“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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“Immigrants make up about 26% of the construction workforce, per census data cited by Pew Research Center last fall.”
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“An estimated 13% of construction workers are undocumented”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
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“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.”
“Zoning cops have a knack for blocking affordable housing, but in Troy, New York, regulators greenlit an 11-unit apartment building on a vacant lot. Just as construction was about to kick off, however, the project ran up against a different, familiar hurdle.
Concerned neighbors—who already have housing—filed a lawsuit to keep outsiders out. Rather than challenge the developer directly, the project opponents instead took the city to court, insisting regulators hadn’t done enough research before granting a zoning change. The city won a trial court victory in 2023, but opponents appealed and scored a reversal on October 24, 2024.
What have the “concerned citizens” given as reason for legal action? Evidence of a nearby quarry allegedly used by Native Americans in the distant past. Strangely, proximity to this site was not an issue when these residents secured housing for themselves. The “high archaeological sensitivity,” as they frame it, came later.
New York’s State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) makes it easy for citizens to stall or kill housing in New York with almost any excuse they can cook up. Courts can be swayed by vague concepts like “community” or “neighborhood character.” Project opponents can even cite generic concerns without showing specific harm.
In Guilderland, New York, a citizen group raised alarms about global climate change when developers proposed five apartment buildings and a Costco. This group, represented by the same lawyer now working to derail housing in Troy, won at the trial court level. But an appellate court reversed the decision in 2022 noting that construction would result in less driving, not more, producing a net gain for air quality.
But these NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) activists don’t need a win in court to achieve their goals. Even when they lose, they can use SEQRA to freeze construction for months or longer. In Old Westbury, Long Island, developers waited 25 years for permission to build religious facilities. The legal labyrinth is also expensive. SEQRA litigation added $2 million to a single housing project in Hempstead, New York.”