Mastodawn

matthest Mar 19

Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2026/03/18/austins-surge-of-new-housing-construction-drove-down-rents

Austin’s Surge of New Housing Construction Drove Down Rents

After decades of explosive growth, Austin, Texas, in the 2010s was a victim of its own success. Lured by high-tech jobs and the city’s hip reputation, too many people were competing for too few homes. From 2010 to 2019, rents in Austin increased nearly 93%—more than in any other major American city. And home sale prices increased 82%, more than in any other metro area in Texas.

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.

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 Mar 19

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.

And yet, gentrification.

triceratops Mar 19

God forbid bad parts of town ever get good.

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.

> good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives

It looks like - it might not be what you mean, but it looks like - you're saying 'good housing' is housing that has "artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives", as opposed to poor working people.

JuniperMesos Mar 19

Many artists and self-employed creatives are themselves poor working people - making art is work (and so is marketing it to potential customers), and most artists are not lucky or successful enough to become wealthy doing it.

But yes, I think there is a sense in which people who are driven to create have some kind of ineffable, cultural capital that people without this drive do not have. So a neighborhood that is full of artists is more interesting, and therefore more valuable to spend time in, than one that isn't.

FarmerPotato Mar 19

See the photo in the above East Side article. In the old neighborhood, people talked to the photographer because the front yards didn't have privacy fences.

terminalshort Mar 19

My heart breaks for those poor people whose houses became worth multiple times what they paid for them. A true tragedy. I would be devastated if my house became so valuable that the property taxes were more than I could afford.

Even if we don't enact Prop-13-like things to keep property taxes reasonable I'm sure we could get a compromise where your property tax remains stable as long as you deed the appreciation over baseline to the city/county.

Win/win, right?

triceratops Mar 19

My interpretation of your comment:

The existing residents (artists) made money by selling their appreciated houses. Those who could afford to remain were now in areas with less crime and poverty.

The new residents spent a ton of money to live in a place they themselves culturally diminished.

We should re-evaluate the winners and losers here.

FarmerPotato Mar 19

Let's talk about the East Side.

https://www.austinmonthly.com/in-photos-what-gentrification-...

I don't think many home owners got a price for their land that allowed them to buy a similar house elsewhere.

The world is far from an ideal model where what you get is what you deserve.

Note the history of the East Side power plant, which depressed property prices. Ditto, I-35 construction plans. The article says the plant will become a park now. After the new developers locked in purchases.

cucumber3732842 Mar 19

You see this business model everywhere. They buy up all the land around an industrial site, small airport, race track, pig farm that smells bad, etc, etc. Then they and their Karens lobby for rule changes that force that use out or make it non-competitive in the broader market. Then they develop the land.

Nothing will fix it until some case goes up to the supreme court and results in some sort of "they were there first the .gov can piss off" doctrine.

Good for whom? If it's good for the residents, that's great. If it's bad for the residents, who get driven out, but good for some developers and outside rich people - that's what gentrification is.

triceratops Mar 19

Unless all of the housing is owned by non-residents prior to gentrification, some residents always benefit from their neighborhood going upscale. Either through increased home values, allowing them to sell and improve their lives. Or because it's now a more pleasant area to live in.

Even renters in gentrifying areas may profit if housing construction outpaces population growth. Yes, they may have to move, but also the places they move to on their current budget may be nicer - because the people who can afford better have moved too.

> increased home values, allowing them to sell and improve their lives

That also raises property taxes, making the neighborhood unaffordable and driving them out.

> it's now a more pleasant area to live in.

For new wealthy residents. People who have spent lifetimes there don't want everything to change and have their communities destroyed.

> Yes, they may have to move, but also the places they move to on their current budget may be nicer - because the people who can afford better have moved too.

These are theoretical and very general averages. The actual individuals often do not benefit. Being forced to move is not a mere inconvenience to your theory.

triceratops Mar 19

The alternative: new housing doesn't get built. Existing housing - including the "bad" neighborhood that isn't redeveloped for fear of "gentrification" - gets bid up to the moon. People who can't afford rent end up moving anyway and commuting from very far away, if they're lucky. Or they end up on the streets, if they aren't so lucky.

That isn't theoretical. I just described the SF Bay Area.

When people in NYC are driven out of their neighborhoods because of gentrification, they generally move down south. There isn’t some magical part of town that they can afford with their “current budget”

triceratops Mar 19

> There isn’t some magical part of town that they can afford with their “current budget”

Literally impossible unless:

1. People are living in multiple houses

2. New construction hasn't kept up with population growth

We're commenting on an article that says the exact same thing.

> Literally impossible

Economic theory says some things are theoretically impossible, no literally, but economic theory wouldn't say that here:

The local housing market is much more complex than supply and demand, with larger economic factors (e.g., interest rates), very imperfect information (affecting everyone from buyers, to sellers, real estate agents, lenders, etc.), coordination by landlords (e.g., RealPage), non-economic factors such as prejudice (or just a co-op board!), government actions, larger trends, temporary inefficiencies, etc.

Economic theory is useful, but it does not predict or circumscribe the immediate reality of individuals. Life is much more complicated than that.

triceratops Mar 19

We're seeing in TFA that this economic theory worked on Austin rents.

First, I didn't say there is no supply effect; I said it's far from impossible for the effect to make a difference.

Second, many factors are involved in a complex market; you and I don't know how much effect the supply had in this case. That you are interested in that input isn't evidence of its effect.

[flagged]

hunterpayne Mar 19

Can you guess what the #1 source of wealth increase in the AA community has been over the last 20 years? That's right, grandma's house...guess where she lived.

This is a huge important part - if gentrification of an AA community occurs in an area where the homes are owned by the residents, it's a great wealth-growing event; generational even.

If the gentrification of an AA community occurs where the residents rent then they capture none of it and are forced out.

triceratops Mar 19

Let's assume communities are rated on a scale of 1 to 10. A "gentrified community" goes from being a 3 to being an 8. Renters are forced to move because they can't afford 8/10-rated-community rents, while existing owners profit handsomely. On this we all agree.

Where do the new residents of this now-8/10 community come from? Probably a place that was less than 8/10 - maybe it was 7. So now there's less demand for all the 7s and their rents decrease, allowing residents living in 6s to move there. And so on.

Assuming housing construction in the region has kept up with the population, even the renters who were forced out of the previously 3/10 community will likely find new housing in a 4/10 neighborhood at the same price. Their relationships from the old place were probably disrupted by the move (bad) but they also got better housing for the same money (good).

The key in this is housing construction must be allowed to increase with population.

Exactly - when things are happening "naturally" for some value of "not artificially constrained" you find that people move over time and what were the luxury dwellings of 20/30/50 years ago are the new "starter homes" of today.

When supply is artificially constrained, the old homes get torn down and replaced with luxurious ones - without increasing dwelling spaces available.

triceratops Mar 19

Your comment violates site guidelines. "Assume good faith" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What did you hope to do by saying this?

Hacker News Guidelines

beepbooptheory Mar 19

What is a better faith interpretation of downplaying gentrification like this? Like what do we talk about when we talk about gentrification if not this? Gp is not even, like, denying the concept, and literally saying that it is good (in a sarcastic way).

It's not "better faith" to construct an entire alternative world for the user's comment to remove it from the actually existing implications of their point. I am not sure what that it is, but it certainly isn't a healthy exchange of ideas.

"I think we should burn down all the forests"; "Oh geeze that sounds like a terrible idea.."; "um it's actually pretty bad faith for you to assume they were talking about forests on Earth and not some bad evil forests that could hypothetically exist somewhere else..." taps the guidelines sign

triceratops Mar 19

I refuse the premise that "gentrification" is purely negative. There are benefits and downsides. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434356

The downsides of not building new housing at all are even worse than "gentrification" and they fall even heavier on the poor. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434470

Unless all of the housing is owned by non-residents prior to gentrification, som... | Hacker News

beepbooptheory Mar 19

I don't want to throw the dictionary at yeah but gentrification is the word we generally use to talk about a downside to maybe a more general effort in urban development. This is really really weird hill to die on.. Just pick another word, I don't think you'd lose the nuance you are trying to inject here. As it stands its just needlessly provocative, a Twitter-hot-take vibe that is generally frowned upon around here.

Also (imo) don't link to yourself like this! Especially when its to just another short comment in the same thread! Why do that??

triceratops Mar 19

> don't link to yourself like this... Why do that??

I've been told off (by dang, no less) before for copy-pasting comments. There's no winning it seems.

datsci_est_2015 Mar 19

There’s nothing good faith to be interpreted from a pithy comment that denies real suffering experienced by real people. If OP wanted to be interpreted in good faith they should’ve written more substance to their comment.