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Its wild how the solution to housing costs is really just: Build more housing. Keep law and order. No it doesn’t need to be “affordable”. Yes rent control is

by pclowes 7mo ago

Its wild how the solution to housing costs is really just: Build more housing. Keep law and order. No it doesn’t need to be “affordable”. Yes rent control is a terrible idea. Just build more housing. Note: that the US already has plenty of housing and housing costs basically go up in areas of low crime relative to economic opportunity. If you build housing, but allow crime to rise, you have wasted everybody’s time.

hammock 7mo ago
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deleted 7mo ago
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datsci_est_2015 7mo ago
Multiple things can be done at once. The policies you laid out are not mutually exclusive, and have different utility for different communities. But yes, fundamentally more housing is needed for growing populations. Conversions and rezoning are also important parts of the urban equation to “build more housing”, not just exurban McMansion developments.
tsunamifury 7mo ago
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- tptacek 7mo ago
  There isn't affordable housing in areas of opportunity. You can easily find cheap housing if you don't care about proximity to jobs or to good school districts.
  - tsunamifury 7mo ago
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- bitmasher9 7mo ago
  What do you mean by "economic singularity"? If your goal is being near economic opportunity then Austin has plenty. It’s not NYC or SF, but this suggests that those would be more affordable if they just built more housing.
- pibaker 7mo ago
  It is not affordable if it is located somewhere with no job.
  - tsunamifury 7mo ago
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- deleted 7mo ago
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slg 7mo ago
This comment is phrased as if the article is confirming these points when it either doesn't mention them or even directly refutes them. First there is no mention of either crime or rent control in the article. But more importantly, it states that "A key piece of Austin’s strategy has been to encourage the construction of affordable housing." So why are you concluding that affordable housing isn't needed?
- terminalshort 7mo ago
  Affordable housing is the only type of housing that will ever be built. Builders aren't so stupid as to build products that their customers can't buy. Government intervention is not needed.
  - ms_menardi 7mo ago
    And yet, gentrification.
    - triceratops 7mo ago
      God forbid bad parts of town ever get good.
      - KPGv2 7mo ago
        That's not what gentrification is. Relevant to this article, I lived through the gentrification of large parts of Austin in the early 00s. What happened was that good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives began gentrifying, driving up property values, which drove up property taxes, which became unaffordable to the existing residents (who had owned their homes for a long time). Many (actually, most) of these artists had to sell and leave. They often left for other cities. But hey at least the good houses everyone liked all got torn down to be replaced by McMansions for the influx of techbros. Austin still has that slogan, "Keep Austin Weird." It failed. Austin isn't weird anymore. The University of Texas still is responsible for a lot of great stuff about Austin, but huge chunks of the city are just boring these days. There's certainly much less interesting culture happening. It's been airbnbified.
tharmas 7mo ago
You have to restrict investors buying up that newly built housing too. Homes for people. Not investors.
- creato 7mo ago
  It really doesn't matter as long as someone is living in it.
- bryanlarsen 7mo ago
  35% of Americans rent their homes. And they almost invariably rent from investors. Therefore if more than 35% of homes are owned by investors this drives down rent. If less than 35% are owned by investors rent goes up.
  - ms_menardi 7mo ago
    This logic assumes that 35% of Americans WANT to rent their home. Which seems odd to me, if only for financial reasons - why would you pay 1400$ for a 1 bedroom apartment when you could pay 700$ in a mortgage for that same apartment if you could have bought it?
    - triceratops 7mo ago
      If you invent a scenario where the mortgage is half the rent then buying is a no-brainer. Does that reflect reality?
      - TimorousBestie 7mo ago
        Maybe not half, but it’s pretty common around here (generic midwestern city) for renting to be more expensive than a comparable mortgage. Many landlords seem to expect to pay their mortgage and property taxes and maintenance with the rental income, and still net a profit, if r/landlord is to be believed.
        triceratops 7mo ago
estearum 7mo ago
New construction has already decelerated in Austin due to falling prices, which compresses already-near-zero margin on real estate development. So yes, it really is "just build more housing." The problem is: why would you build more housing as prices fall?
- creato 7mo ago
  It doesn't matter whether prices are going up or down, it matters if the price is more than the cost to build.
  - estearum 7mo ago
    No, not really. It matters whether the margin is higher than other investment opportunities of similar scale and risk profile. Already, the answer is very often no. In Austin, the answer will increasingly be no. That means people will not finance new construction, so if demand continues to grow it will outstrip supply and prices will go back up until the margin on new construction exceeds that of alternative investment opportunities of similar scale and risk profile.
    - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
      Your explanation of fluctuations in supply and demand are not very revelatory. Everything being in flux at all times is kind of an elementary fact of life.
      - estearum 7mo ago
        It's clearly not elementary if people here believe that you can just keep building until prices collapse, and people will still keep building. The question is whether the market achieves equilibrium at a point where 1) developers can get financing to build profitably, and 2) units can be sold at a broadly attainable price to the local market. The answer appears to be no because the cost of inputs is so high. No one here is talking about directly reducing the cost of inputs. They believe that instead developers will just continue to build units that they sell at a loss, or at least investors will continue to invest in construction that returns less than the S&P 500 or 10 Year Treasuries (they won't).
testaccount28 7mo ago
without rent control, what economic incentive do renters have to maintain law and order / invest in local community / be a good neighbor? any investment they make is captured by the landlord. in fact, they are incentivized to maintain their neighborhood in as much disrepair as they can stand, for fear of rent increases. the little old lady living in a rent controlled apartment is a big part of why rents are high in that area: she was part of what made the community thrive. we would do well to compensate her for this.
bsder 7mo ago
> Just build more housing. Also "Wipe out a whole boatload of techbros who artificially inflate prices". Nobody is talking about that part of the equation. Austin was one of the places a lot of tech folks flocked to when everybody was working online. RTO and layoffs have wiped a lot of them out. I'd estimate almost 1/3 of the tech folks that were floating around last year are now in other cities.
mmooss 7mo ago
> Its wild how the solution to housing costs is really just: > Build more housing. Keep law and order. Safety (law and order) increases housing costs, as you say. It's desireable on its own, but it does not solve housing cost. NYC is very safe and very expensive. Crime is way down in most of the US, and housing costs are much higher.
- pclowes 7mo ago
  NYC is fairly high density. Has stopped building massive new skyscrapers and has water on two sides. It is also a tier 1 global city culturally AND economically. Its not really reasonable to expect to be affordable.
  - mmooss 7mo ago
    It's been affordable for many generations, a destination for opportunity for the poorest people, including immigrants. It's only recently that things have become so absurd. > water on two sides Do you mean Manhattan, one of the five boroughs? It's an island. > stopped building massive new skyscrapers When? Why?
easterncalculus 7mo ago
And also expand the city line for what "Austin" is so you can include the cheaper, far from everything housing that you refuse to build. Yes, it does need to be affordable, and a certain percentage of it needs to be non-market housing. Housing isn't an elastic commodity. Get real.
- pclowes 7mo ago
  But where do you draw the limit on moving the line in? Do I get to demand affordable housing overlooking Central Park in NYC? Beachside in Malibu? If you want large incentive for development at scale you need to allow developers to make fat margins or else you wont get too many of them. Yes you can use affordable housing to do that. Eg: in the article they got higher density and exceptions (aka “fat stacks”) for building affordable housing units. This is all policy tradeoffs at the end of the day. Eg: a tent is not “housing”, why? Because of reasonable policy. Same thing with housing codes etc. All directionally wise/good. But at the same time you can have bad affordable housing policy. I do think housing is elastic and a cities policies around that elasticity determines if they will thrive or stagnate.
bluegatty 7mo ago
Rent control is one of the best ideas, and it may be a civilizational, foundational idea. Property ownership is at the very core of entrenched power, and the foundation of rent-seeking and wealth asymmetry. If you look at even the Monarchs of long past - it wasn't their 'titles' that made them powerful - it was the economic rent that came along with the land ownership. Even in more open market economies, property is still is basically long term economics lording over short term economics of wage earning workers. Being able to kick someone out of their home almost arbitrary basically puts working class people at the 'total whims of the market' and it's one of the most disruptive concepts imaginable. If we take the view that 'housing is about housing first - only about investment to the extent it does not disrupt housing' - then a different perspective takes shape. Many Canadian provinces have 'basic rent controls' and it does not generally prevent new housing development. If anything, providing 'housing stability' is probably the best way to create base prosperity, so those people can go out and spend on all the other things. There might need to be some degree of leeway here and there for certain kinds of density challenges, but that can be had with rent control There is almost unlimited land in North America to build on - if in one spot it's a bit difficult - build elsewhere. If people want to have 'density' then incorporate an area and 'build density' in that area. Also it does need to be 'affordable' but that can work with regulations. Edit: our housing problems are about screwed up management, it's actually not even an ideological problem underneath. Like 'rent control' the way it is framed scares some people, but its literally province wide in Ontario, Quebec and it's a 'non issue' for new unit hinderance. Even the nimbyism stuff can be worked around: if people don't want high-rises next to them, it's their right, but there's a lot less opposition to 'mild density' especially if it fits in local cultural and aesthetic context. We can have our cake and it eat on housing. I think we invent ideological lenses because it's easier to frame 'narratives' than it is just weird policies, special circumstances, hiccups, different municipal things going on all at once.
- wyager 7mo ago
  > Rent control is one of the best ideas It's funny how this question might have the greatest divergence in answer distribution between people who do and don't know what they're talking about Other candidates are "is debt good" and "is property tax better or worse than income tax"
jmyeet 7mo ago
So pretty much everything you've said here is wrong. Build more housing? In a place like Austin, you can just keep building out, basically. To a point. Eventually cities doing this reach a limit. Houston and Atlanta are pretty much at or beyond that limit. And it's not that building low-density SFH housing is the most economic. It's simply the most subsidized. Every road, every parking space, every sewer pipe, every water pipe, every utility pole, every school, every hospital, every police station, every fire station... they all add factor in to the true cost of housing and the more spread out things are, the more expensive those things become. Taken to extremes, look at the billions Houston spends now to add just one more lane (because this one will totally solve traffic) on, say, the Katy Freeway or the ring roads. Yes it does need to be affordable. NYC is the posterchild for this. Nothing that's getting built on billionaire's row will ever trickle down to being affordable housing. They build ultra-luxury housing because it's the most profitable and it does absolutely nothing for anyone else because these units are just ways for non-residents (mostly) to park wealth and not pay their fair share of taxes. Rent control is the wrong solution for the right problem and it's typically American. By that I mean it forces the solution onto private landlords who are going to do everything possible to get out of those obligations and deliver subpar but compliant housing. And they'll demand tax breaks for it. When in fact the solution is for the government to supply a large chunk of the housing market ie social housing. But there's a pervasive and wrong idea that we can only solve problems in the private sector and that's nothing more than a wealth transfer from the government to the already-wealthy. "Just build more housing". Yeah, and then you get Houston. Cities need to be planned. Cities require infrastructure. And one of the most important thing cities need is public transit infrastructure, something sadly lacking in virtually every American city. The core to so many of these problems is that we need to stop treating housing as a speculative asset. Owning two or more houses should be incredibly difficult and expensive and should be taxed punitively. By this I mean the capital gains on non-primary residences should be 80% and property taxes should be significantly higher.
- FarmerPotato 7mo ago
  You seem to know Houston; alas yes Austin was formerly surrounded by open spaces. But let's not miss the point of the article. This is a right-ward shift of the supply curve. It means that the economics of building the next unit got cheaper. That's the point. I've seen a lot of neighborhoods across the USA, and Austin making way for higher-density housing on urban corridors (Lamar) is like, duh, this is more live-able. There are new towers along rail and bus route, townhomes packed in, and behind the tree line it's now possible for some single-family lots to become duplexes or fourplexes. And rather than McMansion ugly, the new Austin residents are dressing those up to look pretty darn cool. There is a lot more to be done to remove supply-side barriers in every city.
atoav 7mo ago
Well, build more housing and ensure the more housing is being bought by people who live in it or (if you don't find enough of those) by people who will rent it to them. Many problems occur when capital buys living space as an investment that needs to go up in value, since now there is an incentive to keep some scarcity.
vkou 7mo ago
> Yes rent control is a terrible idea. When you aren't building more housing, for whatever reason, rent control is the only thing that prevents domestic 'immigrants' into your city from making all the residents homeless. Since cities can't stop migration into them, it's the only tool they have to protect their existing residents. --- PS. If you believe in trial-by-combat for housing, why not a similar approach to border control? It's the same concept, open it all up and let the market decide whether your existence is worth it. There are billions of honest, hard-working, capable people who will happily pay more than you for where you live, do your work for less pay than you're willing to accept, and would love to live... Wherever you currently feel entitled to live. What gives you any right to deny the market from improving the welfare of your landlord and employer?
- TurdF3rguson 7mo ago
  The problem is, rent control scares away developers and traps tenants in apartments that they've grown out of. Also why should cities prioritize protecting residents based on how long they've lived there? Everyone counts the same.
  - vkou 7mo ago
    > Also why should cities prioritize protecting residents based on how long they've lived there? Everyone counts the same. That's a great question. Why do countries prioritize existing citizens over all people who want to move into them? We are, after all, all the same. Two legs, two arms, just under a dozen fingers, most of us aren't destructive shitheads. If we just let in anyone who wants to emigrate, you wouldn't be trapped in an apartment, or home, or city or life you were born into. You would always have the chance to 'upgrade' to one that's worse!
    - TurdF3rguson 7mo ago
      You're not emigrating anywhere, lol. Should I be treated like trash when I move from Bronx to Queens? How about SoHo to Tribeca? All US citizens have the same rights and every vote counts the same as every other vote.
fogzen 7mo ago
It's possible to build more housing and have rent control. Rent control is the only thing allowing working class families to live a dignified life in the USA's most desirable cities. Land value tax and social housing are simply not politically feasible – rent control is.
- hunterpayne 7mo ago
  That is simply not true in any way. Have you ever lived somewhere with rent control? Working class families who have members working jobs in rent controlled areas commute in from often over an hour outside of the city. There are only 3 types of people who live in those cities: those in public housing, upper middle class and wealthy. Their plumbers live in Tracy.
wolfi1 7mo ago
Vienna built housing itself, with this housing it was possible to have cheap rents and keep rents from private investors down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_Vienna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_Vienna
- bobthepanda 7mo ago
  It’s worth noting that a major confounding factor is that, unlike most cities with a housing crisis, Vienna is well below its population peak and so does not need to build nearly as much housing
  - ginko 7mo ago
    During that peak Vienna’s housing situation was infamously bad though. You’d have single rooms shared by multiple families and beds being used by multiple people on a timetable.
    - bobthepanda 7mo ago
      What city wasn’t that true of? Most cities with a housing crisis like New York had population growth on top of that, so Vienna just hasn’t had to walk and chew gum in that sense.
  - Paradigma11 7mo ago
    Technically yes, but lol no. Population is about the same as at its peak and density (person/m2) was about four times that of today. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlafg%C3%A4nger https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlafg%C3%A4nger https://www.demokratiezentrum.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/eigner_wohnbau.pdf https://www.demokratiezentrum.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10...
    - bobthepanda 7mo ago
      You could say that about every Industrial Revolution city. They just have also had to deal with absolute population growth as well.
nodesocket 7mo ago
And yet, if you dig through the various comments on HN over the years regarding SF housing costs the overwhelming conesus is more rent control. Sometimes, the most common sense solution turns out to be the correct one.
- pclowes 7mo ago
  Hows that working for SF so far?
  - nodesocket 7mo ago
    To be clear, I'm not advocating for rent control. :-)
protocolture 7mo ago
>If you build housing, but allow crime to rise Building enough housing that rents go down is the same thing as lowering crime so not much of an issue there.
b0rtb0rt 7mo ago
in america, more density and more people always means more crime
kevin061 7mo ago
No, it really is not that easy. Check out China, and read up on the Spanish housing crisis. "Just build more" works only sometimes, as demonstrated in those counter-examples. Housing is massive societal and sociological problem with no simple fix. Furthermore, in many circles, another proposal is to cut red tape. You know, housing in the US already is among the least affordable and lowest quality in the developed world. But some people really insist that going back to asbestos and lead pipes would make housing cheaper. And don't get me wrong, asbestos and lead are wonderful construction materials. Cheap, durable, and high quality. It's just a shame it causes all sorts of health complications when we use them, right? I mean, it would definitely make housing cheaper, but also cause all kinds of health problems.
- Gareth321 7mo ago
  Your reply conflates “build more” with “build anything, anywhere, with no standards”, which is not what they wrote. China and Spain are not rebuttals to the basic supply point because both involved distorted credit, speculation, and overbuilding in the wrong places or segments, not healthy increases in broadly useful housing supply. The question is not whether supply is the only variable, but whether more homes, in places people actually want to live, puts downward pressure on prices and rents, and it does. That is just basic scarcity: when demand rises faster than housing stock, prices go up. Keeping crime low matters too, because people pay a premium for safety, and high-crime areas often face weaker investment and worse long-term housing outcomes. And “cutting red tape” does not mean legalising asbestos or lead pipes, which is a straw man. It means reducing delays, exclusionary zoning, parking mandates, and other rules that limit safe housing production and raise costs for no good reason. Housing is absolutely a complex social problem, but complexity does not erase the role of supply. More safe housing plus safer neighbourhoods will not solve everything, but it is still one of the clearest ways to reduce pressure on rents and prices.
simgt 7mo ago
You may be implying it but you also need to make sure this new housing goes into the long term rental market, instead of being secondary residences or airbnbs. I've seen it happen first hand in my home town. That may not be a problem for Austin though.
philipallstar 7mo ago
> Build more housing. Keep law and order. At least the latter has been equated with fascism in recent years. That's why it's become such a problem.
left-struck 7mo ago
It’s a difficult problem not because we don’t know the simple solutions (supply and demand). It’s difficult because the people who have the majority vote also typically own the houses and they obviously don’t want the prices to go down. This is not just speaking about the US, many countries are facing this issue
- philipallstar 7mo ago
  Lots of people have kids and want them to be able to a) not be a victim of crime, and b) be able to afford a house. Anyone who has loads of money to afford high house prices and private security can afford luxury beliefs, as espoused in Oscar acceptance speeches, but everyone else with housing and kids is either voting for less crime and better affordability, or is not yet voting for those things.
  - loudmax 7mo ago
    Plenty of people with kids are voting to block new housing. It's not that they don't want their kids to be able to afford to pay rent. They're just not making the basic connection between supply and demand. This just happened in my neighborhood. There was a proposal to build low rise apartment buildings about a mile from the detached single home neighborhood where I live, and people had lawn signs opposing the construction. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the loudest and most active anti-development voices were from Trump supporters. Economic illiteracy used to be the domain of the political Left, but the Republicans are making real inroads in rejecting free market principles, so there's some amount of political realignment. Luxury beliefs indeed.
    - salawat 7mo ago
      >They're just not making the basic connection between supply and demand. They don't like my beds. There's something wrong with them! I can't be the problem! -Procrustes Yes. It's the people's fault for not understanding markets. Couldn't be that markets are fundamentally structurally fucked by an inversion of the demo pyramid. Couldn't be that market participants are just delusional about how much other actors should have extracted from them.
austin-cheney 7mo ago
There is a massive difference between rental prices and home ownership. There is a further difference apartment rentals and single family rentals. Rented apartments are a commodity with features. Owned houses are fixed assets with different economic rules.
shafyy 7mo ago
> No it doesn’t need to be “affordable” The article directly contradicts you: > "A key piece of Austin’s strategy has been to encourage the construction of affordable housing." There is enough data now from around the world that shows that it is important what kind of new housing you build. Building all new luxury units does not lead to lower rents. Another big factors for Austin is probably the significant decline in population growth in the past few years. But sure, keep spreading blanket statements and misinformation... I know that there are many "free market" type of dudes on here, so keep the downvotes coming. But he truth is that an unregulated market in housing does not work. Even the "freedom" state Texas has understood this.
- zozbot234 7mo ago
  "Luxury housing" is a meaningless qualifier. New housing (market-rate) is always a luxury since, guess what, it's brand new! Older housing is inherently more affordable, so it's not that the new housing sells for less, but that its very availability pushes prices elsewhere down comparatively. That "elsewhere" may even be in a completely different neighborhood if the new market-rate housing acts as an amenity that soaks up demand locally - then neighborhoods that have thereby become worse by comparison will be cheaper.
  - shafyy 7mo ago
    No that's not true at all. You can absolutely build new housing that's luxury and ask for more than the average market rate. And also in Austin, by "affordable" they mean "income-restricted" units. The quote I copy and passted above continues like this: > A key piece of Austin’s strategy has been to encourage the construction of affordable housing. The city pursued this goal through density bonuses—allowing taller buildings with more units when they include income-restricted units—and bond levies to build more affordable homes. Maybe don't comment as if you know what you are talking about if you are not familiar with the politics and economics of the housing market. Many (most?) cities have a quota of social housing (i.e. housing that's below a certain rate that allow for people with lower income to get a place). That's what meant by affordable housing in this context.
api 7mo ago
We love solutions to housing that sound good but won’t work, like rent control and subsidizing demand. Building more is unpopular because it would actually work. The same goes for homelessness. Feel good sound good solutions are popular. Housing the homeless is not. BTW I have this weird crazy hypothesis that there might be a connection between homelessness and insufficient housing supply. Like, people not in a home, and not enough homes. I know it’s a stretch. Sometimes I feel like there are other problems like this that we don’t really want to solve but want to pretend to solve.
dnautics 7mo ago
Austin is not even that good at "keeping law and order" (marginally better than say SF). It's really just "build more housing".
risyachka 7mo ago
And most importantly - limit housing speculation e.g. don't allow private equity to buy those. Housing should not be a speculative investment or a wealth growth vehicle. Housing must be a commodity.
xbar 7mo ago
Build more housing and scale schools, police, and fire linearly per unit.
KolibriFly 7mo ago
Yet Austin didn't just "build more housing" in a vacuum, they also changed how and where you can build
jpfromlondon 7mo ago
truly incredible, instead of subsidizing demand you build more houses and just like that they're more affordable, somebody should write some economic theories on this.
underlipton 7mo ago
I don't know how much I buy this. Washington, DC added about 60,000 units between 2015 and now, so a little less proportionally to Austin (with 1 million residents vs 650k). Metro area, 160k more in DC, with a population of 3 million (vs 2.5 million in Austin). Even if DC's unit add is slower than Austin's, you'd expect median rent changes to be within the ballpark, right? Maybe only a slight increase instead of the small decrease Austin saw? No. Rent doubled. I don't know if Austin or DC is an outlier, but considering how many states sued property managers and their rental management software providers over price-fixing, I'm leaning toward Austin. In the rest of the country, building more doesn't lower rents. Lowering rents lowers rents. And you have to force landlords to do so.
- ej88 7mo ago
  Accounting for inflation, rents barely moved from 2022-2024 in D.C.: https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-year https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-yea... I suspect most of the rent increase is due to inflation (sticker price). Nonetheless rents are still rising, which means 60k units were not enough to outweigh demand.
  - underlipton 7mo ago
    I'm sure 3 years noted for their high inflation rates are indicative of the preceding 7 years which were not. /s
    - ej88 7mo ago
      either way, it's clear they didn't build enough
      - underlipton 7mo ago
        It's not, because it's not clear that building actually lowers prices.
wilkommen 7mo ago
I think that building more housing helps, but a lack of supply is not the only cause of high housing prices. Wealth inequality is also a huge driver, possibly the primary driver. If wealth is allocated in a society in a sufficiently lopsided way, then a small number of people can buy up literally all the assets in the society. Regular people are bidding against a small cadre of ultra-wealthy people who can't possibly spend all their money on consuption, so they use it to buy assets like other people's homes. In the aggregate, increasing the housing supply won't bring down housing prices if wealth inequality is also growing above a certain rate.
- a2dam 7mo ago
  This can also be fixed by increasing supply. People buy housing as an investment because they expect it to increase in value. The best way to counteract that is to build and continue building so that doesn't happen.
  - wilkommen 7mo ago
    There's only so much land in the places where people want to live. You can't increase the housing supply enough to stop housing from being an asset in a society where wealth is sufficiently unequally distributed. By virtue of its unique scarcity, land (and therefore housing) will always be an asset, and in a society with increasing wealth inequality, the price of assets will always be going up.
WalterBright 7mo ago
The Law of Supply & Demand. As immutable as F=ma.
crypto_is_king 7mo ago
Wow, that sounds racist /s

by pclowes 7mo ago

hammock 7mo ago

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deleted 7mo ago

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datsci_est_2015 7mo ago

Multiple things can be done at once. The policies you laid out are not mutually exclusive, and have different utility for different communities. But yes, fundamentally more housing is needed for growing populations. Conversions and rezoning are also important parts of the urban equation to “build more housing”, not just exurban McMansion developments.

tsunamifury 7mo ago

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tptacek 7mo ago
There isn't affordable housing in areas of opportunity. You can easily find cheap housing if you don't care about proximity to jobs or to good school districts.
- tsunamifury 7mo ago
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bitmasher9 7mo ago
What do you mean by "economic singularity"? If your goal is being near economic opportunity then Austin has plenty. It’s not NYC or SF, but this suggests that those would be more affordable if they just built more housing.
pibaker 7mo ago
It is not affordable if it is located somewhere with no job.
- tsunamifury 7mo ago
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deleted 7mo ago
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slg 7mo ago

This comment is phrased as if the article is confirming these points when it either doesn't mention them or even directly refutes them. First there is no mention of either crime or rent control in the article. But more importantly, it states that "A key piece of Austin’s strategy has been to encourage the construction of affordable housing." So why are you concluding that affordable housing isn't needed?

terminalshort 7mo ago
Affordable housing is the only type of housing that will ever be built. Builders aren't so stupid as to build products that their customers can't buy. Government intervention is not needed.
- ms_menardi 7mo ago
  And yet, gentrification.
  - triceratops 7mo ago
    God forbid bad parts of town ever get good.
    - KPGv2 7mo ago
      That's not what gentrification is. Relevant to this article, I lived through the gentrification of large parts of Austin in the early 00s. What happened was that good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives began gentrifying, driving up property values, which drove up property taxes, which became unaffordable to the existing residents (who had owned their homes for a long time). Many (actually, most) of these artists had to sell and leave. They often left for other cities. But hey at least the good houses everyone liked all got torn down to be replaced by McMansions for the influx of techbros. Austin still has that slogan, "Keep Austin Weird." It failed. Austin isn't weird anymore. The University of Texas still is responsible for a lot of great stuff about Austin, but huge chunks of the city are just boring these days. There's certainly much less interesting culture happening. It's been airbnbified.

tharmas 7mo ago

You have to restrict investors buying up that newly built housing too. Homes for people. Not investors.

creato 7mo ago
It really doesn't matter as long as someone is living in it.
bryanlarsen 7mo ago
35% of Americans rent their homes. And they almost invariably rent from investors. Therefore if more than 35% of homes are owned by investors this drives down rent. If less than 35% are owned by investors rent goes up.
- ms_menardi 7mo ago
  This logic assumes that 35% of Americans WANT to rent their home. Which seems odd to me, if only for financial reasons - why would you pay 1400$ for a 1 bedroom apartment when you could pay 700$ in a mortgage for that same apartment if you could have bought it?
  - triceratops 7mo ago
    If you invent a scenario where the mortgage is half the rent then buying is a no-brainer. Does that reflect reality?
    - TimorousBestie 7mo ago
      Maybe not half, but it’s pretty common around here (generic midwestern city) for renting to be more expensive than a comparable mortgage. Many landlords seem to expect to pay their mortgage and property taxes and maintenance with the rental income, and still net a profit, if r/landlord is to be believed.
      - triceratops 7mo ago

estearum 7mo ago

New construction has already decelerated in Austin due to falling prices, which compresses already-near-zero margin on real estate development. So yes, it really is "just build more housing." The problem is: why would you build more housing as prices fall?

creato 7mo ago
It doesn't matter whether prices are going up or down, it matters if the price is more than the cost to build.
- estearum 7mo ago
  No, not really. It matters whether the margin is higher than other investment opportunities of similar scale and risk profile. Already, the answer is very often no. In Austin, the answer will increasingly be no. That means people will not finance new construction, so if demand continues to grow it will outstrip supply and prices will go back up until the margin on new construction exceeds that of alternative investment opportunities of similar scale and risk profile.
  - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
    Your explanation of fluctuations in supply and demand are not very revelatory. Everything being in flux at all times is kind of an elementary fact of life.
    - estearum 7mo ago
      It's clearly not elementary if people here believe that you can just keep building until prices collapse, and people will still keep building. The question is whether the market achieves equilibrium at a point where 1) developers can get financing to build profitably, and 2) units can be sold at a broadly attainable price to the local market. The answer appears to be no because the cost of inputs is so high. No one here is talking about directly reducing the cost of inputs. They believe that instead developers will just continue to build units that they sell at a loss, or at least investors will continue to invest in construction that returns less than the S&P 500 or 10 Year Treasuries (they won't).

testaccount28 7mo ago

without rent control, what economic incentive do renters have to maintain law and order / invest in local community / be a good neighbor? any investment they make is captured by the landlord. in fact, they are incentivized to maintain their neighborhood in as much disrepair as they can stand, for fear of rent increases. the little old lady living in a rent controlled apartment is a big part of why rents are high in that area: she was part of what made the community thrive. we would do well to compensate her for this.

bsder 7mo ago

> Just build more housing. Also "Wipe out a whole boatload of techbros who artificially inflate prices". Nobody is talking about that part of the equation. Austin was one of the places a lot of tech folks flocked to when everybody was working online. RTO and layoffs have wiped a lot of them out. I'd estimate almost 1/3 of the tech folks that were floating around last year are now in other cities.

mmooss 7mo ago

> Its wild how the solution to housing costs is really just: > Build more housing. Keep law and order. Safety (law and order) increases housing costs, as you say. It's desireable on its own, but it does not solve housing cost. NYC is very safe and very expensive. Crime is way down in most of the US, and housing costs are much higher.

pclowes 7mo ago
NYC is fairly high density. Has stopped building massive new skyscrapers and has water on two sides. It is also a tier 1 global city culturally AND economically. Its not really reasonable to expect to be affordable.
- mmooss 7mo ago
  It's been affordable for many generations, a destination for opportunity for the poorest people, including immigrants. It's only recently that things have become so absurd. > water on two sides Do you mean Manhattan, one of the five boroughs? It's an island. > stopped building massive new skyscrapers When? Why?

easterncalculus 7mo ago

And also expand the city line for what "Austin" is so you can include the cheaper, far from everything housing that you refuse to build. Yes, it does need to be affordable, and a certain percentage of it needs to be non-market housing. Housing isn't an elastic commodity. Get real.

pclowes 7mo ago
But where do you draw the limit on moving the line in? Do I get to demand affordable housing overlooking Central Park in NYC? Beachside in Malibu? If you want large incentive for development at scale you need to allow developers to make fat margins or else you wont get too many of them. Yes you can use affordable housing to do that. Eg: in the article they got higher density and exceptions (aka “fat stacks”) for building affordable housing units. This is all policy tradeoffs at the end of the day. Eg: a tent is not “housing”, why? Because of reasonable policy. Same thing with housing codes etc. All directionally wise/good. But at the same time you can have bad affordable housing policy. I do think housing is elastic and a cities policies around that elasticity determines if they will thrive or stagnate.

bluegatty 7mo ago

Rent control is one of the best ideas, and it may be a civilizational, foundational idea. Property ownership is at the very core of entrenched power, and the foundation of rent-seeking and wealth asymmetry. If you look at even the Monarchs of long past - it wasn't their 'titles' that made them powerful - it was the economic rent that came along with the land ownership. Even in more open market economies, property is still is basically long term economics lording over short term economics of wage earning workers. Being able to kick someone out of their home almost arbitrary basically puts working class people at the 'total whims of the market' and it's one of the most disruptive concepts imaginable. If we take the view that 'housing is about housing first - only about investment to the extent it does not disrupt housing' - then a different perspective takes shape. Many Canadian provinces have 'basic rent controls' and it does not generally prevent new housing development. If anything, providing 'housing stability' is probably the best way to create base prosperity, so those people can go out and spend on all the other things. There might need to be some degree of leeway here and there for certain kinds of density challenges, but that can be had with rent control There is almost unlimited land in North America to build on - if in one spot it's a bit difficult - build elsewhere. If people want to have 'density' then incorporate an area and 'build density' in that area. Also it does need to be 'affordable' but that can work with regulations. Edit: our housing problems are about screwed up management, it's actually not even an ideological problem underneath. Like 'rent control' the way it is framed scares some people, but its literally province wide in Ontario, Quebec and it's a 'non issue' for new unit hinderance. Even the nimbyism stuff can be worked around: if people don't want high-rises next to them, it's their right, but there's a lot less opposition to 'mild density' especially if it fits in local cultural and aesthetic context. We can have our cake and it eat on housing. I think we invent ideological lenses because it's easier to frame 'narratives' than it is just weird policies, special circumstances, hiccups, different municipal things going on all at once.

wyager 7mo ago
> Rent control is one of the best ideas It's funny how this question might have the greatest divergence in answer distribution between people who do and don't know what they're talking about Other candidates are "is debt good" and "is property tax better or worse than income tax"

jmyeet 7mo ago

So pretty much everything you've said here is wrong. Build more housing? In a place like Austin, you can just keep building out, basically. To a point. Eventually cities doing this reach a limit. Houston and Atlanta are pretty much at or beyond that limit. And it's not that building low-density SFH housing is the most economic. It's simply the most subsidized. Every road, every parking space, every sewer pipe, every water pipe, every utility pole, every school, every hospital, every police station, every fire station... they all add factor in to the true cost of housing and the more spread out things are, the more expensive those things become. Taken to extremes, look at the billions Houston spends now to add just one more lane (because this one will totally solve traffic) on, say, the Katy Freeway or the ring roads. Yes it does need to be affordable. NYC is the posterchild for this. Nothing that's getting built on billionaire's row will ever trickle down to being affordable housing. They build ultra-luxury housing because it's the most profitable and it does absolutely nothing for anyone else because these units are just ways for non-residents (mostly) to park wealth and not pay their fair share of taxes. Rent control is the wrong solution for the right problem and it's typically American. By that I mean it forces the solution onto private landlords who are going to do everything possible to get out of those obligations and deliver subpar but compliant housing. And they'll demand tax breaks for it. When in fact the solution is for the government to supply a large chunk of the housing market ie social housing. But there's a pervasive and wrong idea that we can only solve problems in the private sector and that's nothing more than a wealth transfer from the government to the already-wealthy. "Just build more housing". Yeah, and then you get Houston. Cities need to be planned. Cities require infrastructure. And one of the most important thing cities need is public transit infrastructure, something sadly lacking in virtually every American city. The core to so many of these problems is that we need to stop treating housing as a speculative asset. Owning two or more houses should be incredibly difficult and expensive and should be taxed punitively. By this I mean the capital gains on non-primary residences should be 80% and property taxes should be significantly higher.

FarmerPotato 7mo ago
You seem to know Houston; alas yes Austin was formerly surrounded by open spaces. But let's not miss the point of the article. This is a right-ward shift of the supply curve. It means that the economics of building the next unit got cheaper. That's the point. I've seen a lot of neighborhoods across the USA, and Austin making way for higher-density housing on urban corridors (Lamar) is like, duh, this is more live-able. There are new towers along rail and bus route, townhomes packed in, and behind the tree line it's now possible for some single-family lots to become duplexes or fourplexes. And rather than McMansion ugly, the new Austin residents are dressing those up to look pretty darn cool. There is a lot more to be done to remove supply-side barriers in every city.

atoav 7mo ago

Well, build more housing and ensure the more housing is being bought by people who live in it or (if you don't find enough of those) by people who will rent it to them. Many problems occur when capital buys living space as an investment that needs to go up in value, since now there is an incentive to keep some scarcity.

vkou 7mo ago

> Yes rent control is a terrible idea. When you aren't building more housing, for whatever reason, rent control is the only thing that prevents domestic 'immigrants' into your city from making all the residents homeless. Since cities can't stop migration into them, it's the only tool they have to protect their existing residents. --- PS. If you believe in trial-by-combat for housing, why not a similar approach to border control? It's the same concept, open it all up and let the market decide whether your existence is worth it. There are billions of honest, hard-working, capable people who will happily pay more than you for where you live, do your work for less pay than you're willing to accept, and would love to live... Wherever you currently feel entitled to live. What gives you any right to deny the market from improving the welfare of your landlord and employer?

TurdF3rguson 7mo ago
The problem is, rent control scares away developers and traps tenants in apartments that they've grown out of. Also why should cities prioritize protecting residents based on how long they've lived there? Everyone counts the same.
- vkou 7mo ago
  > Also why should cities prioritize protecting residents based on how long they've lived there? Everyone counts the same. That's a great question. Why do countries prioritize existing citizens over all people who want to move into them? We are, after all, all the same. Two legs, two arms, just under a dozen fingers, most of us aren't destructive shitheads. If we just let in anyone who wants to emigrate, you wouldn't be trapped in an apartment, or home, or city or life you were born into. You would always have the chance to 'upgrade' to one that's worse!
  - TurdF3rguson 7mo ago
    You're not emigrating anywhere, lol. Should I be treated like trash when I move from Bronx to Queens? How about SoHo to Tribeca? All US citizens have the same rights and every vote counts the same as every other vote.

fogzen 7mo ago

It's possible to build more housing and have rent control. Rent control is the only thing allowing working class families to live a dignified life in the USA's most desirable cities. Land value tax and social housing are simply not politically feasible – rent control is.

hunterpayne 7mo ago
That is simply not true in any way. Have you ever lived somewhere with rent control? Working class families who have members working jobs in rent controlled areas commute in from often over an hour outside of the city. There are only 3 types of people who live in those cities: those in public housing, upper middle class and wealthy. Their plumbers live in Tracy.

wolfi1 7mo ago

Vienna built housing itself, with this housing it was possible to have cheap rents and keep rents from private investors down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_Vienna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_Vienna

bobthepanda 7mo ago
It’s worth noting that a major confounding factor is that, unlike most cities with a housing crisis, Vienna is well below its population peak and so does not need to build nearly as much housing
- ginko 7mo ago
  During that peak Vienna’s housing situation was infamously bad though. You’d have single rooms shared by multiple families and beds being used by multiple people on a timetable.
  - bobthepanda 7mo ago
    What city wasn’t that true of? Most cities with a housing crisis like New York had population growth on top of that, so Vienna just hasn’t had to walk and chew gum in that sense.
- Paradigma11 7mo ago
  Technically yes, but lol no. Population is about the same as at its peak and density (person/m2) was about four times that of today. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlafg%C3%A4nger https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlafg%C3%A4nger https://www.demokratiezentrum.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/eigner_wohnbau.pdf https://www.demokratiezentrum.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10...
  - bobthepanda 7mo ago
    You could say that about every Industrial Revolution city. They just have also had to deal with absolute population growth as well.

nodesocket 7mo ago

And yet, if you dig through the various comments on HN over the years regarding SF housing costs the overwhelming conesus is more rent control. Sometimes, the most common sense solution turns out to be the correct one.

pclowes 7mo ago
Hows that working for SF so far?
- nodesocket 7mo ago
  To be clear, I'm not advocating for rent control. :-)

protocolture 7mo ago

>If you build housing, but allow crime to rise Building enough housing that rents go down is the same thing as lowering crime so not much of an issue there.

b0rtb0rt 7mo ago

in america, more density and more people always means more crime

kevin061 7mo ago

No, it really is not that easy. Check out China, and read up on the Spanish housing crisis. "Just build more" works only sometimes, as demonstrated in those counter-examples. Housing is massive societal and sociological problem with no simple fix. Furthermore, in many circles, another proposal is to cut red tape. You know, housing in the US already is among the least affordable and lowest quality in the developed world. But some people really insist that going back to asbestos and lead pipes would make housing cheaper. And don't get me wrong, asbestos and lead are wonderful construction materials. Cheap, durable, and high quality. It's just a shame it causes all sorts of health complications when we use them, right? I mean, it would definitely make housing cheaper, but also cause all kinds of health problems.

Gareth321 7mo ago
Your reply conflates “build more” with “build anything, anywhere, with no standards”, which is not what they wrote. China and Spain are not rebuttals to the basic supply point because both involved distorted credit, speculation, and overbuilding in the wrong places or segments, not healthy increases in broadly useful housing supply. The question is not whether supply is the only variable, but whether more homes, in places people actually want to live, puts downward pressure on prices and rents, and it does. That is just basic scarcity: when demand rises faster than housing stock, prices go up. Keeping crime low matters too, because people pay a premium for safety, and high-crime areas often face weaker investment and worse long-term housing outcomes. And “cutting red tape” does not mean legalising asbestos or lead pipes, which is a straw man. It means reducing delays, exclusionary zoning, parking mandates, and other rules that limit safe housing production and raise costs for no good reason. Housing is absolutely a complex social problem, but complexity does not erase the role of supply. More safe housing plus safer neighbourhoods will not solve everything, but it is still one of the clearest ways to reduce pressure on rents and prices.

simgt 7mo ago

You may be implying it but you also need to make sure this new housing goes into the long term rental market, instead of being secondary residences or airbnbs. I've seen it happen first hand in my home town. That may not be a problem for Austin though.

philipallstar 7mo ago

> Build more housing. Keep law and order. At least the latter has been equated with fascism in recent years. That's why it's become such a problem.

left-struck 7mo ago

It’s a difficult problem not because we don’t know the simple solutions (supply and demand). It’s difficult because the people who have the majority vote also typically own the houses and they obviously don’t want the prices to go down. This is not just speaking about the US, many countries are facing this issue

philipallstar 7mo ago
Lots of people have kids and want them to be able to a) not be a victim of crime, and b) be able to afford a house. Anyone who has loads of money to afford high house prices and private security can afford luxury beliefs, as espoused in Oscar acceptance speeches, but everyone else with housing and kids is either voting for less crime and better affordability, or is not yet voting for those things.
- loudmax 7mo ago
  Plenty of people with kids are voting to block new housing. It's not that they don't want their kids to be able to afford to pay rent. They're just not making the basic connection between supply and demand. This just happened in my neighborhood. There was a proposal to build low rise apartment buildings about a mile from the detached single home neighborhood where I live, and people had lawn signs opposing the construction. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the loudest and most active anti-development voices were from Trump supporters. Economic illiteracy used to be the domain of the political Left, but the Republicans are making real inroads in rejecting free market principles, so there's some amount of political realignment. Luxury beliefs indeed.
  - salawat 7mo ago
    >They're just not making the basic connection between supply and demand. They don't like my beds. There's something wrong with them! I can't be the problem! -Procrustes Yes. It's the people's fault for not understanding markets. Couldn't be that markets are fundamentally structurally fucked by an inversion of the demo pyramid. Couldn't be that market participants are just delusional about how much other actors should have extracted from them.

austin-cheney 7mo ago

There is a massive difference between rental prices and home ownership. There is a further difference apartment rentals and single family rentals. Rented apartments are a commodity with features. Owned houses are fixed assets with different economic rules.

shafyy 7mo ago

> No it doesn’t need to be “affordable” The article directly contradicts you: > "A key piece of Austin’s strategy has been to encourage the construction of affordable housing." There is enough data now from around the world that shows that it is important what kind of new housing you build. Building all new luxury units does not lead to lower rents. Another big factors for Austin is probably the significant decline in population growth in the past few years. But sure, keep spreading blanket statements and misinformation... I know that there are many "free market" type of dudes on here, so keep the downvotes coming. But he truth is that an unregulated market in housing does not work. Even the "freedom" state Texas has understood this.

zozbot234 7mo ago
"Luxury housing" is a meaningless qualifier. New housing (market-rate) is always a luxury since, guess what, it's brand new! Older housing is inherently more affordable, so it's not that the new housing sells for less, but that its very availability pushes prices elsewhere down comparatively. That "elsewhere" may even be in a completely different neighborhood if the new market-rate housing acts as an amenity that soaks up demand locally - then neighborhoods that have thereby become worse by comparison will be cheaper.
- shafyy 7mo ago
  No that's not true at all. You can absolutely build new housing that's luxury and ask for more than the average market rate. And also in Austin, by "affordable" they mean "income-restricted" units. The quote I copy and passted above continues like this: > A key piece of Austin’s strategy has been to encourage the construction of affordable housing. The city pursued this goal through density bonuses—allowing taller buildings with more units when they include income-restricted units—and bond levies to build more affordable homes. Maybe don't comment as if you know what you are talking about if you are not familiar with the politics and economics of the housing market. Many (most?) cities have a quota of social housing (i.e. housing that's below a certain rate that allow for people with lower income to get a place). That's what meant by affordable housing in this context.

api 7mo ago

We love solutions to housing that sound good but won’t work, like rent control and subsidizing demand. Building more is unpopular because it would actually work. The same goes for homelessness. Feel good sound good solutions are popular. Housing the homeless is not. BTW I have this weird crazy hypothesis that there might be a connection between homelessness and insufficient housing supply. Like, people not in a home, and not enough homes. I know it’s a stretch. Sometimes I feel like there are other problems like this that we don’t really want to solve but want to pretend to solve.

dnautics 7mo ago

Austin is not even that good at "keeping law and order" (marginally better than say SF). It's really just "build more housing".

risyachka 7mo ago

And most importantly - limit housing speculation e.g. don't allow private equity to buy those. Housing should not be a speculative investment or a wealth growth vehicle. Housing must be a commodity.

xbar 7mo ago

Build more housing and scale schools, police, and fire linearly per unit.

KolibriFly 7mo ago

Yet Austin didn't just "build more housing" in a vacuum, they also changed how and where you can build

jpfromlondon 7mo ago

truly incredible, instead of subsidizing demand you build more houses and just like that they're more affordable, somebody should write some economic theories on this.

underlipton 7mo ago

I don't know how much I buy this. Washington, DC added about 60,000 units between 2015 and now, so a little less proportionally to Austin (with 1 million residents vs 650k). Metro area, 160k more in DC, with a population of 3 million (vs 2.5 million in Austin). Even if DC's unit add is slower than Austin's, you'd expect median rent changes to be within the ballpark, right? Maybe only a slight increase instead of the small decrease Austin saw? No. Rent doubled. I don't know if Austin or DC is an outlier, but considering how many states sued property managers and their rental management software providers over price-fixing, I'm leaning toward Austin. In the rest of the country, building more doesn't lower rents. Lowering rents lowers rents. And you have to force landlords to do so.

ej88 7mo ago
Accounting for inflation, rents barely moved from 2022-2024 in D.C.: https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-year https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-yea... I suspect most of the rent increase is due to inflation (sticker price). Nonetheless rents are still rising, which means 60k units were not enough to outweigh demand.
- underlipton 7mo ago
  I'm sure 3 years noted for their high inflation rates are indicative of the preceding 7 years which were not. /s
  - ej88 7mo ago
    either way, it's clear they didn't build enough
    - underlipton 7mo ago
      It's not, because it's not clear that building actually lowers prices.

wilkommen 7mo ago

I think that building more housing helps, but a lack of supply is not the only cause of high housing prices. Wealth inequality is also a huge driver, possibly the primary driver. If wealth is allocated in a society in a sufficiently lopsided way, then a small number of people can buy up literally all the assets in the society. Regular people are bidding against a small cadre of ultra-wealthy people who can't possibly spend all their money on consuption, so they use it to buy assets like other people's homes. In the aggregate, increasing the housing supply won't bring down housing prices if wealth inequality is also growing above a certain rate.

a2dam 7mo ago
This can also be fixed by increasing supply. People buy housing as an investment because they expect it to increase in value. The best way to counteract that is to build and continue building so that doesn't happen.
- wilkommen 7mo ago
  There's only so much land in the places where people want to live. You can't increase the housing supply enough to stop housing from being an asset in a society where wealth is sufficiently unequally distributed. By virtue of its unique scarcity, land (and therefore housing) will always be an asset, and in a society with increasing wealth inequality, the price of assets will always be going up.

WalterBright 7mo ago

The Law of Supply & Demand. As immutable as F=ma.

crypto_is_king 7mo ago

Wow, that sounds racist /s