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 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.