Mastodawn

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.

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pclowes Mar 19

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.

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api

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.