>A U.S. Census Bureau survey found almost 592,000 new apartments were finished last year, the most since the 1970s, when baby boomers sparked a construction surge as they moved out of their childhood homes. There were 693,000 new apartments built in 1974, when the country had about half as many households.
I feel the numbers would be best contextualized as ratios of demand (e.g: prospective homeowners).
As a rough first approximation, Google gives me the US population in 1974 as: ~212.53M, with the 2025 population at: ~347M.
So it'd be more significant with: 1.63 * 693k = ~1.131M new apartments.
Of course, this is a rough approximation which doesn't take into account a host of other factors, but you can already guess things are not as optimistic as the headline would make it seem. That said, I'd guess those factors would further increase the "households per capita", with phenomena like the shrinking of nuclear families relative to the 1970s.
For example, googling average household size gives me: 1974=3.44 and in 2025=2.51. This yields roughly: 61.78M households in 1974 vs 138.24M households in 2025. Which means we'd ideally want to see something closer to: 2.26 * 693k = 1.57M new apartments.
deeThrow94 · 13h ago
Also, it doesn't make sense to price homes in absolute terms. Surely relative to wage would be a better indication of the health of the market. Unless we can bring the wealthy to heel of course.
angra_mainyu · 11h ago
100% agreed! Housing prices stated in reference to purchasing power would make a bit more sense.
kasey_junk · 9h ago
Didn’t you do a bunch of math to get to what the sentence you quoted said?
jeffbee · 8h ago
> when baby boomers sparked a construction surge as they moved out of their childhood homes.
Man, boomers had smarter parents than boomers' children had. When the much more numerous millennials wanted houses, boomers told them to go jump in a lake.
tharmas · 6h ago
Boomers = The Selfish Generation
Poor stewards.
eGP9jDq_nw · 10h ago
Consider adding the country of relevance to the title for inclusivity purposes
energy123 · 13h ago
[flagged]
WalterGR · 12h ago
I wonder if there are structural reasons why California's housing construction is lower than Texas, rather than intentional punching-down.
prasadjoglekar · 12h ago
Not sure if you intended the pun, but the biggest structural reason is not engineering but procedural. The permitting, environmental processes in CA are often onerous making new construction much more expensive. That means the rents must be higher to break even, which in turn means new apartments go up where the incomes support those higher rents. Paradoxicall places where incomes are high also tend to have the most onerous permitting.
masklinn · 10h ago
NIMBY is by far the main problem CA has. The permitting process includes incredible amounts of public feedback, which makes it difficult to build a chemical plant and a middle school next to one another, but also makes it impossible to rezone or densify neighbourhoods.
Braxton1980 · 12h ago
>The permitting, environmental processes in CA are often onerous making new construction much more expensive
There's basically no zoning whatsoever in much of Texas. That's how you get industrial explosions like the 2020 industrial explosion right up against a residential neighborhood in Houston.
California's largely the other extreme. Even large parts of San Francisco are zoned for single family housing (or maybe duplex if you're lucky). So already things like larger apartment buildings or mixed-use buildings that can be more profitable are out. CEQA allows for a lot of public feedback which is in turn allowed to grind projects to a halt.
For example there's undeveloped land in Brisbane, just south of San Francisco. It's near a freeway (CA-101) and commuter rail (Caltrain). The city of Brisbane's been (successfully) trying to block any development that would include residential buildings — they want office jobs not new residents. I don't know enough about other cities to make relative comparisons, but again in SF the department in charge of permitting (DBI) has seen a number of bribery and conflict-of-interest charges recently. Look at any big project in California really. Corruption at the city/county level may differ but the process by which anyone can gum up the works is a state mandated one.
placardloop · 10h ago
It’s inaccurate to say that there’s “basically no zoning whatsoever in much of Texas”. In Texas, zoning is up to the individual cities. Houston is notorious for having a lack of zoning laws, but all of the other major cities like Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, San Antonio all have very complex zoning laws.
dragonwriter · 11h ago
> I wonder if there are structural reasons why California's housing construction is lower than Texas
Prop. 13 prevents localities from meaningfully taxing property values, capping nominal rates at lower than the national average effective rates and reducing effective rates even further by limiting assessment increases to much less than the usual value increase in between transfers.
This forces localities to rely on sales and income taxes (both local and redirected shares of state taxes, both directly and as allocations of state funding for particular functions), which are much more volatiles, and do not reward attracting moderate income residents who pay low income tax rates and for whom housing and sales tax exempt basics are a much larger share of their spending.
Retric · 11h ago
Three of the major Texas cities (Dallas, Austin, San Antonio) have far more room for growth based on geography they simply aren’t next to the ocean etc. This has significant impact on how infrastructure can be added and the availability of land for housing. California also has significantly increased construction costs dealing with earthquakes, and water scarcity issues.
But that’s a long way from explaining everything going on, government regulations have a real impact.
dtech · 12h ago
Texas is much more liberal in what you can do, which means that the market functions better. CA has much more - well meant - requirements and regulations.
energy123 · 11h ago
> well meant
I dispute this. Parking requirements and stopping multistorey housing have no environmental justification.
The individuals behind these regulations (anti-housing activists like Marc Andreessen and the local NIMBY politicians) are well educated and wealthy. They know what they're doing.
Braxton1980 · 12h ago
Do you have evidence of this?
lazide · 12h ago
California has significantly stronger NIMBY forces than Texas.
Desirable real estate is also much more constrained by geography than Texas.
Braxton1980 · 12h ago
Specifically who is virtue signalling and then not building homes?
As far as I know the state government of California doesn't build homes. Smaller local governments can change zoning laws and the like but don't due to NIMBY stuff talked about here.
Home builders aren't virtue signalling.
Finally, if new apartments are constructed how would that be better solution to those already renting existing older apartments who are under rental stress?
itake · 11h ago
Rich people need places to live but if there isn’t new housing for them to move into, they’ll live in the next only option: existing older units that could be rented out by lower income people.
vemom · 11h ago
Does the state have any power. In Australia I think the state has power to generally zone things e.g. near a train station is high density and it is out of councils hands much to their chagrin.
bluesnews · 10h ago
States generally set the regulations that cities must follow. So they can constrain cities or choose not to.
For instance Washington State forces cities to make zoning plans that align with state housing needs. Similarly they set rules near public transit in some cases.
energy123 · 11h ago
The degrowth leftists like Dean Preston or the state and federal Dems who either turn a blind eye to them or go so far as to endorse them (like Nancy Pelosi) despite their anti-housing track record.
fundaThree · 11h ago
> TX builds over 2x more per capita than CA.
Ok, but this comes at the severe detriment of having to deal with the Texas government. Why not just move out of the country at that point?
energy123 · 11h ago
Or the Democratic Party can get their house in order before the next federal election? They run a decent pro-growth platform at the federal level, but CA is a living counterexample that will be a sink on their credibility until it's fixed. It should be an existential issue for them given they'll lose a bunch of congressional seats in 2030 if they fail to start building.
lotsofpulp · 10h ago
Coastal California is one of the most desirable places to live in the world.
It will always be higher priced than most other places, unless maybe it looked like Hong Kong, but that might so reduce how desirable it is.
energy123 · 10h ago
I am not judging them based on price, because price is not under their direct control. I am judging them based on artificially depressed housing starts per capita and the lack of will to address it.
lotsofpulp · 10h ago
It is possible that lots of people moving there would change the characteristics of the place, such as too many people on the trails/beaches/etc.
If coastal California added 10M apartments, I bet they would fill up. But what is the quality of life impact?
bluesnews · 10h ago
Most people don't have the ability to move out of the country
7e · 5h ago
New apartments = new babies = expensive apartments 20 years later, but with more traffic, pollution, and cost to the earth.
scoofy · 3h ago
Not if we build trains and walkable neighborhoods.
fra · 5h ago
[citation needed]
jmyeet · 8h ago
I used to be very YIMBY. Build, build, build. But what I've come to understand is that this just isn't going to help. Do it anyway, but it's just not going to correct the problem of unaffordable housing.
The entire real estate industry and our government is designed to make housing prices go up over time. Voters are behind it because it gives the impression of increasing wealth but it's an illusion for most people. If the median price is $200k and you buy a house for $200k and the median price and your house goes up to $600k, you still only have one housing unit's worth of wealth and you need to live somewhere.
All increasing real estate prices does is enrich a tiny minority by stealing from the next generation. And the negative externalities are massive. Housing makes everything more expensive.
If you look at NYC, you can see that a lot of apartments get built but almost all of them are for the ultra-wealthy to park money. You aren't increasing the available housing.
In the 1990s the average house price in London was 70k pounds. Now it's over 700k. Are wages 10x? No, no they are not. The whole thing is a giant Ponzi scheme to keep people in debt so they're compliant little workers.
davidw · 8h ago
> what I've come to understand is that this just isn't going to help.
This is false though.
Austin, Texas built a lot of apartments and then rents fell 22%. That's a big win for a lot of people seeing lower prices!
NYC is not a place that builds very much in proportion to the population.
I think that the claim that "supply and demand do not apply to housing" is an extraordinary one, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
tharmas · 6h ago
Maybe Austin is an outlier. They have high property taxes. Or people left because of those taxes Most cities that built a lot of housing saw it bought up by investors.
davidw · 3h ago
Investors only invest in things with a good return. It's why they don't buy up, say, nails, because the nail makers would just produce a lot more nails to sell to them and they'd be left sitting with a bunch of nails.
They invest in housing because it's scarce because we don't build enough of it.
And if you look at the actual numbers, large-scale institutional investors just aren't that big a factor. It's another bogeyman for people desperate to avoid the solution to not having enough housing: building more housing.
Austin is an example of the market balancing out when allowed to do so.
jeffbee · 8h ago
Recently some socialist lackwit on Twitter was railing that YIMBYs only lowered prices from $600k to $500k. This person apparently did not understand that the difference - $20k up front and $700/mo for 30 years - is the margin between affordable and not affordable for tens of millions of ordinary people.
davidw · 7h ago
In case anyone reading thinks otherwise: you can absolutely be a socialist and a YIMBY. Maybe your goal is Vienna style housing. The only thing you need to acknowledge is that cities need 'enough' housing.
jeffbee · 6h ago
Yeah but there's this entire genre of hammer-and-sickle-in-bio online guy who thinks socialism is about ideals, not the material experience of the proletariat. Those guys think we should outlaw home building until after the revolution.
davidw · 6h ago
Yeah, I've seen those people. They remind me of this scene
They don't want to take that next small step that will help somebody, they want to change everything all at once.
jmyeet · 7h ago
> Austin, Texas built a lot of apartments and then rents fell 22%.
This is false. Just look at the chart [1]. All that's happened is some of the pandemic price gouging, something landlords were being sued over [2].
We simply cannot capitalism our way out of this problem.
> i think that the claim that "supply and demand do not apply to housing"
Where did I say that?
Speaking more generally, the idea of a "free market" is a myth, particularly for housing. It's one of the most manipulated and politicized markets there is.
But supply and demand do apply and it has been a political goal for decades to ensure that supply will be constrained.
Landlords would be happy if rents never fell though. They're not dropping them because "gosh, maybe we charged too much during the pandemic". New housing was built and landlords had to compete for tenants. Dropping prices during a time when inflation is still a thing is a pretty big deal, and very beneficial to thousands of people.
The housing market is, indeed, anything but free. That's a core idea behind the YIMBY movement: make it legal to build more kinds of housing, rather than just meet demand by outward sprawl.
> But supply and demand do apply and it has been a political goal for decades to ensure that supply will be constrained.
That's what YIMBY is about: fighting back against those constraints. They have hugely detrimental consequences for people, the economy and the environment.
In terms of "capitalism", I think most YIMBYs are pragmatic - capitalism is the system we have in the US, so we need to leverage it as much as possible to get the housing we need. If we could get Vienna style social housing, I think a lot of YIMBYs would be happy to sign up. You still need Vienna style zoning and building codes to get that, though.
Hilift · 7h ago
Check out the story on Block 216 in Portland. A well known local developer sunk a lot of his own money into the development of an upscale hotel/residences. The result? The new, finished development is valued at $415 million, however the loan debt is $510 million. And of course it isn't generating any tax revenue for the city, which has about $100 million budget deficit, recently announced cuts in services.
San Francisco collected $522 million in real estate transfer property tax in 2022. This year will be less than half that.
The inflationary rebound after the pandemic and lower than normal interest rates created an artificial market that otherwise may not have existed.
Unoccupied housing or otherwise housing purely for investment is certainly a problem. If they aren’t renting at least with AirBnB they would actually be better served by holding gold in many cases.
jeffbee · 8h ago
It does help and is helping. Here's an article published this week in Berkeley about how a modest building boom has stabilized and lowered rents in existing buildings, after rents doubled in the 2010s.
If you look at the trend for all Bay Area cities over a similar period [1], you'll see Berkeley is pretty much in line with the overall trend.
Now you can argue that's because of greatly increased development, but I don't think that applies to SF (or SJ) and it doesn't match the Berkeley timeline anyway.
Yeah, the specific contribution here is tracking a stable cohort of existing housing, not the entire market, to show the effect of new construction on the price of older housing.
AlphaSite · 8h ago
I mean in the Bay Area where SFH have massively ballooned in price condos have remained steady for a long time. It works. Maybe not everyone gets the SFH but that’s fine and not the point. Everyone can own a home.
amir734jj · 13h ago
In the Midwest city where I live, the price for a new apartment is almost or even more than a house in the suburbs. All these apartments usually end up empty or get rented out. Such a waste of money.
angra_mainyu · 13h ago
What's wrong with renting? I refuse to buy until I hit at least my 40s and/or start a family and decide I will stay put in a place.
I've seen people go through the incredible pain of having to either turn down job offers because they can't sell in a month's time and relocate or be drowned in the myriad issues involved in selling/renting out.
Personally I can't justify buying a house to myself until I either hit my 40s or have picked a corner of the world I want to settle down with a family and probably die and get buried there.
EDIT: why downvote? I'm not opposing people buying houses, I'm opposing demonizing renting out when for lots of people it's the preferred option.
petepete · 13h ago
If you're able to save while renting, fair.
Lots of people can't and get stuck in the cycle. In the UK at least, they're often just paying other peoples' mortgages.
chgs · 11h ago
U.K. has a viscous cycle where if your parents are in commuting distance of London you can live with them for a few years and the money you save from not renting will fund a deposit. By the time you’re 30 you can then by and your career will have progressed
If you can’t benefit from that then you spend that deposit on renting, which means you can’t buy in your 30s and are trapped in the rent cycle.
angra_mainyu · 11h ago
> If you can’t benefit from that then you spend that deposit on renting, which means you can’t buy in your 30s and are trapped in the rent cycle.
I disagree with this - assuming the average white collar job (given HN), you _will_ progress salarywise from your early 20s to your early 30s.
When I was a Jr. Software Dev at 23, I both didn't have the money to afford a house where I got all the job offers (which wouldn't make sense), nor would it have been a good idea given I would've wanted to stay open to chasing higher salaries after 1-3 years elsewhere (which I did).
Maybe some decades ago it was common to spend your whole professional career in the same city, but as a dev I've had jobs pop up in different cities, heck even different countries!
walthamstow · 11h ago
It's a great advantage of people from the London area, especially inside zone 6 where travel is much cheaper than outside the TFL area.
However, it is also likewise a trap. Prices have moved quicker than people can save, unless they have a lucrative career or live like a monk
I know one person trapped like this, he's 30 this year. He has good savings but can't afford to buy on his own, bank won't lend enough on his salary, he needs a partner, but it's harder to find one when you live at home.
Tade0 · 9h ago
I think it's a broader phenomenon. I was raised in the capital city of my country, but moved to a smaller city because I can work remotely and was largely priced out of the real estate market at home anyway.
This allowed me to afford an apartment while my siblings who stayed are basically stuck renting.
angra_mainyu · 11h ago
Odd, renting while I lived in the UK was the only way I was able to save.
If I had attempted to buy, I would literally have financially died (not to mention wouldn't have been able to pursue better jobs elsewhere at the drop of a hat - month's notice).
proneb1rd · 12h ago
Not only UK, Europe in general is stuck in this nonsense. People buy properties, tenants pay their mortgage. In 15 years the property is yours mostly at the expense of someone else plus it gained in value. After owning it for so long and selling the property you probably pay lower capital gains from that too. Unless you put all that money in the right stocks in 2010, renting just doesn’t make all that much sense in this economy.
angra_mainyu · 10h ago
> renting just doesn’t make all that much sense in this economy
I disagree.
Example scenario of many young Europeans in their 20s:
- living in small or mid-sized city
- job offer pops up paying significantly more across the country, either capital or one of the top cities
- move and earn significantly more (even when adjusted for CoL)
- continue progressing careerwise
- job offer pops up elsewhere, possibly in other EU countries, pays significantly more
A reasonable person in their 20s would allow themselves the chance to focus on professional career growth/salary growth up until they hit their mid-30s in which they can start considering settling in a given place and purchasing. Before that it's nonsensical.
To give my own example, I went through various cities across several countries, starting at 12k, then a few years later job offer in another country for 33k, then a few years later at 54k, then at 115k, all before 30 years old (because I allowed myself to be anchor-free).
The rest who stayed put in the same city? 12k to 30k in the same span of time.
Anyone telling a person in their 20s: "buy a house and stay put" is giving terrible advice. The advice should be something along the lines of: "what you do in your 20s will bear fruits in your 30s, stay open-minded, adventurous, don't be afraid to burn out and discover your limits, see the world before your parents get old, and try your hardest".
akudha · 8h ago
This is the thing that is so depressing. I know someone who owns 6 apartments, 5 of which he has rented out and his family is living in the 6th. Every couple of years, he will save enough money for the down payment, buy an apartment and his tenants end up paying the mortgage.
His tenants will never be able to save enough money for a down payment, so they are stuck in a endless cycle of paying someone else's mortgage, just for the privilege of having a roof over their heads. If wages were fair, if mega corps like Blackrock weren't allowed to buy entire neighborhoods, maybe his tenants will have a fighting chance of owning a place for themselves, even if it is just a small two bedroom apartment.
A dude I used to work with - he used to buy a couple of apartments in buildings right when they get started (he has contacts all over a major city). By the time the buildings are finished 3 years later, the "value" of those apartments have already gone up anywhere from 10 to 20 percent or more, depending on the area. He'd sell for a profit, rinse and repeat. His only goal is to flip - sometimes he buys apartments without even looking at them. Of course it is legal, but is it ethical?
This whole thing is just depressing.
rufus_foreman · 3h ago
>> What's wrong with renting?
The problem with renting, in areas like the parent poster is talking about, is that in those areas almost anyone who can hold down a full time job, even a low wage job, can afford to buy a house. When you rent an apartment, you end up living around the people who can't hold down a full time job. Which is not always ideal.
spicyusername · 9h ago
why downvote
for lots of people it's the preferred option.
I am going to guess the down votes represent dissent from the idea that renting is generally the preferred option.
Renting is definitely more flexible, but it is also basically just a regressive tax that transfers wealth from those at the lower end of the income distribution to those closer to the top.
If housing was affordable, I think you'd find that most would opt to own and there would be less ability for those with means to prey on those without.
tzs · 7h ago
By that kind of reasoning what purchased goods or services I get from any entity wealthier than me aren't a regressive tax? For instance I bought a sandwich from Subway yesterday rather than making one at home, because it was more convenient. Was that a regressive tax on my food?
HDThoreaun · 9h ago
In my Midwest city the reason for this is because a huge amount of the cost associated with building has nothing to do with construction. You have to bribe the local politician to get zoning approval and then hold community meetings run by expensive consultants you need to employ. With such huge upfront fixed costs it only makes sense to build luxury. If we reduce the friction to building, more housing would be built and affordable styles would be much easier to pencil out.
andrewchilds · 8h ago
> With such huge upfront fixed costs it only makes sense to build luxury.
You really believe that if there were less upfront fixed costs, that developers wouldn’t still default to building “luxury” as long as nothing was stopping them? The profit margin incentives are all still the same, regardless of the level of community/political opposition.
HDThoreaun · 6h ago
when fixed costs are high you want to invest more to raise the final price. The lower the fixed costs the less sense it makes to build the most expensive thing you can.
there are only so many people looking for those units. As more units are built the competition to sell those units will heat up. Either prices drop on those units, or theyre replaced by units that are cheaper to build. Right now they can sell all the luxury units they build so no reason to build anything else. So removing the barriers doesnt itself make luxury less appealing for developers, but it increases the number of units built and that makes luxury less appealing for developers. It will still make sense to build luxury, but it wont make sense to build only luxury.
There are other reasons too. Personally I would not mind living in communist style blocks and I know some others agree. If it was legal to build those they might be created because you can fit so many more units on a plot compared to luxury housing.
skipkey · 8h ago
But see, to the politicians this is a feature, not a bug. It’s the same reason that it’s incredibly expensive in terms of permitting and such to start a brick and mortar business in many cities. They would rather leave the locations unoccupied and available for something that will bring in high tax revenue than tie them up with low revenue occupants.
greenie_beans · 8h ago
yeah the cost of building has nothing to do with the construction cost, like the materials and labor
I feel the numbers would be best contextualized as ratios of demand (e.g: prospective homeowners).
As a rough first approximation, Google gives me the US population in 1974 as: ~212.53M, with the 2025 population at: ~347M.
So it'd be more significant with: 1.63 * 693k = ~1.131M new apartments.
Of course, this is a rough approximation which doesn't take into account a host of other factors, but you can already guess things are not as optimistic as the headline would make it seem. That said, I'd guess those factors would further increase the "households per capita", with phenomena like the shrinking of nuclear families relative to the 1970s.
For example, googling average household size gives me: 1974=3.44 and in 2025=2.51. This yields roughly: 61.78M households in 1974 vs 138.24M households in 2025. Which means we'd ideally want to see something closer to: 2.26 * 693k = 1.57M new apartments.
Man, boomers had smarter parents than boomers' children had. When the much more numerous millennials wanted houses, boomers told them to go jump in a lake.
Poor stewards.
Can you give an example of this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noe_Valley_public_toilet
No comments yet
California's largely the other extreme. Even large parts of San Francisco are zoned for single family housing (or maybe duplex if you're lucky). So already things like larger apartment buildings or mixed-use buildings that can be more profitable are out. CEQA allows for a lot of public feedback which is in turn allowed to grind projects to a halt.
For example there's undeveloped land in Brisbane, just south of San Francisco. It's near a freeway (CA-101) and commuter rail (Caltrain). The city of Brisbane's been (successfully) trying to block any development that would include residential buildings — they want office jobs not new residents. I don't know enough about other cities to make relative comparisons, but again in SF the department in charge of permitting (DBI) has seen a number of bribery and conflict-of-interest charges recently. Look at any big project in California really. Corruption at the city/county level may differ but the process by which anyone can gum up the works is a state mandated one.
Prop. 13 prevents localities from meaningfully taxing property values, capping nominal rates at lower than the national average effective rates and reducing effective rates even further by limiting assessment increases to much less than the usual value increase in between transfers.
This forces localities to rely on sales and income taxes (both local and redirected shares of state taxes, both directly and as allocations of state funding for particular functions), which are much more volatiles, and do not reward attracting moderate income residents who pay low income tax rates and for whom housing and sales tax exempt basics are a much larger share of their spending.
But that’s a long way from explaining everything going on, government regulations have a real impact.
The individuals behind these regulations (anti-housing activists like Marc Andreessen and the local NIMBY politicians) are well educated and wealthy. They know what they're doing.
Desirable real estate is also much more constrained by geography than Texas.
As far as I know the state government of California doesn't build homes. Smaller local governments can change zoning laws and the like but don't due to NIMBY stuff talked about here.
Home builders aren't virtue signalling.
Finally, if new apartments are constructed how would that be better solution to those already renting existing older apartments who are under rental stress?
For instance Washington State forces cities to make zoning plans that align with state housing needs. Similarly they set rules near public transit in some cases.
Ok, but this comes at the severe detriment of having to deal with the Texas government. Why not just move out of the country at that point?
It will always be higher priced than most other places, unless maybe it looked like Hong Kong, but that might so reduce how desirable it is.
If coastal California added 10M apartments, I bet they would fill up. But what is the quality of life impact?
The entire real estate industry and our government is designed to make housing prices go up over time. Voters are behind it because it gives the impression of increasing wealth but it's an illusion for most people. If the median price is $200k and you buy a house for $200k and the median price and your house goes up to $600k, you still only have one housing unit's worth of wealth and you need to live somewhere.
All increasing real estate prices does is enrich a tiny minority by stealing from the next generation. And the negative externalities are massive. Housing makes everything more expensive.
If you look at NYC, you can see that a lot of apartments get built but almost all of them are for the ultra-wealthy to park money. You aren't increasing the available housing.
In the 1990s the average house price in London was 70k pounds. Now it's over 700k. Are wages 10x? No, no they are not. The whole thing is a giant Ponzi scheme to keep people in debt so they're compliant little workers.
This is false though.
Austin, Texas built a lot of apartments and then rents fell 22%. That's a big win for a lot of people seeing lower prices!
NYC is not a place that builds very much in proportion to the population.
I think that the claim that "supply and demand do not apply to housing" is an extraordinary one, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
They invest in housing because it's scarce because we don't build enough of it.
And if you look at the actual numbers, large-scale institutional investors just aren't that big a factor. It's another bogeyman for people desperate to avoid the solution to not having enough housing: building more housing.
Austin is an example of the market balancing out when allowed to do so.
https://youtu.be/tx02tY8ABfA?si=JbSiDMTdkHs5LrOk&t=62
They don't want to take that next small step that will help somebody, they want to change everything all at once.
This is false. Just look at the chart [1]. All that's happened is some of the pandemic price gouging, something landlords were being sued over [2].
We simply cannot capitalism our way out of this problem.
> i think that the claim that "supply and demand do not apply to housing"
Where did I say that?
Speaking more generally, the idea of a "free market" is a myth, particularly for housing. It's one of the most manipulated and politicized markets there is.
But supply and demand do apply and it has been a political goal for decades to ensure that supply will be constrained.
[1]: https://www.kut.org/austin/2024-06-13/austin-texas-rent-pric...
[2]: https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2025/01/u-s-accuses-si...
The housing market is, indeed, anything but free. That's a core idea behind the YIMBY movement: make it legal to build more kinds of housing, rather than just meet demand by outward sprawl.
> But supply and demand do apply and it has been a political goal for decades to ensure that supply will be constrained.
That's what YIMBY is about: fighting back against those constraints. They have hugely detrimental consequences for people, the economy and the environment.
In terms of "capitalism", I think most YIMBYs are pragmatic - capitalism is the system we have in the US, so we need to leverage it as much as possible to get the housing we need. If we could get Vienna style social housing, I think a lot of YIMBYs would be happy to sign up. You still need Vienna style zoning and building codes to get that, though.
San Francisco collected $522 million in real estate transfer property tax in 2022. This year will be less than half that.
The inflationary rebound after the pandemic and lower than normal interest rates created an artificial market that otherwise may not have existed.
https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2025/04/tower-anchored-b...
https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2025/04/at-troubled-port...
https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2025/05/02/portland-city-lea...
Unoccupied housing or otherwise housing purely for investment is certainly a problem. If they aren’t renting at least with AirBnB they would actually be better served by holding gold in many cases.
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2025/05/01/berkeley-housing-ren...
Note: I developed the data used in the article.
Now you can argue that's because of greatly increased development, but I don't think that applies to SF (or SJ) and it doesn't match the Berkeley timeline anyway.
[1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-bay-area-rent-prices...
I've seen people go through the incredible pain of having to either turn down job offers because they can't sell in a month's time and relocate or be drowned in the myriad issues involved in selling/renting out.
Personally I can't justify buying a house to myself until I either hit my 40s or have picked a corner of the world I want to settle down with a family and probably die and get buried there.
EDIT: why downvote? I'm not opposing people buying houses, I'm opposing demonizing renting out when for lots of people it's the preferred option.
Lots of people can't and get stuck in the cycle. In the UK at least, they're often just paying other peoples' mortgages.
If you can’t benefit from that then you spend that deposit on renting, which means you can’t buy in your 30s and are trapped in the rent cycle.
I disagree with this - assuming the average white collar job (given HN), you _will_ progress salarywise from your early 20s to your early 30s.
When I was a Jr. Software Dev at 23, I both didn't have the money to afford a house where I got all the job offers (which wouldn't make sense), nor would it have been a good idea given I would've wanted to stay open to chasing higher salaries after 1-3 years elsewhere (which I did).
Maybe some decades ago it was common to spend your whole professional career in the same city, but as a dev I've had jobs pop up in different cities, heck even different countries!
However, it is also likewise a trap. Prices have moved quicker than people can save, unless they have a lucrative career or live like a monk
I know one person trapped like this, he's 30 this year. He has good savings but can't afford to buy on his own, bank won't lend enough on his salary, he needs a partner, but it's harder to find one when you live at home.
This allowed me to afford an apartment while my siblings who stayed are basically stuck renting.
If I had attempted to buy, I would literally have financially died (not to mention wouldn't have been able to pursue better jobs elsewhere at the drop of a hat - month's notice).
I disagree.
Example scenario of many young Europeans in their 20s:
- living in small or mid-sized city
- job offer pops up paying significantly more across the country, either capital or one of the top cities
- move and earn significantly more (even when adjusted for CoL)
- continue progressing careerwise
- job offer pops up elsewhere, possibly in other EU countries, pays significantly more
A reasonable person in their 20s would allow themselves the chance to focus on professional career growth/salary growth up until they hit their mid-30s in which they can start considering settling in a given place and purchasing. Before that it's nonsensical.
To give my own example, I went through various cities across several countries, starting at 12k, then a few years later job offer in another country for 33k, then a few years later at 54k, then at 115k, all before 30 years old (because I allowed myself to be anchor-free).
The rest who stayed put in the same city? 12k to 30k in the same span of time.
Anyone telling a person in their 20s: "buy a house and stay put" is giving terrible advice. The advice should be something along the lines of: "what you do in your 20s will bear fruits in your 30s, stay open-minded, adventurous, don't be afraid to burn out and discover your limits, see the world before your parents get old, and try your hardest".
His tenants will never be able to save enough money for a down payment, so they are stuck in a endless cycle of paying someone else's mortgage, just for the privilege of having a roof over their heads. If wages were fair, if mega corps like Blackrock weren't allowed to buy entire neighborhoods, maybe his tenants will have a fighting chance of owning a place for themselves, even if it is just a small two bedroom apartment.
A dude I used to work with - he used to buy a couple of apartments in buildings right when they get started (he has contacts all over a major city). By the time the buildings are finished 3 years later, the "value" of those apartments have already gone up anywhere from 10 to 20 percent or more, depending on the area. He'd sell for a profit, rinse and repeat. His only goal is to flip - sometimes he buys apartments without even looking at them. Of course it is legal, but is it ethical?
This whole thing is just depressing.
The problem with renting, in areas like the parent poster is talking about, is that in those areas almost anyone who can hold down a full time job, even a low wage job, can afford to buy a house. When you rent an apartment, you end up living around the people who can't hold down a full time job. Which is not always ideal.
Renting is definitely more flexible, but it is also basically just a regressive tax that transfers wealth from those at the lower end of the income distribution to those closer to the top.
If housing was affordable, I think you'd find that most would opt to own and there would be less ability for those with means to prey on those without.
You really believe that if there were less upfront fixed costs, that developers wouldn’t still default to building “luxury” as long as nothing was stopping them? The profit margin incentives are all still the same, regardless of the level of community/political opposition.
there are only so many people looking for those units. As more units are built the competition to sell those units will heat up. Either prices drop on those units, or theyre replaced by units that are cheaper to build. Right now they can sell all the luxury units they build so no reason to build anything else. So removing the barriers doesnt itself make luxury less appealing for developers, but it increases the number of units built and that makes luxury less appealing for developers. It will still make sense to build luxury, but it wont make sense to build only luxury.
There are other reasons too. Personally I would not mind living in communist style blocks and I know some others agree. If it was legal to build those they might be created because you can fit so many more units on a plot compared to luxury housing.