of regulatory hurdles and little foreign competition makes building construction prices rise steadily. We need a well-funded startup to pull an Uber and indiscriminately sidestep regulation to disrupt the real estate market.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  > There's little reason that constructing new housing cannot be automated to the degree that car construction is automated What experience do you have that you would be able to make a lofty claim like this? Are the people working at DR Horton and Lennar and the like missing something obvious? I figure businesses that construct and sell tens of thousands of homes in a year are at the bleeding edge of figuring out how to most efficiently construct a house.
  - margalabargala 2y ago
    One can observe the increase in quality and variety of prefab and manufactured homes, which fully take advantage of new manufacturing efficiency advances, while also observing assorted regulations that make building such housing infeasible in many parts of the US. What's you're special experience that makes you so confident this is not the case? Seems like a pretty extraordinary claim.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      >What's you're special experience that makes you so confident this is not the case? Seems like a pretty extraordinary claim. The comment I responded to was edited to include the component about regulations being the problem. Obviously, the parameters within which to construct a house includes regulations, so my experience that automating home construction is not cost efficient yet is the fact that the largest and most successful home builders do not use those techniques. Aka reality. Whether or not regulations are appropriate or not is a separate discussion, but in my experience, most are good other than the ones that forbid the type of housing being built (such as higher density), or excessive setbacks that waste land. Edit: never mind, the comment I replied to was not edited, I just didn’t read it thoroughly. My bad!
lenerdenator 2y ago
> And then the increase in local taxes to try to compensate for the mass costs, and hurting the current tax base, is a major issue. My favorite is when jurisdictions let people past a certain age freeze the property tax rate at a certain point. Of course, these were the same people who: 1) campaigned against any and all housing that would disrupt the "charm" of the area 2) insisted on a 3/2 single-family home on a significant fraction of an acre 3) insisted that said home be miles away from the city center, requiring lots of infrastructure while simultaneously reducing the population density that would pay for said infrastructure 4) did nothing to shore up the budgets at the local, state, and national level over the last 30 years
- tzs 2y ago
  Are you under the impression that only people who fall into one of those four categories age?
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    This is a list of things that a generation by-and-large did, not a list of categories.
ponector 2y ago
But actual data says opposite. Amount of housing is growing while household size shrinking. >>US-wide, homes built in the last 6 years are 74% larger than those built in the 1910s, an increase of a little over 1,000 square feet. The average new home in America, be it condo or house, now spreads over 2,430 square feet. It is also important to note that, parallel to the rise in living space, households have been getting smaller over the same period. In 2015, the average number of people in a household is 2.58, compared to 4.54 in 1910. This means that today the average individual living in a newly built home in the US enjoys 211% more living space than their grandparents did, 957 square feet in total
- itishappy 2y ago
  Does this control for short-term rentals? I could totally see us building more 3 bedroom Airbnb flats while simultaneously moving families into smaller apartments.
- HumblyTossed 2y ago
  Yeah, this is annoying. Even the 55 and older neighborhood that was built a few miles from me recently, the smallest is about 2K sqft. What the heck?? Surely the math must make sense to someone.
- highcountess 2y ago
  There is an inundation of foreign nationals holding in various camps and temporary housing that are fueling inflation (gov’t money printing, aka fraud) and will drive price increases soon as they start being interleaved into society. The other side of the equation is also that the same inundation of foreign nationals into the system will drive down wages. We are all riding the dragon. We shall see how it unravels.
- silverquiet 2y ago
  This has long been a suspicion of mine; I've wondered what the actual ratio of housing square footage per person in the US is. I see the wealthy building palatial 3rd homes that are occupied a few weeks a year and wonder if that's a big enough demographic to have any noticeable affect on the national market. Seems wasteful regardless.
panick21_ 2y ago
Totally wrong. Infrastructure was not designed for population 30-50 years ago. The opposite, to much bad infrastructure was built for to few people. There are lots of town the same amount of people but about 5x more infrastructure per person. Even the places with growth have massivly overbuilt infrastructure. And low value housing ever further out is just not helping because the housing + transport cost equation doesn't add up for people. Its simply bad infrastructure, badly planned with a totally disfunctional insentive structure. The infrastructre isnt actually supported by the local taxes and raising taxes can often even in the best case only cover maintenance at best. Look at the data from Stong Towns or Urban 3. If R1 zoneing (single family homes) is 80% of you land and each on is losing money from a tax perspective, its not suprising. You have medium sized cities that have to maintaine roads that can reach half way accross the country. Indianapolis has to maintaine a road that reaches from it to Alaska. Lots of good infrastructure like trains and walkable neiberhoods were systematically destroyed and replaced with less efficent infrastructure. Any county with a great inner city somewhere is profiting massivly and that city is paying for all the infrastructure around it. Even delapidated inner cities are better from a a tax efficency point of view then single family homes or a wallmarkt. The poor neiberhoods are overtaxed and the richer ones are undertaxed by a large margin. Even if you assume the poor get the full service they should have, and they often don't. But im sure the solution is to make the highway threw Austin wider ...

jimbob45 2y ago

Price fixing and no penalty for leaving units vacant.

natoliniak 2y ago
question: how can a municipality determine if a unit is vacant?

blakesterz 2y ago

> And then the increase in local taxes to try to compensate for the mass costs I don't know if it's like this everywhere, but our local taxes have gone up by a big percentage over the past several years. They say they haven't raised our taxes, but since valuations go up, our taxes go up... by thousands of dollars.

IncreasePosts 2y ago
If valuations are up across the board, and the revenue requirements remain fixed, then your mill levy should be lower and your tax burden should be the same as the past. It should be pretty clear that your municipality is collecting more taxes than they were previously from published reports. If they aren't, then that means your property valuation has gone up more than others in your region...that should be considered a good thing, even if you have a slightly higher tax burden because of it.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  In what conceivable reality could housing costs go up across the board but municipal revenues remain flat? Municipal employees need a place to sleep, so housing costs lead directly to new revenue needs.
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    If municipal revenue doesn't remain flat, then you can't say taxes haven't gone up.
nradov 2y ago
This was the main reason behind California's Proposition 13 in 1978. At the time, homeowners were seeing their taxes go up and up every year just based on valuation increases. Meanwhile their incomes weren't necessarily increasing at the same rate. Prop 13 has had some negative effects but the anger by voters at the time is entirely understandable.
- asdff 2y ago
  The biggest issue with prop 13 is they also rolled it out for commercial properties not just your primary residential home. So much prime land is squandered as a result by things like 1950s era single story retail at best or just a surface lot that sees minimal overhead but a lot of upside for the absentee owner.
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  Deferring taxes until death or home sale seems like it would work better. Now, you just have a system where the newest members of a neighborhood pay way more for services than extant members of the neighborhood.
  - nradov 2y ago
    Deferring taxes does nothing to prevent wasteful over spending by local governments. For all of its faults, Prop 13 was effective in capping spending.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  Well sure but its basically a system where you massivly, massivly benefit people already have property, and literally take a huge shit on everybody else. Its basically a "lets give property owners billion and billions in subsidies" and make everybody else pay.
tnel77 2y ago
Exactly. Our tax rates were cut (very slightly) this year, but valuations are still up so the tax bill is up as well. The city acts like we should be super grateful.
WalterBright 2y ago
Seattle keeps raising property taxes in order to reduce the housing shortage.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  My property taxes have gone down for the last few years, probably because King County has moved the equation to taxing land more than structures (and I live in a town home on a small piece of land).

doctorpangloss 2y ago

On the other hand, the main reason the landlords using RealPage were not raising rent, seemingly, when they could, was vibes.

jasonjayr 2y ago

And don't forget stagnant wages, forcing desperate sales to those with capital in the bank go acquire property, and then rent it back for even more money....

bequanna 2y ago
> …forcing desperate sales Are you referring to single or multifamily property? Either way, demand is strong and prices are high. Sellers still have a lot of power in this market and I haven’t really seen examples of anyone selling a property being taken advantage of.

throwaway44773 2y ago

Not to mention that construction has seen little gains in productivity over the past few decades resulting in the Baumol effect in the industry. There's little reason that constructing new housing cannot be automated to the degree that car construction is automated, but a variety of regulatory hurdles and little foreign competition makes building construction prices rise steadily. We need a well-funded startup to pull an Uber and indiscriminately sidestep regulation to disrupt the real estate market.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
> There's little reason that constructing new housing cannot be automated to the degree that car construction is automated What experience do you have that you would be able to make a lofty claim like this? Are the people working at DR Horton and Lennar and the like missing something obvious? I figure businesses that construct and sell tens of thousands of homes in a year are at the bleeding edge of figuring out how to most efficiently construct a house.
- margalabargala 2y ago
  One can observe the increase in quality and variety of prefab and manufactured homes, which fully take advantage of new manufacturing efficiency advances, while also observing assorted regulations that make building such housing infeasible in many parts of the US. What's you're special experience that makes you so confident this is not the case? Seems like a pretty extraordinary claim.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    >What's you're special experience that makes you so confident this is not the case? Seems like a pretty extraordinary claim. The comment I responded to was edited to include the component about regulations being the problem. Obviously, the parameters within which to construct a house includes regulations, so my experience that automating home construction is not cost efficient yet is the fact that the largest and most successful home builders do not use those techniques. Aka reality. Whether or not regulations are appropriate or not is a separate discussion, but in my experience, most are good other than the ones that forbid the type of housing being built (such as higher density), or excessive setbacks that waste land. Edit: never mind, the comment I replied to was not edited, I just didn’t read it thoroughly. My bad!

lenerdenator 2y ago

> And then the increase in local taxes to try to compensate for the mass costs, and hurting the current tax base, is a major issue. My favorite is when jurisdictions let people past a certain age freeze the property tax rate at a certain point. Of course, these were the same people who: 1) campaigned against any and all housing that would disrupt the "charm" of the area 2) insisted on a 3/2 single-family home on a significant fraction of an acre 3) insisted that said home be miles away from the city center, requiring lots of infrastructure while simultaneously reducing the population density that would pay for said infrastructure 4) did nothing to shore up the budgets at the local, state, and national level over the last 30 years

tzs 2y ago
Are you under the impression that only people who fall into one of those four categories age?
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  This is a list of things that a generation by-and-large did, not a list of categories.

ponector 2y ago

But actual data says opposite. Amount of housing is growing while household size shrinking. >>US-wide, homes built in the last 6 years are 74% larger than those built in the 1910s, an increase of a little over 1,000 square feet. The average new home in America, be it condo or house, now spreads over 2,430 square feet. It is also important to note that, parallel to the rise in living space, households have been getting smaller over the same period. In 2015, the average number of people in a household is 2.58, compared to 4.54 in 1910. This means that today the average individual living in a newly built home in the US enjoys 211% more living space than their grandparents did, 957 square feet in total

itishappy 2y ago
Does this control for short-term rentals? I could totally see us building more 3 bedroom Airbnb flats while simultaneously moving families into smaller apartments.
HumblyTossed 2y ago
Yeah, this is annoying. Even the 55 and older neighborhood that was built a few miles from me recently, the smallest is about 2K sqft. What the heck?? Surely the math must make sense to someone.
highcountess 2y ago
There is an inundation of foreign nationals holding in various camps and temporary housing that are fueling inflation (gov’t money printing, aka fraud) and will drive price increases soon as they start being interleaved into society. The other side of the equation is also that the same inundation of foreign nationals into the system will drive down wages. We are all riding the dragon. We shall see how it unravels.
silverquiet 2y ago
This has long been a suspicion of mine; I've wondered what the actual ratio of housing square footage per person in the US is. I see the wealthy building palatial 3rd homes that are occupied a few weeks a year and wonder if that's a big enough demographic to have any noticeable affect on the national market. Seems wasteful regardless.

panick21_ 2y ago

Totally wrong. Infrastructure was not designed for population 30-50 years ago. The opposite, to much bad infrastructure was built for to few people. There are lots of town the same amount of people but about 5x more infrastructure per person. Even the places with growth have massivly overbuilt infrastructure. And low value housing ever further out is just not helping because the housing + transport cost equation doesn't add up for people. Its simply bad infrastructure, badly planned with a totally disfunctional insentive structure. The infrastructre isnt actually supported by the local taxes and raising taxes can often even in the best case only cover maintenance at best. Look at the data from Stong Towns or Urban 3. If R1 zoneing (single family homes) is 80% of you land and each on is losing money from a tax perspective, its not suprising. You have medium sized cities that have to maintaine roads that can reach half way accross the country. Indianapolis has to maintaine a road that reaches from it to Alaska. Lots of good infrastructure like trains and walkable neiberhoods were systematically destroyed and replaced with less efficent infrastructure. Any county with a great inner city somewhere is profiting massivly and that city is paying for all the infrastructure around it. Even delapidated inner cities are better from a a tax efficency point of view then single family homes or a wallmarkt. The poor neiberhoods are overtaxed and the richer ones are undertaxed by a large margin. Even if you assume the poor get the full service they should have, and they often don't. But im sure the solution is to make the highway threw Austin wider ...