As ever, YMMV. Like most renters here, we're paying 2x what we were 5y ago. During that time, our region transitioned from the most affordable category to the least affordable.
The article shows our rents are up 4 percent; nothing shows any indication of slowing.
The folks most likely to be priced out of housing by escalating costs - they are the same folks who don't have the stack of cash needed to move to a different market.
andsoitis · 3h ago
what's a good way to reconcile this with the common narrative that there's a big housing shortage?
jayd16 · 3h ago
> Still, she added, rents are about 20% higher than pre-pandemic levels, and consumers remain concerned about their financial situation and job security in recent surveys.
When people throw around the word shortage what they mean is "availability at a price I'm willing to pay." Same with labor shortages.
WarOnPrivacy · 3h ago
> "availability at a price I'm willing to pay."
For the many scores of millions of us, it's "not more than I can possibly pay".
ref: lived thru the 400 applications per day per rental crisis in 2021.
elashri · 3h ago
I think it is usually means "for the price I can afford". Housing as you can imagine is not luxury item in your life.
SubiculumCode · 3h ago
So that is a good point. Demand is related to price. Lower the price, demand increases. Perhaps we've reached the point where all those who want and can afford apartments priced $x and above already have apartments, but there are not apartments priced $x-$z available.
So we will just have to see if prices continue to drop.
moron4hire · 3h ago
That's... the definition of shortage
jayd16 · 32m ago
I think most would imagine it meant low inventory over fixed prices. If you have millions of overpriced widgets, it's not intuitive to call that a widget shortage.
lazide · 3h ago
I think they meant ‘that i’m happy to pay’. which is different.
tiahura · 3h ago
Much of the narrative has been that the problem is because nimby boomers won’t allow apartment complexes in single family neighborhoods, there are simply not enough apartments.
WarOnPrivacy · 2h ago
We've been rewarding voices who want to lock the gate behind them. They want their area frozen at the moment they moved into their home.
What we learned is that those voices are catastrophic for entire classes of people - like new families.
happytoexplain · 1h ago
This is oversimplified as an attack on the image of an enemy. Most people work hard as hell to call a place home, and understandably don't want their community "ruined", the definition of which they have variably (un)reasonable metrics for. That's the complicated truth. Yes, people also don't want things to change in general from the moment they called it home, but change isn't the same thing as "ruined".
7e · 17m ago
No, the problem is that humans breed to fill the supply of housing, causing prices to go up again. The population of the U.S. has doubled since 1960. It’s a never ending cycle, only after every iteration, there is more pollution, less beauty, more greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, more traffic, etc. It’s not sustainable. The solution is not to build, it is to reproduce sustainably and stop overrunning the planet with unchecked population growth. That implies limits on how much you can ruin a neighborhood with development.
Lionga · 2h ago
Name checks out
mitthrowaway2 · 3h ago
The title is about asking rents, not average rents. In a perfectly liquid market these are the same, but shelter is far from liquid. Many renters have been renting for years and are paying less than today's asking prices; if they had to move, they'd still be facing a rent hike. This means that while the pressure on housing may be decreasing somewhat, shelter inflation is still a big thing (growing at a 3.6% annualized rate as of April, and outpacing broader inflation significantly).
actuallyalys · 3h ago
It means the shortage is being relieved. From the article:
> The construction boom, nonetheless, has improved rent affordability, according to Realtor.com data.
iambateman · 2h ago
This is a fantastic question, and sparked a lot of thought.
The story shows 28/44 metro areas had decreasing rents last year, so 64%. That still means that the other 16 had rising rents.
My guess is that rents lag inflation quite a bit, so the (slight) decrease is basically reflecting the drop in inflation over the past couple years. So, yes rents dropped 1% last year but they’re up 20% over 5 years.
I do believe that the US has a significant shortage of housing that is high quality in city centers. Families don’t want to live in apartments in this country so they end up living 20+ miles from their work and spending a huge amount on transportation.
mathattack · 2h ago
A couple ways:
1 - The median apartment this year may be different than the median apartment 3 years ago. Perhaps cheaper (or smaller) apartments and houses are coming up for rent. A more accurate measure would be comparing the prior rents to new rents for existing places.
2 - Median doesn't equal mean. The 50th percentile apartment may be cheaper, while the 25th (more applicable for housing affordability discussion) or 75th (more applicable to HN readers) may be higher.
3 - The median is still up 20% over pre-pandemic levels.
4 - To measure housing shortage we should check levels of homelessness based on economic reasons. (Much more complicated than median price)
Molitor5901 · 2h ago
My opinion is there is not really a housing shortage, instead, there is a shortage of housing where people want to live. Take any populous city and you will find the cute, walk-able neighborhoods that everyone wants to live in. Because of that, they have higher rental prices.
There is plenty of housing, but in a capitalist market of supply versus demand, the loudest group are going to be those who want to live in the expensive housing but can't afford it.
hiddencost · 3h ago
Rents are still too damn high. The shortage will be over when rent is less than 10% of take home pay for a lower class laborer in NYC.
xnx · 1h ago
> when rent is less than 10% of take home pay
If that were ever true, people would chose to spend a higher percentage to get a nicer, bigger, or better located place.
Unlike many goods, there is practically no upper bound on what you can spend on housing. You can't buy a better phone for $3000, but you can continue to buy a better home up to $50 million (possibly more).
Molitor5901 · 2h ago
If there wasn't anyone renting at the high prices, then they would sit empty, but someone must be renting them. Otherwise the price would have to come down or they stay empty.
speff · 3h ago
Has rent ever been 10% of take-home pay of a lower-class laborer anywhere in history? Asking because this goal doesn't seem very achievable, but I could be wrong
sfmz · 3h ago
By 1933 [Social Democrats in Vienna] had built almost 60,000 dwellings, mostly in huge apartment houses... These were built so efficiently that the average cost per apartment was only about $1,650 each; since rent was expected to cover only upkeep and not construction cost (which came from taxes), the average rent was less than $2.00 a month. Thus the poor of Vienna spend only a fraction of their income for rent, less than 3 percent, compared to 25 percent in Berlin and about 20 percent in Vienna before the war.
From "Tragedy & Hope" by Carrol Quigley
IshKebab · 3h ago
> rent was expected to cover only upkeep and not construction cost (which came from taxes)
I think he meant non-subsidized rents.
snapplebobapple · 1h ago
Aka actual rent because subsidy can make rent for some group targetted for special treatment whatever the subsidizer wants. Subsidized rent is a stupid metric. What matters is the broad situation for everybody
kelnos · 3h ago
I doubt it. If we go by the guideline that your housing costs shouldn't exceed 30% of your salary (which I usually understood to be pre-tax), converting that to post-tax for a relatively low-income job is not going to bring that down to 10%.
Sure, that's just a guideline, but it's presumably based on what is (or once was) reasonable and possible to expect.
myflash13 · 3h ago
Average salary in Ukraine is about 25,000 UAH, and average rent in some of the poorer regions was/is about 4000 UAH. So 16% of salary.
margalabargala · 3h ago
That's the average salary country wide. What's the average salary in "some of the poorer regions"?
Also I'm not sure rental rates in a country currently actively being invaded and regularly bombed is a good example.
myflash13 · 2h ago
The situation was actually comparable even before the full-scale invasion.
margalabargala · 2h ago
Fine, but you're still comparing apples to oranges by using the country-wide average salary against the average rent in the poorest regions.
IshKebab · 3h ago
Average salary will be lower in poorer regions though. 10% is a crazy goal.
Ah yea, it looks like that's true. I didn't calculate the actual percentages, but it was very low. Thanks for the heads up -
> Demand for housing also remains heavy because Soviet rents, heavily subsidized by the Government, are very low. A modest two‐room apartment will en for 6 to 8 rubles ($8 to $11.30) a month, including some utilities. A four‐room apartment wil rent for 14 to 16 rubles ($18.20 to $22.30). Apartments in more modern buildings cost more because of additional services.
Sure... if you could actually find something to rent, as the article makes clear.
bufferoverflow · 3h ago
Except Soviet Union made you work for near slave wages. I would choose NYC over it 100% of the time.
mitthrowaway2 · 36m ago
2% of slave wages is actually even more impressive.
doctorpangloss · 3h ago
“Location, location, location”
energy123 · 3h ago
There's a housing shortage in places like California where people aren't allowed to build. There's no housing shortage in places like Austin, Texas where people are allowed to build.
const_cast · 29m ago
The trouble is that Austin will just become California once those people buy homes, because that's how housing works in the US. It's an investment, and not just any investment, but the primary investment for the middle class. We don't actually want housing prices to come down.
"Just because home prices are coming down and there are more listings, doesn't mean that prices are affordable. So there's still a supply problem in cities like Austin," Turner said. "I think only 25 percent of Austinites can afford to purchase a home at the median home price."
“I’m not seeing many first-time homebuyers right now,” said Nicole Stewart, a Redfin Premier real estate agent in Boise, ID. “Rental rates here are still more manageable than saving up for a down payment and mortgage. People are finding rentals that are nicer than the house they could afford at the same monthly cost. That’s in part because a lot of home sellers are overpricing their properties as they struggle to adjust to the changing housing market.”
> The typical U.S. homebuyer needs to earn over $50,000 more than the typical renter to afford monthly housing payments, and the gap has been widening due to high home prices and mortgages rates.
I’ve heard that buying a house is being “long” on the local labor market. What this is suggesting is that labor markets (i.e. salaries) in general have not kept pace with inflation and higher interest rates.
anonfordays · 2h ago
Considering the precipitous fall in border crossings since Trump took office, I wonder how the fall in immigration is tied to the fall in rent. Illegal immigrants still have to live somewhere, they increase the demand for rental housing, boosting rent prices.
The article shows our rents are up 4 percent; nothing shows any indication of slowing.
The folks most likely to be priced out of housing by escalating costs - they are the same folks who don't have the stack of cash needed to move to a different market.
When people throw around the word shortage what they mean is "availability at a price I'm willing to pay." Same with labor shortages.
For the many scores of millions of us, it's "not more than I can possibly pay".
ref: lived thru the 400 applications per day per rental crisis in 2021.
So we will just have to see if prices continue to drop.
What we learned is that those voices are catastrophic for entire classes of people - like new families.
> The construction boom, nonetheless, has improved rent affordability, according to Realtor.com data.
The story shows 28/44 metro areas had decreasing rents last year, so 64%. That still means that the other 16 had rising rents.
My guess is that rents lag inflation quite a bit, so the (slight) decrease is basically reflecting the drop in inflation over the past couple years. So, yes rents dropped 1% last year but they’re up 20% over 5 years.
I do believe that the US has a significant shortage of housing that is high quality in city centers. Families don’t want to live in apartments in this country so they end up living 20+ miles from their work and spending a huge amount on transportation.
1 - The median apartment this year may be different than the median apartment 3 years ago. Perhaps cheaper (or smaller) apartments and houses are coming up for rent. A more accurate measure would be comparing the prior rents to new rents for existing places.
2 - Median doesn't equal mean. The 50th percentile apartment may be cheaper, while the 25th (more applicable for housing affordability discussion) or 75th (more applicable to HN readers) may be higher.
3 - The median is still up 20% over pre-pandemic levels.
4 - To measure housing shortage we should check levels of homelessness based on economic reasons. (Much more complicated than median price)
There is plenty of housing, but in a capitalist market of supply versus demand, the loudest group are going to be those who want to live in the expensive housing but can't afford it.
If that were ever true, people would chose to spend a higher percentage to get a nicer, bigger, or better located place.
Unlike many goods, there is practically no upper bound on what you can spend on housing. You can't buy a better phone for $3000, but you can continue to buy a better home up to $50 million (possibly more).
From "Tragedy & Hope" by Carrol Quigley
I think he meant non-subsidized rents.
Sure, that's just a guideline, but it's presumably based on what is (or once was) reasonable and possible to expect.
Also I'm not sure rental rates in a country currently actively being invaded and regularly bombed is a good example.
> Demand for housing also remains heavy because Soviet rents, heavily subsidized by the Government, are very low. A modest two‐room apartment will en for 6 to 8 rubles ($8 to $11.30) a month, including some utilities. A four‐room apartment wil rent for 14 to 16 rubles ($18.20 to $22.30). Apartments in more modern buildings cost more because of additional services.
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/11/11/archives/in-soviet-ingenu...
"Just because home prices are coming down and there are more listings, doesn't mean that prices are affordable. So there's still a supply problem in cities like Austin," Turner said. "I think only 25 percent of Austinites can afford to purchase a home at the median home price."
“I’m not seeing many first-time homebuyers right now,” said Nicole Stewart, a Redfin Premier real estate agent in Boise, ID. “Rental rates here are still more manageable than saving up for a down payment and mortgage. People are finding rentals that are nicer than the house they could afford at the same monthly cost. That’s in part because a lot of home sellers are overpricing their properties as they struggle to adjust to the changing housing market.”
> The typical U.S. homebuyer needs to earn over $50,000 more than the typical renter to afford monthly housing payments, and the gap has been widening due to high home prices and mortgages rates.
I’ve heard that buying a house is being “long” on the local labor market. What this is suggesting is that labor markets (i.e. salaries) in general have not kept pace with inflation and higher interest rates.