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.

estearum Mar 19

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?

There is the possibility that the government builds housing, since the government doesn't have to care about direct profits and can include the overall economic effects of affordable housing in its calculations. We don't expect much direct profits from roads either, but we keep building more and more of them.

That is a good idea that requires careful attention to make sure it has near-perfect execution. Because we do that, and they are called 'the projects'.

I'm under the impression that more supply=lower rents, even if execution is not perfect, but I'm not an economist.

Sure if that's all you care about, it will do that. At the price of making people's lives miserable due to substandard housing if it's done wrong. I said it's a good idea, let's just make sure we do it right.

autoexec Mar 19

> At the price of making people's lives miserable due to substandard housing if it's done wrong.

I'm curious to see how Austin will do in the near future by that same metric. More people can afford a place that will let them pay rent, although now at least some of those people will be living in someone else's basement or garage. These may not be very nice places to live, but they may be all some people can afford.

They've also removed the regulation requiring a second way out of a burning 5 story building. Austin faces an increasing number of red flag warnings and has the 5th highest wildfire risk in the US. It remains to be seen what removing that second exit route will cost in the charred corpses of families.

Austin is also cutting corners on permitting which is great news if that was all needless red tape that can be rushed or skipped without cost, but if new apartments built today are (or soon become) deathtraps due to lax code enforcement that could be a major problem down the road.

Austin has already lowered rents which is great, but hopefully it was also done right and it doesn't result in more people being forced into substandard housing or increased deaths. As long as it doesn't, other cities should look into trying some of the same things Austin has done.

orangecat Mar 19

They've also removed the regulation requiring a second way out of a burning 5 story building.

This has been well studied. Requiring two stairways significantly increases costs, constrains layouts, and is not actually safer: https://www.pew.org/-/media/assets/2025/05/single-stair_repo...

autoexec Mar 19

The Center for Building in North America has been aggressively pushing for these single stairwell reforms all over the country. Stephen Smith, writer of that report, is the founder of that group as well as the founder of Quantierra a real estate tech company.

The real estate industry is in huge support of this particular reform, and they stand to massively profit from it, but the people who are strongly against it include The International Association of Fire Fighters, the National Association of State Fire Marshals, The International Association of Fire Chiefs, and The National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. These are the people who are most informed about the dangers and risks involved and in what safety measures are required to save lives and fight building fires effectively.

The report itself does make some very good arguments like how much safer modern construction has become, and also some rather weak ones (for example it ignores the poor quality of data on fire and smoke related fatalities in the US, as well as important differences between the US and Europe) and I'm not even saying that single stairwell buildings can't ever be made safely, but if safety really wasn't a problem we wouldn't see a lack of support from firefighters who are the actual experts in this space. Until they are convinced of the safety of these reforms real estate developers are going to have a hard time convincing me.

Here are a couple of their objections:

https://www.iaff.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/JointStateme...

https://cityclerk.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2025/25-0247_pc_IAFF...

Sounds like a horrible attempt they rightly resist 100%. Hopefully they prevail.

CalRobert Mar 19

Is substandard housing worse than no housing?

OneDeuxTriSeiGo Mar 19

Not really? "The projects" are a consequence of a very specific approach to government housing construction.

There's an alternative approach which mirrors the public healthcare concept of "public option". Instead of restricting government housing to means tested individuals or specific low income populations, you develop a public competitor to drive prices down and to eat costs in regions where housing is needed but the economics just don't make sense yet.

i.e. the US Postal Service model. It works extraordinarily well as long as you don't repeatedly capture and handicap the org/agency (like has been done to the USPS). And even with the USPS despite being severely handicapped it still provides immense value by driving prices down while maintaining the essential service of last mile delivery.

A similar approach could be envisioned for a public construction agency.

Any program created by the US government can be captured and handicapped, like has been done to the USPS.

Also, the Postmaster General was on Capitol Hill today saying how this time next year the service won’t be able to afford delivering to all addresses in the US.

OneDeuxTriSeiGo Mar 19

> Any program created by the US government can be captured and handicapped, like has been done to the USPS.

Agreed but even despite that they generally are a net positive.

> Also, the Postmaster General was on Capitol Hill today saying how this time next year the service won’t be able to afford delivering to all addresses in the US.

The same postmaster general who is a longstanding board member at FedEx.

And the US Post was still an extremely effective agency for well over 150 years, only truly beginning to become shackled when Nixon transformed it into the USPS in the 70s, and even then it retained most of its efficacy until the 2000s and 2010s when it truly began to fall onto its last legs.

But also despite being shackled the way it currently is, it's not exactly nontrivial to reform it provided there was any political momentum towards doing so. So it may get its legs back in the days following this administration.

naravara Mar 19

I’ve seen some housing projects around my city that are actually quite nice. They didn’t end up being shabby because they were built poorly. They were shabby because they were reserved for the very poor and, consequently, became extreme concentrations of poverty and crime. This makes people unwilling to invest in maintenance and continued improvement of their homes.

If the government just went on a building binge of housing to be sold at market rate, or even set an upper bound before qualifying to buy them at a middle class income, it’d work out fine. That’s basically how Singapore does it only they couple it with somewhat aggressive policies to encourage people to downsize their living situations once they’re empty nesting to free up family dwellings for people with families. We probably wouldn’t need to do that second part since we’re not a claustrophobic island, and could just count on natural turnover.

idiotsecant Mar 19

There are multiple city and state housing facilities in my area that are perfectly fine. They are not huge or luxurious but they're safe, clean, and well maintained.

When the options ar homelessness or subsidized housing, subsidized housing is absolutely the best option, which is backed up by decades of data.

hunterpayne Mar 19

"When the options ar homelessness or subsidized housing, subsidized housing is absolutely the best option, which is backed up by decades of data."

Not quite. That's only true if you are housing people who ended up homeless due to bankruptcy or similar reasons (lost jobs, medical issues, etc). If you have people who are homeless due to sever addiction, you just end up with more OD deaths. You have similar issues with people with sever mental illness.

The homeless are not a monolith and different parts of the population need different solution unless you really really don't give a f*ck about them.

That only makes sense if there is a positive externality from housing. Is there?

ImPostingOnHN Mar 19

Of course, many.

To be sure, are you asking if society does better when its people are homed vs. homeless? Because that seems like a question with an obviously-yes answer.

The concept of externality has a specific definition and you’re not addressing housing in those terms.

ImPostingOnHN Mar 19

I'm not sure "externality" means what you think it means.

Society being better off in many ways (more productive society, happier society, less crime-ridden society) is an example of multiple positive externalities resulting from its people being homed vs. homeless.

donkeybeer Mar 19

Why shouldn't housing, like any other goods, be as cheap as possible for as high quality as possible?

pembrook Mar 19

Because "cheap" government housing has never been "high quality" in the history of the world. Those two properties are antithetical.

Humans don't have a ton of preferences for the electricity they consume or the water they drink, just that it exists. It's a commodity, so a good task for government. Housing is not an undifferentiated commodity and is subject to extreme variances in preference. Markets do differentiation and preference matching infinitely better.

Hence why Government housing always takes the form of a utilitarian blight on the community with giant towers of tiny apartments with tiny windows...doesn't matter if its communist Russia or the richest capitalist city on earth (NYC), all government housing results in the same outcome.

Assuming someone will chime in with some "halo" government housing project in the nordics that represents like 0.01% of the government stock there but socialists will use as propaganda. However, it's important to remember these are not cherry picked examples, they are median examples:

[1] NYC government housing: https://www.brickunderground.com/sites/default/files/styles/...

[2] Russian government housing: https://i.redd.it/twz37r739xse1.jpeg

donkeybeer Mar 19

Not just government made housing but any housing. Housing market needs don't seem to have as much wide fragmentation as eg most of the Western world seems quite happy with suburb style housing and most asia seems content with apartment though aspiring to owning houses.

I am saying just like any other capitalist endeavour, where things that barely existed or were quite expensive many years ago eventually reached a point where both the price became so low and quality so good that it became a mindlesss thing eg sawblades. And housing for whatever reason has been an extremely anticapitalist market. Even if we take the exact same houses people want today, their execution seems far from optimized. Think of something like precutting all the timber and sheets at a factory and doing some light adjustment and fitting on site, developing new materials that are cheaper or easier to work with tools, etc there are countless angles of attack.

In optics for example, it was mostly this rather bespoke work by a few artisans and people back then might have said this needs a fine touch that can't be done on mass scale. And then Carl Zeiss emerged. I feel housing is in the pre Carl Zeiss era.

EDIT: Neither example looks bad to me. The russian looks denser but both look clean and well organized. It doesn't at all look like blight to me, any more than a grid of houses in a suburb does. It's clean and geometric just like rows of houses in suburbs. If you like one but have a problem with another, I think you are trying to get offended deliberately.

estearum Mar 19

Pretty sure France and Singapore both have quite successful and high quality public housing projects.

pembrook Mar 19

France has similar issues as the US housing projects from the 70s (creating ghettos), these are not places that people choose to live. And yes, all governments put up halo projects that you see in the press that do not represent the average, please link me to them claiming I'm wrong, and I will say yes, this halo project designed by a famous architecture firm does look nice! Now show me the median late-1970s constructed French public apartment.

Singapore is different because they eliminated the "cheap" part. Singaporean HDB flats are expensive, have extremely long wait times (you're stuck for life when one comes up), while still being super tiny. Fertility rates are 0.87 there (replacement rate is 2.1). The domestic population is literally disappearing itself. I'm sure highly regulated tiny housing stock and development policy has no influence on family size though...

donkeybeer Mar 19

The floor space and the proximity to neighbors are perfectly valid reasons to not prefer apartments. Calling them a "blight" is bs, unless you had in mind as your ideal something like historic parts of London because rows of identical mansions in a suburb looks to me no different than rows of vertically stacked apartment blocks. They are both clean, geometric and "industrial" looks.

def_true_false Mar 19

The government housing in communist countries didn't actually have tiny windows, compared to the housing stock available at the time.

> Because "cheap" government housing has never been "high quality" in the history of the world. Those two properties are antithetical.

I've lived in military on-base housing. It can be just fine ... or sometimes not.

Do you think that’s what government produced goods gets you? If so, shouldn’t the government make everything?

donkeybeer Mar 19

I was saying in general, privately or government built housing, not that government in particular should be making housing. I meant that housing market seems to be highly anticapitalist in many ways valuing the opposite of what a good should be.

Yeah, there's no positive benefit to making sure people have housing. That's why every day when I walk home from work, I have to think really hard about if I'm going to go home today, or just hang out under the overpass and panhandle.

Because they don’t care about profits, they always end up overpaying and taking way longer time than necessary.

And who pays for that? The whole society: Either the government raises taxes, gets more in debt, or they print more money driving inflation up.

The most basic commodity, food, is a great example. The moment the government has ever step into controlling production of food, we’ve only seen subpar performance and starving people as a consequence. Ultimately killing millions (USRR, China, Korea…)

> The moment the government has ever step into controlling production of food, we’ve only seen subpar performance and starving people as a consequence.

You might be surprised to hear how heavily government directed and subsidized food production is in the USA.

circlefavshape Mar 19

This is nonsense. Agricultural subsidies are the largest item in the EU budget. Nobody is starving in Europe