Some interesting snippets from the article also in-play here: > above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red

Some interesting snippets from the article also in-play here: > above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth > The region’s population and job growth slowed as apartment building took off. > San Antonio, Dallas and Plano have also seen declining rents — but they haven’t fallen as fast as in Austin. > While nearly 17,000 apartments are under construction, according to MRI data, builders have pulled back on new projects amid the glut. > Austin rents sit about 17% above pre-pandemic levels, Zillow figures show. Nearly half of the Austin-Round Rock region’s renters are “cost-burdened,” according to a report last year published by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies — meaning that they spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities, leaving less money in their pockets to spend on other essential needs like groceries, clothes and transportation. This is obviously far better than them not falling at all, but as a place with a big Covid migration boom + crazy pricing market, it will be interesting to see if it turns into a long-term decrease compared to the pre-Covid prices. Slowed job growth compared to the Covid-migration will likely help keep the prices from ramping back up, but slowed construction as prices already started to dip could counteract that to mean it ends up more like "pre-Covid status quo" than "much more affordable than it used to be." They built in a boom - which is better than NOT building in a boom like some places have done - but there's a lot more work to be done. Question is: will being hands-off there be enough, or will there need to be more proactive government intervention to encourage continued building in a more "normal" market? It would also be interesting to compare the effect of the mentioned YIMBY politicians with policies in other areas of TX where rents have fallen post-Covid. There is a LOT of underutilized land already available around the major cities in the state, it's not like the SF Bay Area. That's where more active intervention might be needed since for the couple decades before Covid developers were happy to build at a rate that let prices still go up quite a lot.