10 ms·

Just because this doesn’t magically solve the housing crisis, doesn’t mean it’s not a good start. We have to stop looking at magical solutions that will solve a

by aynyc 1y ago

Just because this doesn’t magically solve the housing crisis, doesn’t mean it’s not a good start. We have to stop looking at magical solutions that will solve all our problems in one shot. We have to start somewhere.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> because this doesn’t magically solve the housing crisis It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.) [1] http://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US0820000-denver-co/ http://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US0820000-denver-co/
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  > It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.) That is only if you believe that more capacity does not induce more demand, which really isn't true as long as the city remains popular for jobs/climate/nature/etc.... People not moving to Denver because the rent is too high will decide to move to Denver if rents decrease (and the demand they add will cause rents to increase, wash/rinse/repeat until an equilibrium is reached). You also have cases where a city becomes even more attractive because of growing density alone (NYC, Hong Kong, Tokyo).
  - hdgvhicv 1y ago
    Is you idea that people will be renting multiple units just for the fun of it? In large enough numbers to be impactful?
  - FredPret 1y ago
    That's why you have to allow large-scale building everywhere. Then the market will find its own level. The inverse of this situation is that everyone lives somewhere they consider unpleasant because the rent is affordable there. The megacities you mention are enormously economically productive per capita. All sorts of efficiencies pop up when a huge number of people live near one another.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      > The megacities you mention are enormously economically productive per capita. All sorts of efficiencies pop up when a huge number of people live near one another. It isn't a bad thing. NYC and Hong Kong are nice cities, they should exist. But don't expect housing prices to fall because you add more density if demand isn't fixed, the opposite often happens instead (people want to live in megacities even though housing costs are high). And that isn't really a bad thing, like gentrifying a blighted neighborhood will drive up housing prices as well.
  - maxerickson 1y ago
    Better to have good problems than to have bad problems.
  - tptacek 1y ago
    Induced demand can only function if there's a scarcity to begin with, and it's premised on increased supply increasing affordability (that's the mechanism by which it works), but these axiomatic derivations don't matter because we have case studies (in MN, in TX, and now CO, a story we're literally commenting on). Empirical observations win.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > Induced demand can only function if there's a scarcity to begin with I don't believe this is true, assuming scarcity = shortage. Ad absurdum, if Denver overbuilt such that one could pick up a parcel for a song, you'd see opportunistic demand where there previously was none.
      - toast0 1y ago
        There's places all over where land, and sometimes land with buildings gets very inexpensive because there's not much demand. Here's a listing for a parcel for $9000, that's been listed for over a year[1]. Denver seems like a nicer place than Detroit, IMHO, but it's possible for there to be more supply than demand. I suspect at 5% annual growth in units, you would be able to reach the point where there's not enough demand for builders to recover costs. It might take a few years, depending on just how much unmet demand there is. [1] https://www.redfin.com/MI/Detroit/1752-W-Canfield-St-48208/home/145142144?msockid=47f37366fe7611ee993d8f15c298c8ad https://www.redfin.com/MI/Detroit/1752-W-Canfield-St-48208/h...
        bombcar 1y ago
        In some places where well and septic costs say $25k to install, you can get land with working well and septic for $25k or less; the land is free.
      - bombcar 1y ago
        But there’s an obvious limit somewhere, Denver with 5 billion units might still see demand, perhaps even ten billion (need that second house of course!) but once Denver has 20 billion dwelling units demand will have leveled off, no matter how much more supply is added.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > only if you believe that more capacity does not induce more demand No, it doesn't. What you're describing is elasticity. It's a well-studed concept, and means that a 5% increase in supply will probably reduce prices by less than 4.8%. (An interesting side effect of a government committing to a zero real-price increase housing strategy is it eliminates whole categories of speculative demand. I wouldn't count on this for policy effects. But it's another feather in the cap for pro-housing policy.)
  - davidw 1y ago
    This argument always comes up when discussing a specific place. "Everyone would move to ________ because it is the best place in the spiral arm of the Milky Way", where ________ is Boulder, Bend, Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Hawai'i, Santa Fe, etc.... etc.... It cannot be true for all of them. So they all need to build and people will figure out where they actually want to live. Bozeman, Montana, a small city of 50K people, is seeing falling rents because they built a lot of housing: https://montanafreepress.org/2025/06/23/has-bozemans-rental-market-finally-flipped/ https://montanafreepress.org/2025/06/23/has-bozemans-rental-... And it's very much the kind of small place where "everyone wants to live there".
    - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      If everyone could live where they wanted to live, then ya, why wouldn't everyone want to live in the best cities? If you have fixed demand, then you can definitely "build" your way out of a housing crisis. Bozeman, for example, doesn't have many jobs, so you can't really live there if you don't bring your own money. A big city like Seattle or Denver... they have lots of jobs, so they will grow at least to the point that all those jobs have people working them...but then a city like that attracts even more jobs (the way cities work since they concentrate talent, which attracts more businesses looking for that talent), more people, it could grow from a million people to 10 or 20 million easily. > And it's very much the kind of small place where "everyone wants to live there". MT is a bad place if you need to work for a living: high housing prices, jobs don't pay very well if you can find them at all. My mom moved to Helena in the late 90s and found that out first hand. If WFH took off as expected, then you definitely could make a good life in Bozeman or Missoula or Butte, but alas, the opposite happened and we regressed greatly.
      - davidw 1y ago
        The population of Bozeman is still growing, albeit more slowly. It's not like people left. They just built a lot of housing, vacancy rates increased and prices dropped. Same thing happened in Austin, Texas, which is a much bigger city with lots of jobs. The underlying story is that building enough housing is a good way to fix a shortage of housing, which is what causes high prices.
  - czhu12 1y ago
    Giving significantly more people a way to live a lifestyle they seek, while holding the cost of housing flat -- if thats the worst case outcome, that seems totally fine, and arguably a better solution than trying to crash the cost of housing. I would imagine for most people, this is what "solving the housing crisis" means
  - happymellon 1y ago
    Except that all the folks that left Austin to move to Denver makes the houses prices in Austin drop. Now the folks in Denver who hadn't considered Austin due to high rates can move there and reduce the costs in Denver again.
  - mattmaroon 1y ago
    A 5% increase in supply annually indefinitely would crash the housing market there, induced demand be damned. To put it in perspective, a metro area growing at 2% is killing it, the highest growth rate is Austin at 3%. Denver only grows at less than 1%. Cheaper homes may induce demand, they won't induce a 5% growth rate.
    - caseyohara 1y ago
      > A 5% increase in supply annually indefinitely would crash the housing market there Only if population is held constant. Housing supply is inelastic, but housing demand is somewhat elastic. As seen in Denver, an increase in housing supply would decrease prices. But those lower prices will increase demand from people that want to live in Denver but previously couldn’t afford it.
      - mattmaroon 1y ago
        I think you missed my point. It won’t increase it to 5% because that’s basically an unheard of population level increase for a big city/metro. It’s like 5x your average fast growing big city. You may induce some demand, it will be nowhere near that much.
  - s17n 1y ago
    Are there people who have been avoiding Denver because the rent is too high? I think of Denver as somewhere you go if you're sick of the cost of living on the coast.
    - hnthrow90348765 1y ago
      You could definitely do better if that's the only criteria.
    - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      > I think of Denver as somewhere you go if you're sick of the cost of living on the coast. Denver hasn't been that place for more than a few decades. Heck, the whole rocky mountain region has never ever been a place for cheap housing. Western housing prices are high historically for reasons related to desirability. They never were as cheap as the midwest or deep south.
      - Manuel_D 1y ago
        Median price per sq ft in Denver is $377 according to Google. That's still on the order of half the cost in Seattle of SF.
        seanmcdirmid 1y ago
        Ya, but also still way above average ($220/sqf). If you ever moved to Denver or anywhere our west for cheap housing, you didn’t do your homework.
  - SR2Z 1y ago
    How much demand do you think CAN be induced? Colorado has 2.6M housing units for ~6M people. If Denver builds 20k units a year for the next 5 years, that would represent the entire state growing by 4% (230k people) off the back of one city alone. I guess that's not terribly unreasonable - if Denver was the only city in the country. Except, it's not. Where would all of these extra people come from? More to the point, Denver is already quite expensive. Where are you going to find another 230k people capable of paying even higher rents than folks do today?
  - kelnos 1y ago
    You keep building until supply meets demand, regardless of what that demand is or where it comes from. We don't have an infinite number of people available to move into housing. There are only a certain number of people who will want to move into a particular region, and that number will stop growing at some point. Granted, you don't want to build too much and end up with a ghost town. There's a balance to be maintained, and I think housing should be affordable, not a race-to-the-bottom cheap as possible.
- standardUser 1y ago
  > You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater If you buy a house for $400k, and suddenly it is worth $300k, you don't need to be "bailed out" for your purchase decision. You should have been certain that the house was worth $400k to you at the time of purchase. Otherwise you're a speculator, and we shouldn't be bailing out speculators. It's called buyer's remorse. We accept it when it's a car or a TV, but suddenly when it's a house we're supposed to give massive government support to correct the buyer's mistake?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > If you buy a house for $400k, and suddenly it is worth $300k, you don't need to be "bailed out" for your purchase decision...we shouldn't be bailing out speeculators When the speculators vote, yes, you need to bail out the speculators. > It's called buyer's remorse It's called building consensus. At the end of the day, if it costs making homeowners whole to gain their buy in to solve the housing crisis, that's money well spent. I'm not saying what I'm proposing is fair or even palatable. But it's functional. If solving the housing crisis is more important than aesthetics, it's a good move.
    - standardUser 1y ago
      I agree there are political considerations, but we are talking about a scenario where the only damage done is that the buyer must continue to live in the home they purchased at the price they purchased it for, and where the recipient of government benefits is a household capable of purchasing a house, presumably at the height of the market. Is a tax dollar better spent placating grumpy homeowners who already have a place to live they can afford, or by more directly building more housing and infrastructure?
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > we are talking about a scenario where the only damage done is that the buyer must continue to live in the home they purchased at the price they purchased it for In non-recourse states, you'd expect to see defaults as people leave the keys in the mail to reduce their housing costs by moving next door at the reduced price or rent. More broadly, people don't like seeing their wealth go down. > Is a tax dollar better spent placating grumpy homeowners If it gets you the reform, yes. The point is you don't get housing reform with grumpy homeowners barring a massive shift in voting patterns. Also, let's keep scope in mind. You only need to bail anyout out if you reduce home prices. If you hold them constant in nominal terms, that shouldn't generate pushback. (If you hold them constant in real terms, people can continue feeling wealthier.)
- mateo411 1y ago
  I think Denver home prices have decreased by 4% since the peak in 2022. I don't think anybody is going to be permanently underwater. Home prices changing should be a second order effect of building more apartments.
- phkahler 1y ago
  Nope. Smaller more affordable homes would be a better solution. Most people who rent cant afford to buy, but rent is a worse deal long term.
  - Retric 1y ago
    For single family homes square footage alone has a fairly modest impact on housing prices. Land, driveway, number and quality of fixtures, electrical hookups, cabinets, countertops, doors, clearing land, water, sewage, etc can be nearly identical costs for a 1,000 sf or a 3,000sf home. Many things like wall insulation and heating demand increase sub linearly with square footage. Which is why home builders so heavily favor large homes by historic standards. This is slightly less true of high rises, but making the building wider doesn’t require more elevators, internal hallways, etc.
    - sokoloff 1y ago
      A 1000 sqft, 3BR, 1 Bath, basic kitchen unit will be cheaper than a 3000 sqft 4BR, 2.5 Bath, fancy kitchen unit. Builders (and most everyone else involved in real estate) make a lot more money on the latter than the former, though.
      - Retric 1y ago
        Cheaper sure, but a large fraction of the difference is that extra 1.5 bathroom and fancy kitchen. Plus all the other little difference like more larger and nicer windows.
        sokoloff 1y ago
        Exactly; those are the things that are needed to turn "smaller more affordable homes would be a better solution" into reality.
        Retric 1y ago
        I’m not sure I get your point. If the utility of a home is largely a function of size, but the cost is largely a function of location and amenities then there’s little benefit to specifically building smaller homes rather than less expensive homes.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- majormajor 1y ago
  > It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.) "Committing to doing this every year" is VERY different than doing it in one particular year. Yes, that would solve it. But of course, 2022 was part of a very unusual cycle including a lot of migration and you should note the last line in the article: > Meanwhile, the pipeline of new apartment buildings is drying up. The number of properties under construction is down by roughly one-third from the peak in 2023, the report found. That likely means fewer units coming available in the months ahead, potentially giving landlords room to start raising rents again.
- 7e 1y ago
  It is instructive to look at how we got expensive housing in the first place. Expensive housing comes from a surplus of people. How did we get all those people? By building more housing and having people breed there. New housing is only a temporary salve and perpetuates a vicious cycle. The people who move into these new units will have more babies, because they have new habitat. These babies will grow up and eventually drive up housing prices. Even before then, people will move or emigrate into cheap housing and fill it up. Housing then becomes expensive again, only with more people filling up the earth: polluting the air, straining water supplies, clogging roads, uglifying neighborhoods with massive buildings, overrunning parks and trails. Thankfully, expensive housing, in part, has reduced American baby making to 1.6 per woman, a sustainable rate. Unfortunately, because humans are living longer, the US population still continues to rise. The U.S. Census Bureau currently projects that the resident U.S. population will peak at nearly 370 million around the year 2080, before it gradually declines to about 366 million by 2100. If immortality is invented before 2080, the population may never go down, ever. Meanwhile, the latest estimates put the current U.S. population (as of mid‑2025) at approximately 342 million. The population has increased roughly 4.5x since 1900. From building new housing.
- Braxton1980 1y ago
  And what happens if all that new stock isn't needed? Detroit?
- theoreticalmal 1y ago
  Why would we consider bailing out entities that are financially solvent? These homeowners may have an underwater investment, but they (presumably) can still pay the mortgage to get it paid off
- dwaite 1y ago
  > Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. That would be an incredible commitment, and not something which has happened. This burst of new rental property is already subsiding, with an expectation that rents will again raise next year. Moreso, it would be hard to get private organizations to commit to building such a massive glut of property knowing that they are tanking the market that would pay back their investment. That is why this doesn't magically solve the housing crisis.

by aynyc 1y ago

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> because this doesn’t magically solve the housing crisis It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.) [1] http://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US0820000-denver-co/ http://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US0820000-denver-co/

seanmcdirmid 1y ago
> It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.) That is only if you believe that more capacity does not induce more demand, which really isn't true as long as the city remains popular for jobs/climate/nature/etc.... People not moving to Denver because the rent is too high will decide to move to Denver if rents decrease (and the demand they add will cause rents to increase, wash/rinse/repeat until an equilibrium is reached). You also have cases where a city becomes even more attractive because of growing density alone (NYC, Hong Kong, Tokyo).
- hdgvhicv 1y ago
  Is you idea that people will be renting multiple units just for the fun of it? In large enough numbers to be impactful?
- FredPret 1y ago
  That's why you have to allow large-scale building everywhere. Then the market will find its own level. The inverse of this situation is that everyone lives somewhere they consider unpleasant because the rent is affordable there. The megacities you mention are enormously economically productive per capita. All sorts of efficiencies pop up when a huge number of people live near one another.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    > The megacities you mention are enormously economically productive per capita. All sorts of efficiencies pop up when a huge number of people live near one another. It isn't a bad thing. NYC and Hong Kong are nice cities, they should exist. But don't expect housing prices to fall because you add more density if demand isn't fixed, the opposite often happens instead (people want to live in megacities even though housing costs are high). And that isn't really a bad thing, like gentrifying a blighted neighborhood will drive up housing prices as well.
- maxerickson 1y ago
  Better to have good problems than to have bad problems.
- tptacek 1y ago
  Induced demand can only function if there's a scarcity to begin with, and it's premised on increased supply increasing affordability (that's the mechanism by which it works), but these axiomatic derivations don't matter because we have case studies (in MN, in TX, and now CO, a story we're literally commenting on). Empirical observations win.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Induced demand can only function if there's a scarcity to begin with I don't believe this is true, assuming scarcity = shortage. Ad absurdum, if Denver overbuilt such that one could pick up a parcel for a song, you'd see opportunistic demand where there previously was none.
    - toast0 1y ago
      There's places all over where land, and sometimes land with buildings gets very inexpensive because there's not much demand. Here's a listing for a parcel for $9000, that's been listed for over a year[1]. Denver seems like a nicer place than Detroit, IMHO, but it's possible for there to be more supply than demand. I suspect at 5% annual growth in units, you would be able to reach the point where there's not enough demand for builders to recover costs. It might take a few years, depending on just how much unmet demand there is. [1] https://www.redfin.com/MI/Detroit/1752-W-Canfield-St-48208/home/145142144?msockid=47f37366fe7611ee993d8f15c298c8ad https://www.redfin.com/MI/Detroit/1752-W-Canfield-St-48208/h...
      - bombcar 1y ago
        In some places where well and septic costs say $25k to install, you can get land with working well and septic for $25k or less; the land is free.
    - bombcar 1y ago
      But there’s an obvious limit somewhere, Denver with 5 billion units might still see demand, perhaps even ten billion (need that second house of course!) but once Denver has 20 billion dwelling units demand will have leveled off, no matter how much more supply is added.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > only if you believe that more capacity does not induce more demand No, it doesn't. What you're describing is elasticity. It's a well-studed concept, and means that a 5% increase in supply will probably reduce prices by less than 4.8%. (An interesting side effect of a government committing to a zero real-price increase housing strategy is it eliminates whole categories of speculative demand. I wouldn't count on this for policy effects. But it's another feather in the cap for pro-housing policy.)
- davidw 1y ago
  This argument always comes up when discussing a specific place. "Everyone would move to ________ because it is the best place in the spiral arm of the Milky Way", where ________ is Boulder, Bend, Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Hawai'i, Santa Fe, etc.... etc.... It cannot be true for all of them. So they all need to build and people will figure out where they actually want to live. Bozeman, Montana, a small city of 50K people, is seeing falling rents because they built a lot of housing: https://montanafreepress.org/2025/06/23/has-bozemans-rental-market-finally-flipped/ https://montanafreepress.org/2025/06/23/has-bozemans-rental-... And it's very much the kind of small place where "everyone wants to live there".
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    If everyone could live where they wanted to live, then ya, why wouldn't everyone want to live in the best cities? If you have fixed demand, then you can definitely "build" your way out of a housing crisis. Bozeman, for example, doesn't have many jobs, so you can't really live there if you don't bring your own money. A big city like Seattle or Denver... they have lots of jobs, so they will grow at least to the point that all those jobs have people working them...but then a city like that attracts even more jobs (the way cities work since they concentrate talent, which attracts more businesses looking for that talent), more people, it could grow from a million people to 10 or 20 million easily. > And it's very much the kind of small place where "everyone wants to live there". MT is a bad place if you need to work for a living: high housing prices, jobs don't pay very well if you can find them at all. My mom moved to Helena in the late 90s and found that out first hand. If WFH took off as expected, then you definitely could make a good life in Bozeman or Missoula or Butte, but alas, the opposite happened and we regressed greatly.
    - davidw 1y ago
      The population of Bozeman is still growing, albeit more slowly. It's not like people left. They just built a lot of housing, vacancy rates increased and prices dropped. Same thing happened in Austin, Texas, which is a much bigger city with lots of jobs. The underlying story is that building enough housing is a good way to fix a shortage of housing, which is what causes high prices.
- czhu12 1y ago
  Giving significantly more people a way to live a lifestyle they seek, while holding the cost of housing flat -- if thats the worst case outcome, that seems totally fine, and arguably a better solution than trying to crash the cost of housing. I would imagine for most people, this is what "solving the housing crisis" means
- happymellon 1y ago
  Except that all the folks that left Austin to move to Denver makes the houses prices in Austin drop. Now the folks in Denver who hadn't considered Austin due to high rates can move there and reduce the costs in Denver again.
- mattmaroon 1y ago
  A 5% increase in supply annually indefinitely would crash the housing market there, induced demand be damned. To put it in perspective, a metro area growing at 2% is killing it, the highest growth rate is Austin at 3%. Denver only grows at less than 1%. Cheaper homes may induce demand, they won't induce a 5% growth rate.
  - caseyohara 1y ago
    > A 5% increase in supply annually indefinitely would crash the housing market there Only if population is held constant. Housing supply is inelastic, but housing demand is somewhat elastic. As seen in Denver, an increase in housing supply would decrease prices. But those lower prices will increase demand from people that want to live in Denver but previously couldn’t afford it.
    - mattmaroon 1y ago
      I think you missed my point. It won’t increase it to 5% because that’s basically an unheard of population level increase for a big city/metro. It’s like 5x your average fast growing big city. You may induce some demand, it will be nowhere near that much.
- s17n 1y ago
  Are there people who have been avoiding Denver because the rent is too high? I think of Denver as somewhere you go if you're sick of the cost of living on the coast.
  - hnthrow90348765 1y ago
    You could definitely do better if that's the only criteria.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    > I think of Denver as somewhere you go if you're sick of the cost of living on the coast. Denver hasn't been that place for more than a few decades. Heck, the whole rocky mountain region has never ever been a place for cheap housing. Western housing prices are high historically for reasons related to desirability. They never were as cheap as the midwest or deep south.
    - Manuel_D 1y ago
      Median price per sq ft in Denver is $377 according to Google. That's still on the order of half the cost in Seattle of SF.
      - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
        Ya, but also still way above average ($220/sqf). If you ever moved to Denver or anywhere our west for cheap housing, you didn’t do your homework.
- SR2Z 1y ago
  How much demand do you think CAN be induced? Colorado has 2.6M housing units for ~6M people. If Denver builds 20k units a year for the next 5 years, that would represent the entire state growing by 4% (230k people) off the back of one city alone. I guess that's not terribly unreasonable - if Denver was the only city in the country. Except, it's not. Where would all of these extra people come from? More to the point, Denver is already quite expensive. Where are you going to find another 230k people capable of paying even higher rents than folks do today?
- kelnos 1y ago
  You keep building until supply meets demand, regardless of what that demand is or where it comes from. We don't have an infinite number of people available to move into housing. There are only a certain number of people who will want to move into a particular region, and that number will stop growing at some point. Granted, you don't want to build too much and end up with a ghost town. There's a balance to be maintained, and I think housing should be affordable, not a race-to-the-bottom cheap as possible.
standardUser 1y ago
> You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater If you buy a house for $400k, and suddenly it is worth $300k, you don't need to be "bailed out" for your purchase decision. You should have been certain that the house was worth $400k to you at the time of purchase. Otherwise you're a speculator, and we shouldn't be bailing out speculators. It's called buyer's remorse. We accept it when it's a car or a TV, but suddenly when it's a house we're supposed to give massive government support to correct the buyer's mistake?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > If you buy a house for $400k, and suddenly it is worth $300k, you don't need to be "bailed out" for your purchase decision...we shouldn't be bailing out speeculators When the speculators vote, yes, you need to bail out the speculators. > It's called buyer's remorse It's called building consensus. At the end of the day, if it costs making homeowners whole to gain their buy in to solve the housing crisis, that's money well spent. I'm not saying what I'm proposing is fair or even palatable. But it's functional. If solving the housing crisis is more important than aesthetics, it's a good move.
  - standardUser 1y ago
    I agree there are political considerations, but we are talking about a scenario where the only damage done is that the buyer must continue to live in the home they purchased at the price they purchased it for, and where the recipient of government benefits is a household capable of purchasing a house, presumably at the height of the market. Is a tax dollar better spent placating grumpy homeowners who already have a place to live they can afford, or by more directly building more housing and infrastructure?
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > we are talking about a scenario where the only damage done is that the buyer must continue to live in the home they purchased at the price they purchased it for In non-recourse states, you'd expect to see defaults as people leave the keys in the mail to reduce their housing costs by moving next door at the reduced price or rent. More broadly, people don't like seeing their wealth go down. > Is a tax dollar better spent placating grumpy homeowners If it gets you the reform, yes. The point is you don't get housing reform with grumpy homeowners barring a massive shift in voting patterns. Also, let's keep scope in mind. You only need to bail anyout out if you reduce home prices. If you hold them constant in nominal terms, that shouldn't generate pushback. (If you hold them constant in real terms, people can continue feeling wealthier.)
mateo411 1y ago
I think Denver home prices have decreased by 4% since the peak in 2022. I don't think anybody is going to be permanently underwater. Home prices changing should be a second order effect of building more apartments.
phkahler 1y ago
Nope. Smaller more affordable homes would be a better solution. Most people who rent cant afford to buy, but rent is a worse deal long term.
- Retric 1y ago
  For single family homes square footage alone has a fairly modest impact on housing prices. Land, driveway, number and quality of fixtures, electrical hookups, cabinets, countertops, doors, clearing land, water, sewage, etc can be nearly identical costs for a 1,000 sf or a 3,000sf home. Many things like wall insulation and heating demand increase sub linearly with square footage. Which is why home builders so heavily favor large homes by historic standards. This is slightly less true of high rises, but making the building wider doesn’t require more elevators, internal hallways, etc.
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    A 1000 sqft, 3BR, 1 Bath, basic kitchen unit will be cheaper than a 3000 sqft 4BR, 2.5 Bath, fancy kitchen unit. Builders (and most everyone else involved in real estate) make a lot more money on the latter than the former, though.
    - Retric 1y ago
      Cheaper sure, but a large fraction of the difference is that extra 1.5 bathroom and fancy kitchen. Plus all the other little difference like more larger and nicer windows.
      - sokoloff 1y ago
        Exactly; those are the things that are needed to turn "smaller more affordable homes would be a better solution" into reality.
        Retric 1y ago
        I’m not sure I get your point. If the utility of a home is largely a function of size, but the cost is largely a function of location and amenities then there’s little benefit to specifically building smaller homes rather than less expensive homes.
deleted 1y ago
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majormajor 1y ago
> It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.) "Committing to doing this every year" is VERY different than doing it in one particular year. Yes, that would solve it. But of course, 2022 was part of a very unusual cycle including a lot of migration and you should note the last line in the article: > Meanwhile, the pipeline of new apartment buildings is drying up. The number of properties under construction is down by roughly one-third from the peak in 2023, the report found. That likely means fewer units coming available in the months ahead, potentially giving landlords room to start raising rents again.
7e 1y ago
It is instructive to look at how we got expensive housing in the first place. Expensive housing comes from a surplus of people. How did we get all those people? By building more housing and having people breed there. New housing is only a temporary salve and perpetuates a vicious cycle. The people who move into these new units will have more babies, because they have new habitat. These babies will grow up and eventually drive up housing prices. Even before then, people will move or emigrate into cheap housing and fill it up. Housing then becomes expensive again, only with more people filling up the earth: polluting the air, straining water supplies, clogging roads, uglifying neighborhoods with massive buildings, overrunning parks and trails. Thankfully, expensive housing, in part, has reduced American baby making to 1.6 per woman, a sustainable rate. Unfortunately, because humans are living longer, the US population still continues to rise. The U.S. Census Bureau currently projects that the resident U.S. population will peak at nearly 370 million around the year 2080, before it gradually declines to about 366 million by 2100. If immortality is invented before 2080, the population may never go down, ever. Meanwhile, the latest estimates put the current U.S. population (as of mid‑2025) at approximately 342 million. The population has increased roughly 4.5x since 1900. From building new housing.
Braxton1980 1y ago
And what happens if all that new stock isn't needed? Detroit?
theoreticalmal 1y ago
Why would we consider bailing out entities that are financially solvent? These homeowners may have an underwater investment, but they (presumably) can still pay the mortgage to get it paid off
dwaite 1y ago
> Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. That would be an incredible commitment, and not something which has happened. This burst of new rental property is already subsiding, with an expectation that rents will again raise next year. Moreso, it would be hard to get private organizations to commit to building such a massive glut of property knowing that they are tanking the market that would pay back their investment. That is why this doesn't magically solve the housing crisis.