The Housing Market Has New Rules. Realtors Are Evading Them.
The Housing Market Has New Rules. Realtors Are Evading Them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpuD0I0ta-Q
Tag: Housing
J.D. Vance Blames Zoning, Immigrants for High Housing Costs
“Even in the relatively short term, developers will respond to higher demand by building more units, so long as land-use policy is permissive enough to allow additional supply.
Vance acknowledges this point himself in his speech in referencing Austin, Texas.
Said Vance, “In Austin, you saw this massive increase of people moving in. The cost of housing skyrocketed. But then, Austin implemented some pretty smart policies, and that brought down the cost of housing, and it’s one of the few major American cities where you see the cost of housing leveling off or even coming down.”
If new supply can mitigate the upward housing cost pressure created by population growth in Austin, it can do the same for the country as a whole. That’s true even if it’s immigrants creating the population growth.”
https://reason.com/2025/03/11/j-d-vance-blames-zoning-immigrants-for-high-housing-costs/
This COVID boomtown is seeing the biggest decline in rents in the country
“A building boom in Austin, Texas has paid off big for renters.
There, residents’ rents have tumbled 22% from their peak in the summer of 2023, Bloomberg reported. The formerly low-cost city took on a new reputation in 2021 as a prohibitively pricey locale, as companies and young workers flocked to the Lone Star State’s capital. Heavy investment in development and ambitious housing policies, however, have flipped the script between renters and landlords.
Nearly all apartments in Austin are doing some sort of special for move-ins, one agent told Bloomberg.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/covid-boomtown-seeing-biggest-decline-175920025.html
Missing Middle, What Is It Good For?
“A few hundred duplexes and townhomes aren’t going to push down citywide rents. They might not even lower the amount of rent any one family pays. But they will give a few hundred house hunters the option of living in a location that better suits their preferences.”
https://reason.com/2025/01/28/missing-middle-what-is-it-good-for/
Trump immigration crackdown could worsen construction worker shortage
“The construction industry needs to attract 439,000 new workers this year to meet demand, otherwise costs will rise — putting some projects out of reach — per projections from the Associated Builders and Contractors trade group out Friday morning.”
…
“Immigrants make up about 26% of the construction workforce, per census data cited by Pew Research Center last fall.”
…
“An estimated 13% of construction workers are undocumented”
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/24/trump-immigration-construction-industry
Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson – Abundance Is the Key to Fixing
Trump is a scarcity president.
Scott Galloway didn’t expect to have kids and didn’t expect it to change his life. But it did, and gave his life meaning and purpose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGUWMonAtTQ
Move over, Austin: Denver rents are falling at one of the fastest rates in the country
“The relief comes after a construction boom added tens of thousands of new units to the metro area last year alone, largely in its urban core. Builders rushed to Denver to meet demand from a population boom before and during the pandemic and are now completing them as growth has slowed.
“Everybody that wanted to move here because of remote work has moved here,” said Brian Sanchez, chief executive officer of Denver Apartment Finders, a locator service. “The demand is not keeping up with the supply.”
Between 2010 and 2020, the Denver region grew by more than 16% to nearly 3 million people. Since 2020, its growth has slowed to about 1% annually.
Rents for apartments of up to two bedrooms in the Denver metro area dropped 5.9% last year, according to Realtor.com. That’s a faster decrease than several other onetime hotspots for pandemic-era migration and construction, like Austin and Nashville. There, rents fell 5% and 4.4%, respectively in 2024.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/move-over-austin-denver-rents-are-falling-at-one-of-the-fastest-rates-in-the-country-131643629.html
Why Building a Lot of ‘Affordable’ Housing Is Bad News for Affordability
“Housing becomes affordable when a lot of it is built, not when capital-A “affordable housing” makes up a larger slice of a tiny new housing pie.”
https://reason.com/2025/01/07/why-building-a-lot-of-affordable-housing-is-bad-news-for-affordability/
Regulations Keep Millions of Bedrooms Empty During a Housing Crisis
“in 23 of the 30 largest U.S. cities, there are laws that limit occupants deemed “unrelated,” defining a “family” only as a group whose members are related by blood, marriage, or adoption. In St. Louis, no more than three unrelated persons may live together. In Sugar Land, Texas, the limit is four. Private homeowner associations may be even more strict. In the Chase Oaks Homeowners Association in Plano, Texas, a “household” can comprise no more than two unrelated persons, though there is an exception for live-in employees.
Those who would like to form a household of five single adults or multiple unmarried couples in order to share costs are not permitted to do so—no matter how many bedrooms are available. These relics stand in the way of allowing the widowed, divorced, and never-married to build households.”
https://reason.com/2025/01/17/regulations-keep-millions-of-bedrooms-empty-during-a-housing-crisis/
Public housing didn’t fail in the US. But it was sabotaged.
“the demise of public housing was not an inevitable outcome. As my colleague Rachel Cohen has pointed out, other countries have successfully pulled it off. Governments around the world have shown that they can operate mixed-income housing developments that have reliable maintenance and upkeep and that public housing doesn’t have to segregate poor people away from the middle class.
So why did public housing in the United States age so poorly?”
…
“efforts to undermine public housing are about as old as the efforts to build it. From the outset, opposition was fierce. Many Americans didn’t like the idea of the government using their tax dollars to subsidize poor people’s housing, and real estate developers were concerned about having to compete with the government.
The Housing Act of 1949, which had a goal of providing “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,” bolstered America’s public housing plans by heavily investing in the construction of new housing units. But by then, the federal government had already undermined its own stated plans by capping construction costs (which encouraged using cheap materials and discouraged modern appliances) and allowing racial segregation. Congress had also doomed public housing authorities’ ability to raise revenue through rents in 1936 when it passed the George-Healey Act, which established income limits for who can qualify for public housing — making mixed-income public housing models impossible for federally funded projects.
As housing projects started to draw more Black residents, white people who lived in public housing started leaving, especially after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s banned racial discrimination in housing. This was partly because the Federal Housing Authority pushed for more people to own homes and expanded its loans mostly to white people, helping white families move out of the projects. Black families didn’t receive the same opportunity.
“You saw a change in the racial composition, which simply added to the stigma and the pattern of administrative neglect that characterized many housing authorities,” the historian Ed Goetz told The Atlantic in 2015.
Starting with President Richard Nixon — who declared that the US government had turned into “the biggest slumlord in history” and suspended federal spending on subsidized housing — public housing started facing serious austerity measures and never recovered. Federal investments shifted away from building new public housing units and toward housing vouchers and public-private partnerships.
In the decades that followed, public housing started declining in quality, and Congress funded a program to demolish dilapidated public housing units and replace them with newly constructed or renovated mixed-income developments. But according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, those demolitions were an “overcorrection”; public housing simply needed more funding and better management.”
https://www.vox.com/policy/390082/public-housing-america-policy-failure-poverty