[HN Gopher] Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new uni...
___________________________________________________________________
Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the
market
Author : matthest
Score : 117 points
Date : 2025-07-31 20:29 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (denverite.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (denverite.com)
| matthest wrote:
| Supply and demand 101 continues to work.
| koolba wrote:
| Someone should try this with medicine. Instead of subsidizing
| insurance (demand side), let's spend the money to bring doctors
| to the USA from all over the world and have them work in free
| clinics (supply side).
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| we also could just stop having the federal government limit
| the number of residency slots so we could have enough doctors
| trained in the US.
| yablak wrote:
| And by not limit you mean fund. And I agree.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/quality/hospital-
| physi...
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8370355/
| jmye wrote:
| Not just residency. Fix the cost (and capacity) of the
| education system as a whole, especially for mid-levels.
| There's no reason this country should have such a chronic
| NP shortage, and you don't need MD/DOs for most of the
| healthcare gaps we have.
|
| You also make rural care viable when you don't have folks
| who need to pay off astronomical loans.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > you don't need MD/DOs for most of the healthcare gaps
| we have
|
| Or maybe you do! It's for your own good.
|
| https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/scope-
| practice/...
| mindslight wrote:
| How are NPs not just the trend of enshittification? Most
| doctors already aren't very engaged in the tiny 15 minute
| slices of appointments, and now we're supposed to be
| happy that they'll be even less educated? The most
| straightforward way to address the doctor shortage is to
| make it so doctors are spending most of their time on
| healthcare, rather than appeasing "insurance" company
| bureaucrats with onerous paperwork.
| jmye wrote:
| What a weird comment. What do you think you need an MD
| for, in your primary care visit, that an NP can't do?
| What do you actually know about their education? What do
| you actually know about licensing? How much time, in a
| day, do you think doctors are spending on "insurance",
| and what specific experience leads you to believe that?
|
| (Because the actual answer is "near zero for literally
| any provider who isn't completely independent, and almost
| none of them are, anymore".)
|
| Or was this just a way to memetically add
| "enshittification" to a conversation it doesn't even
| _slightly_ apply to, but you think that's currently
| trendy?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| You can be an NP in as few as 4-5 years out of high
| school with some courses. That's to me the definition of
| not knowing what you don't know. I'm a critical care
| paramedic who has corrected many NPs on fairly
| fundamental learning.
|
| I've found that nurses with significant field experience
| do very well, but there are plenty of courses who will
| "zero to hero" you fresh out of high school.
|
| Meanwhile, PAs go through a program near as rigorous as
| medical school and have to have physician supervision
| while NPs are not subject to oversight.
| tptacek wrote:
| Doctors begin delivering clinical care in year 3 of med
| school. You're doing a sleight of hand with this "out of
| high school" thing; doctors are also educated "out of
| high school", the difference between the two roles is 1-2
| years before clinical practice, and NPs tend to practice
| supervised for longer periods of time than doctors.
|
| And, obviously, NPs cover a smaller range of conditions
| than doctors.
| tptacek wrote:
| Nurse-Practitioners work harder to get their
| certification than almost anybody who comments on HN and
| it is not OK to talk about them this way.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| There are NP mills that will take you from high school,
| put you through an accelerated RN and prereqs and
| basically have you as an independent provider in just a
| few years out of high school (well, 4-5), that's
| ridiculous.
| akavi wrote:
| Is there any evidence that _8_ years of post-secondary
| education (plus 3-7 years of residency at poverty wages)
| actually improves medical outcomes?
|
| 5 years could be plenty?
| tptacek wrote:
| NPs are supervised, as are doctors on rotation, so it's 7
| years before clinical practice for a doctor.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Good luck getting the federal government to stop doing what
| the unio..., I mean, what the American Medical Association
| and representatives of the nation's medical schools ask
| for.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200501175120/https://www.balt
| i...
| madars wrote:
| You don't even need to import foreign doctors: just increase
| the number of residency slots.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| We already do that? I mean, minus the free clinic thing.
| hangonhn wrote:
| You basically can't or it won't have the same effects because
| medicine doesn't really follow the same dynamics as most
| other markets: the supplier (doctor) has an information
| asymmetry and thus makes most of the decisions, while the
| buyer (patient) is not usually the payer (insurance) so
| aren't really incentivized to save.
|
| Kenneth Arrow famously analyzed the healthcare market and
| made the above insight: https://assets.aeaweb.org/asset-
| server/files/9442.pdf
|
| I know he was a Nobel Laureate but not sure if this is the
| work that won him the Nobel.
|
| Updated: I should qualify my statement by pointing out this
| is for the US healthcare system.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the supplier (doctor) has an information asymmetry and
| thus makes most of the decisions, while the buyer (patient)
| is not usually the payer (insurance) so aren't really
| incentivized to save_
|
| Counterfactual: patients in India routinely shop around for
| second opinions and negotiate fees.
| hangonhn wrote:
| Completely fair point. I should have prefaced my
| statement with US based healthcare system is structured
| this way. I don't know how the dynamics are in other
| countries -- though I do suspect it's similar in term of
| information asymmetry. I imagine doctors everywhere have
| some pretty advanced and specialized knowledge. I don't
| know enough about India to know how they overcome this
| issue or if they do or not.
| elictronic wrote:
| He said free clinics.
| hangonhn wrote:
| But then you're just shifting the cost somewhere else.
| The doctors aren't working for free. Someone is paying
| them. It's just not the patients in the case of free
| clinics.
|
| In addition, doctors aren't the only cost centers in
| health care either. Even if they're free, which is sort
| of already the case or fairly inexpensive for the insured
| in the US, the overall cost of healthcare will still be
| high.
|
| Plus if you want completely free clinics (everything from
| doctors to medicine, etc), then you're not talking about
| a market solution to the issue, which is completely fair
| too. No one said you have to use a free market solution
| for this problem.
|
| My point is that we can't expect a free market to solve
| this issue. It isn't as simple as supply and demand.
| koolba wrote:
| > It isn't as simple as supply and demand.
|
| It really is that simple.
|
| Giving people insurance without actually increasing the
| supply of doctors or clinics increases the number of
| people willing and able to seek treatment. It does
| nothing for lowering costs of said treatment. Per basic
| economics, that's shifting the demand curve (i.e.,
| increasing demand).
|
| With no changes to supply that leads to higher prices. So
| every time the government makes a new program or expands
| anny existing one that provides insurance coverage, costs
| for everyone will go up.
|
| In contrast, my proposal for explicitly bringing in
| doctors and creating clinics increases supply. People who
| would have gone to see a doctor elsewhere may now choose
| to go to this new free clinic.
|
| The demand curve itself would not change, though with the
| lower cost due to the supply curve shift you would have a
| larger overall market.
|
| This is clearly oversimplified. There's some second order
| effects where if primary care market increases, you'll
| need more X-rays and CAT scans. So there could be an
| increase in _those_ prices. But that's could be solved in
| the same way too.
| pcai wrote:
| I think you're still missing the point - it's NOT classic
| supply and demand because the mechanism by which that
| works is prices, and in many healthcare markets including
| the US -- the buyer isn't the payer, and shortages lead
| to rationing (via wait times) rather than increased
| prices, so often increasing supply doesn't change prices
| even as it increases aggregate costs (because there's
| still excess demand and rationing).
| tptacek wrote:
| For this argument to work you have to believe that
| decreasing the price of service delivery wouldn't
| decrease the price of health insurance. Provider costs
| _dominate_ US national health expenditure, like it 's not
| even close; it's not a full order of magnitude difference
| but it's close to one.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Fixing a severe shortage is actually likely to have some
| impact.
|
| For instance, if there's a lot more doctors, the payer may
| be able to negotiate lower prices. We already have
| insurance mechanisms that drive patients to the providers
| that the insurer has negotiated with...
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| So funny that. Weirdly even if you build nothing but market
| rate housing, housing gets more affordable. :-)
| DaveZale wrote:
| Living in So CO, I smh at what's going on up there. The cost of
| living elsewhere in the state can be 1/3 to 1/2 the price. The
| govt and corporate employers could easily decentralize and stay
| in CO.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| How far south are you? I lived in Colorado Springs for a few
| years as a ski bum and all my friends in Denver used to mock me
| driving back and forth, but my rent was almost $500 cheaper
| living in Springs.
|
| You're 100% right though.
| scblock wrote:
| Commuting from the Springs to Denver every day, so 22-23 days
| a month, 60-70 miles one way...
|
| Is that worth $500?
|
| Quick math:
|
| $4/gallon, 35 mpg, 120 miles a day, so $14/day in gas, plus
| extra maintenance, and the 3 hours a day of your life you'll
| never get back.
|
| Couldn't claim with a straight face myself that the math
| works.
| DaveZale wrote:
| just a little west of Pueblo. We're about 1/3 of the cost of
| living in the Denver area.
|
| We get plenty of migrants from the Denver area and elsewhere.
|
| Of course, the sales tax and other taxes are going up.
| Probably heading to a truly rural area with a nice community
| soon. I lived in many big cities over the years. They are
| toxic and unsafe. I know that because I worked in public
| health. If you look at the morbidity and mortality by zip
| code, you'll see yourself. Affordable city living has a dark
| side.
|
| Not to say that city life isn't great when you're in your 20s
| or 30s. It is fun and jobs are everywhere. But I've seen
| enough fatal car crashes for a lifetime.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Now do KC.
| belmead wrote:
| Howdy, fellow KC resident. They are still building apartment
| complexes in Lenexa, but they are all near the Public Market,
| so. Not exactly the cheaper side of things. South KC is
| growing, but mostly higher-end homes it seems.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Um the rent is still insanely unaffordable?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Um the rent is still insanely unaffordable_
|
| You have to pass 1st Street to get to 5th.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Unless you go to jail.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Lets keep the trend going. Lets get them back to 2019 levels! It
| would be a real feat if they can keep the cost going _down_
| instead of _up_.
| mixdup wrote:
| that's unlikely. the pipeline of new units will be slowing,
| it's just that a bunch of projects that got spun up at the peak
| are finally delivering, but new starts have been down so we're
| probably approaching the bottom of a trough
| MangoToupe wrote:
| It's a nice victory story for the YIMBYs hoping to win over the
| upper-/middle class trying to retain the narrative that the
| market will provide "affordable" housing (not what this even
| demonstrates, but anyway), but this isn't going to get people off
| the street. We need a public housing sector to appropriately meet
| everyone's needs. Otherwise this is just a game of justifying
| "who deserves housing", a discussion over which I'll never agree
| with the market.
| mgfist wrote:
| 0.2% of Americans are homeless.
|
| Why is housing _always_ about the homeless? Yes, getting people
| off the street is important. But there 's few other topics
| where a solution that helps 99.8% of people is dismissed
| because it doesn't help 0.2% of people (I don't even agree that
| it doesn't help them, but I'll be charitable for the sake of
| making my point).
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > Why is housing always about the homeless?
|
| To me, poverty is basically the only thing worth talking
| about when it comes to politics. Nothing else is going to get
| me to the voting box--to me, a platform that doesn't focus on
| poverty reduction doesn't even understand the point of
| government, the economy, or trying to work together.
|
| I suspect other folks who think this way are going to be
| disproportionately loud.
| spankalee wrote:
| People in poverty have to pay for housing. Reducing the
| price of housing helps them, and may even help them climb
| out of poverty. Building more housing reduces the price of
| housing.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > People in poverty have to pay for housing.
|
| No, they don't have to. That's a decision our society has
| made, and in my opinion it was a horribly evil one.
| spankalee wrote:
| Even if the government is paying for housing for them,
| cheaper housing means that the government can pay for
| more people's housing. Building housing reduces the price
| of housing...
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| Right now in cities homelessness is often associated with
| addiction or mental illness. We spend billions every year
| giving these people resources to get off the street, get
| treatment for addiction or mental illness. Right now? Many,
| many, many of those people have no desire to get off the
| streets or get clean or get treatment for their mental
| illness - despite the copious amounts of safety nets and
| other programs designed specifically to help those people.
|
| I agree, we already have programs designed to help those who
| need it - focusing on the larger percentage of the population
| just makes sense if you're concerned about having bigger
| positive outcomes.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| So you're telling me if an additional, say, 100k units came on
| the market in Denver in the next year, housing prices wouldn't
| fall dramatically such that all working people could afford
| housing?
|
| Working people should be able to afford housing near where they
| work. So let's press the gas pedal on building. The mentally
| ill and drug addicted should be subject to mandatory treatment
| or jail until such time as their underlying condition is
| mitigated to the extent that they can work and afford housing.
| Free housing doesn't work. In fact, it exacerbates individual
| dysfunction. It is cruelty masquerading as kindness.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > all working people could afford housing?
|
| Hey, if that's the metric you're pushing for, good for you.
| I'm pushing for housing as a human right. I never caught the
| calvinist bug of "torture the non-productive until they
| conform and perform" method of population management.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _housing as a human right_
|
| Why not just shelter?
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Human rights don't depend on the compulsory labor of
| others. They are inherent. Housing doesn't qualify.
|
| "torture the non-productive until the conform or perform"
| is possibly the most inflammatory framing of "you should
| not make other people pay for your housing" I've seen.
| Ray20 wrote:
| Don't you see the huge contradiction here?
|
| Housing doesn't just spring up on our streets by Jesus'
| will, so by making people responsible for providing housing
| for other people, you're literally calling for "torture
| until they conform and perform".
| jeffbee wrote:
| Lowering the rent stops people from _becoming_ homeless which
| is a necessary element of ending homelessness.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > Lowering the rent stops people from becoming homeless which
| is a necessary element of ending homelessness.
|
| Sure but by this reasoning you could justify _any_ effort as
| sufficient. At some point you have to make the personal
| judgement on what effort is enough. I don 't really see any
| effort focusing on anything short of homelessness as worth
| the oxygen in the room it consumes.
| spankalee wrote:
| Who said anything here about "sufficient"?
| tptacek wrote:
| Until you reach transient shelter beds, which may not be
| saturated in a region (in some places in Chicagoland the work
| is going into outreach to get people off the street and into
| shelter beds as much as it is in expanding the number of beds),
| every additional unit of housing you build frees up some unit
| at or below that unit on the stack of housing. The effect
| percolates all the way down to long-term supportive housing
| rooms.
|
| I don't really understand the intuition people have for how
| anything else could be the case. You make new housing
| available, people move into it, leaving vacancies. Pretty
| simple.
| throwmeaway222 wrote:
| yeah well, the last time things were affordable the price was
| 1200. 71 dollars off 1850 isn't going to do anything
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _71 dollars off 1850 isn 't going to do anything_
|
| The point is the modern urban economic illiteracy that pretends
| supply and demand don't exist in housing (except when it comes
| to short-term rental stock, in which case it magically
| reappears) is wrong. Our housing crisis is a supply-side
| problem.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| It's a supply-side problem, but with majority of people being
| either indifferent to the problem or against downward
| pressure on the housing prices (most people don't rent). The
| prices have skyrocketed, and most people who bought in the
| last 5 years wouldn't want their assets to depreciate, if
| they spent 500K+ on it.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _most people who bought in the last 5 years wouldn't want
| their assets to depreciate, if they spent 500K+ on it_
|
| If they spent any amount on it. The long-run equilibrium is
| managing housing prices like the Fed, with a commitment to
| building enough to keep median real home prices flat. (I'd
| argue for a one-time adustment to pre-Covid levels. But
| that's arguably an arbitrary threshold.)
| jeffbee wrote:
| I recently denounced some Boomer for this exact comment at a
| Berkeley public hearing. Unsurprisingly, $71 per month at the
| margin is quite useful to many people.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| In Colorado, that's about 5 hours of labor for minimum wage
| employees (ignoring taxes, but at that income taxes are low).
| If you're working full-time, you average 174 working hours a
| month so that's about 2.9% of a minimum wage earner's gross
| income, which is nothing to scoff at for those folks who are
| earning at that level. And when you consider taxes (payroll
| which can't be easily avoided, and whatever level of income
| tax they have to pay) it's probably pushing closer to one day
| of work to take home that $71.
| jameslk wrote:
| Doesn't rent need to keep going up so the top-heavy segment of
| retirees can have a steady stream of inflation adjusted income
| and capital gains for their remaining years? This doesn't seem
| sustainable, politically
| jldugger wrote:
| Well, if they own their home and have a diversified portfolio,
| then they should be able to weather a small hit to income.
|
| If they rent, well, this directly helps their budget.
| DaveZale wrote:
| taxes and insurance are both much steeper than just a few
| years ago.
|
| Gov. Polis has forced lifting limits on occupancy to override
| local restrictions. It's just getting more crowded.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Doesn't rent need to keep going up so the top-heavy segment
| of retirees can have a steady stream of inflation adjusted
| income_
|
| No. Maybe 10% of retirees earn rental income [1].
|
| > _and capital gains for their remaining years?_
|
| The value of the home should be plenty to live off, whether by
| sale or borrowing.
|
| [1] https://bradleyclark.com/blog/generating-retirement-
| income-w...
| pphysch wrote:
| Doesn't seem sustainable civilizationally, either, if the young
| and poor are propping up the old and rich, rather than older
| generations nurturing the youth.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Residential real estate is very rarely a large component of
| people's retirement savings or income in the US, and equities
| historically outperform real estate.
| Giorgi wrote:
| [flagged]
| yapyap wrote:
| communism? was there lead in the paint they painted your walls
| with?
|
| no real argument was made for communism, however a housing /
| renting market controlled by the government with regulations
| instead of letting the "free market" (((oligopoly))) run it's
| course screwing over the poor and middle class while the
| richest of the rich pool all these profits to build bunkers and
| do stupid shit.
|
| yeah, a regulated market is better. especially when and if the
| government regulating the market is sane. thats a requirement
| for laws and or institutions relying on regulation
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| > was there lead in the paint they painted your walls with?
|
| yes unfortunately as long as my landlord gave me the LEAD
| PAINT notice i didnt have any other options.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _a housing / renting market controlled by the government
| with regulations instead of letting the "free market"_
|
| It's curious how the largest landowing families in New York
| and San Francisco are strong supporters of these anti-market
| policies.
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and
| flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's
| not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the
| intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
| They include:
|
| " _Don 't be snarky._"
|
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents._ "
|
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of
| what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
| vlakreeh wrote:
| This is not a solution. The average rent is still $1832, which
| is still unaffordable for people in Denver making the median
| income of $54.3k if you apply the rule of thumb where rent
| shouldn't exceed 30% of your monthly income.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Is it wrong of me to be sad that it's _rent_ and not home prices?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _wrong of me to be sad that it 's rent and not home prices?_
|
| Rents are higher frequency than home prices. _Ceteris paribus_
| , prices follow yields.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yes, it is in fact quite wrong and one of the biggest obstacles
| in American society is fetishization of homeownership.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Why is it wrong to want to have equity in the place you live?
| "Ownership" could be a house, it could be a townhome, it
| could be flat. But in the US, "owning" an apartment is very
| rare, while real estate investors buy up all the valuable
| land in the urban cores of cities and rent it.
| jeffbee wrote:
| If _you_ want equity in real estate nobody is stopping you.
| The problem is when people get this idea that we need to
| discourage investors from building very greatly desired
| rental housing.
| chrsw wrote:
| This is the big problem with treating your home as an
| investment. People who just want a place to live near
| where they work now have to play this game too. And it's
| not cheap game.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm pretty sure investors are persuaded by money and
| little else -- if renting is profitable they'll build
| rentals.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if renting is profitable they 'll build rentals_
|
| The point is it's difficult and expensive to build in
| America. The core competency of construction in most
| cities is knowing how to grease the community boards',
| planners', affordable-housing advocates' and permitting
| offices' palms.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| You may object to it, but a home has been the smartest
| investment I've ever made.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| The "fuck you got mine" attitude _so many_ homeowners have
| and deliberate supply restriction to increase property
| values makes it a smart investment on paper, at the cost of
| screwing everyone else coming after you.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm not sure why it has to be that way. Build more
| houses.
| apwell23 wrote:
| then it wouldn't be "smartest investment"
| staringback wrote:
| Not wrong at all. Previously owner-occupied single family homes
| will continue to be bulldozed and replaced with 8 story wooden
| boxes, owned by national corporate landlords of course.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _single family homes will continue to be bulldozed and
| replaced with 8 story wooden boxes, owned by national
| corporate landlords of course_
|
| Source? Why of course?
| iamtheworstdev wrote:
| home prices are falling in a lot of places. :shrug: denver
| could always be next
| righthand wrote:
| It will just go back up 3% next year to match inflation. 20k
| apartments and the rent only lowers 3%? What a joke. Only the
| real estate industry is celebrating this.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _20k apartments and the rent only lowers 3%?_
|
| 20k is about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Given the
| backlog of demand, you'd expect to see inelasticity at the
| entrance.
|
| [1] http://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US0820000-denver-
| co/
| aynyc wrote:
| Just because this doesn't magically solve the housing crisis,
| doesn't mean it's not a good start. We have to stop looking at
| magical solutions that will solve all our problems in one shot.
| We have to start somewhere.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _because this doesn't magically solve the housing crisis_
|
| It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's
| housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the
| housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have
| solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out
| recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but
| that's a separate issue.)
|
| [1] http://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US0820000-denver-
| co/
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of
| Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units
| to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and
| you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need
| to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently
| underwater, but that's a separate issue.)
|
| That is only if you believe that more capacity does not
| induce more demand, which really isn't true as long as the
| city remains popular for jobs/climate/nature/etc.... People
| not moving to Denver because the rent is too high will decide
| to move to Denver if rents decrease (and the demand they add
| will cause rents to increase, wash/rinse/repeat until an
| equilibrium is reached). You also have cases where a city
| becomes even more attractive because of growing density alone
| (NYC, Hong Kong, Tokyo).
| FredPret wrote:
| That's why you have to allow large-scale building
| everywhere. Then the market will find its own level.
|
| The inverse of this situation is that everyone lives
| somewhere they consider unpleasant because the rent is
| affordable there.
|
| The megacities you mention are enormously economically
| productive per capita. All sorts of efficiencies pop up
| when a huge number of people live near one another.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > The megacities you mention are enormously economically
| productive per capita. All sorts of efficiencies pop up
| when a huge number of people live near one another.
|
| It isn't a bad thing. NYC and Hong Kong are nice cities,
| they should exist. But don't expect housing prices to
| fall because you add more density if demand isn't fixed,
| the opposite often happens instead (people want to live
| in megacities even though housing costs are high). And
| that isn't really a bad thing, like gentrifying a
| blighted neighborhood will drive up housing prices as
| well.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Better to have good problems than to have bad problems.
| tptacek wrote:
| Induced demand can only function if there's a scarcity to
| begin with, and it's premised on increased supply
| _increasing affordability_ (that 's the mechanism by which
| it works), but these axiomatic derivations don't matter
| because we have case studies (in MN, in TX, and now CO, a
| story we're literally commenting on). Empirical
| observations win.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Induced demand can only function if there 's a
| scarcity to begin with_
|
| I don't believe this is true, assuming scarcity =
| shortage. _Ad absurdum_ , if Denver overbuilt such that
| one could pick up a parcel for a song, you'd see
| opportunistic demand where there previously was none.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Induced demand can only function if there's a scarcity
| to begin with, and it's premised on _increased supply_
| increasing affordability (that 's the mechanism by which
| it works)
|
| I don't think that's how the theory is supposed to work.
| It's more along the lines of, if you build more housing
| in a place then more people live there and then the
| higher population density can sustain more shops and
| jobs, and then people want to live near shops and jobs so
| the local demand increases.
|
| There are two reasons the theory doesn't actually mean
| that you can't solve the problem with more housing.
|
| The first is, the effect isn't infinite. As the reductio,
| if the entire New York Metro area had the population
| density of Manhattan, it would house 450M people, which
| is more than the entire US population. So you can build
| more housing than you have people to move into it even if
| that would literally cause the entire national population
| to move to the same place, and of course building that
| much housing in one place wouldn't cause literally
| everyone to move there anyway, so the amount you need in
| practice is far less than that.
|
| And the second is, it's a local effect. If you build more
| housing in Denver and that causes people to want to move
| from Austin to Denver, even if you don't build enough to
| overcome that in Denver itself, you'd still be lowering
| housing costs in Austin. And if you're simultaneously
| building new housing everywhere then there is no net
| migration and therefore no induced demand anywhere.
| tptacek wrote:
| A longer r/AskEconomics thread on this:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/y3ywl2/why
| _wo...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _only if you believe that more capacity does not induce
| more demand_
|
| No, it doesn't. What you're describing is elasticity. It's
| a well-studed concept, and means that a 5% increase in
| supply will probably reduce prices by less than 4.8%.
|
| (An interesting side effect of a government committing to a
| zero real-price increase housing strategy is it eliminates
| whole categories of speculative demand. I wouldn't count on
| this for policy effects. But it's another feather in the
| cap for pro-housing policy.)
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| Is you idea that people will be renting multiple units just
| for the fun of it? In large enough numbers to be impactful?
| davidw wrote:
| This argument always comes up when discussing a specific
| place.
|
| "Everyone would move to ________ because it is the best
| place in the spiral arm of the Milky Way", where ________
| is Boulder, Bend, Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Santa
| Barbara, Hawai'i, Santa Fe, etc.... etc....
|
| It cannot be true for all of them. So they all need to
| build and people will figure out where they actually want
| to live.
|
| Bozeman, Montana, a small city of 50K people, is seeing
| falling rents because they built a lot of housing:
|
| https://montanafreepress.org/2025/06/23/has-bozemans-
| rental-...
|
| And it's very much the kind of small place where "everyone
| wants to live there".
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| If everyone could live where they wanted to live, then
| ya, why wouldn't everyone want to live in the best
| cities?
|
| If you have fixed demand, then you can definitely "build"
| your way out of a housing crisis. Bozeman, for example,
| doesn't have many jobs, so you can't really live there if
| you don't bring your own money. A big city like Seattle
| or Denver... they have lots of jobs, so they will grow at
| least to the point that all those jobs have people
| working them...but then a city like that attracts even
| more jobs (the way cities work since they concentrate
| talent, which attracts more businesses looking for that
| talent), more people, it could grow from a million people
| to 10 or 20 million easily.
|
| > And it's very much the kind of small place where
| "everyone wants to live there".
|
| MT is a bad place if you need to work for a living: high
| housing prices, jobs don't pay very well if you can find
| them at all. My mom moved to Helena in the late 90s and
| found that out first hand. If WFH took off as expected,
| then you definitely could make a good life in Bozeman or
| Missoula or Butte, but alas, the opposite happened and we
| regressed greatly.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If everyone could live where they wanted to live, then
| ya, why wouldn 't everyone want to live in the best
| cities?_
|
| I moved from midtown Manhattan to western Wyoming. People
| have diverse preferences. (Even if we assume uniform
| preferences, densifying the population into a few cities
| so we can reclaim our wildlands sounds like a dream.)
| davidw wrote:
| The population of Bozeman is still growing, albeit more
| slowly. It's not like people left. They just built a lot
| of housing, vacancy rates increased and prices dropped.
|
| Same thing happened in Austin, Texas, which is a much
| bigger city with lots of jobs.
|
| The underlying story is that building enough housing is a
| good way to fix a shortage of housing, which is what
| causes high prices.
| czhu12 wrote:
| Giving significantly more people a way to live a lifestyle
| they seek, while holding the cost of housing flat -- if
| thats the worst case outcome, that seems totally fine, and
| arguably a better solution than trying to crash the cost of
| housing.
|
| I would imagine for most people, this is what "solving the
| housing crisis" means
| happymellon wrote:
| Except that all the folks that left Austin to move to
| Denver makes the houses prices in Austin drop.
|
| Now the folks in Denver who hadn't considered Austin due to
| high rates can move there and reduce the costs in Denver
| again.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| A 5% increase in supply annually indefinitely would crash
| the housing market there, induced demand be damned. To put
| it in perspective, a metro area growing at 2% is killing
| it, the highest growth rate is Austin at 3%. Denver only
| grows at less than 1%.
|
| Cheaper homes may induce demand, they won't induce a 5%
| growth rate.
| standardUser wrote:
| > You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who
| will be permanently underwater
|
| If you buy a house for $400k, and suddenly it is worth $300k,
| you don't need to be "bailed out" for your purchase decision.
| You should have been certain that the house was worth $400k
| to _you_ at the time of purchase. Otherwise you 're a
| speculator, and we shouldn't be bailing out speculators.
|
| It's called buyer's remorse. We accept it when it's a car or
| a TV, but suddenly when it's a house we're supposed to give
| massive government support to correct the buyer's mistake?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If you buy a house for $400k, and suddenly it is worth
| $300k, you don 't need to be "bailed out" for your purchase
| decision...we shouldn't be bailing out speeculators_
|
| When the speculators vote, yes, you need to bail out the
| speculators.
|
| > _It 's called buyer's remorse_
|
| It's called building consensus. At the end of the day, if
| it costs making homeowners whole to gain their buy in to
| solve the housing crisis, that's money well spent.
|
| I'm not saying what I'm proposing is fair or even
| palatable. But it's functional. If solving the housing
| crisis is more important than aesthetics, it's a good move.
| standardUser wrote:
| I agree there are political considerations, but we are
| talking about a scenario where the only damage done is
| that the buyer must continue to live in the home they
| purchased at the price they purchased it for, and where
| the recipient of government benefits is a household
| capable of purchasing a house, presumably at the height
| of the market. Is a tax dollar better spent placating
| grumpy homeowners who already have a place to live they
| can afford, or by more directly building more housing and
| infrastructure?
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| Yeah, pretty sure a government won't bail me out if I
| invested in a stock so much that it would crush me if the
| stock went down. If buying a house is an investment and not
| for living, then it should be treated like it is.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _pretty sure a government won't bail me out if I
| invested in a stock_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspan_put
|
| More pointedly, you're not in a position to block equity
| capital markets reforms in the way homeowners are in
| respect of housing reform.
| mateo411 wrote:
| I think Denver home prices have decreased by 4% since the
| peak in 2022.
|
| I don't think anybody is going to be permanently underwater.
| Home prices changing should be a second order effect of
| building more apartments.
| bearcobra wrote:
| It's really encouraging to see these kinds of success stories. I
| really hope people who are concerned about affordability start to
| view things from more of a "yes and" point of view. We can work
| on reducing the barriers to building more housing of any kind
| while also advocating for more social housing development.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _We can work on reducing the barriers to building more
| housing of any kind while also advocating for more social
| housing development_
|
| One of the NIMBY lobby's greatest wins was putting these
| options on the ends of a policy spectrum.
|
| They're not. They're complementary. If it's cheaper to build,
| it's cheaper to build social housing. And if you have a vibrant
| construction sector, you can build more public housing faster.
| tptacek wrote:
| They're not always complementary. For instance, IZOs are a
| social housing intervention, and work against the goal of
| increasing supply.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _IZOs_
|
| This [1]?
|
| [1] https://dhcd.dc.gov/service/inclusionary-zoning-iz-
| affordabl...
| tptacek wrote:
| Sorry, yeah, IZO/IHO --- rules requiring some margin of
| AMI affordable units in new developments (which makes new
| development harder to pencil out, while giving warm
| fuzzies to locals who want to genuflect to affordability
| while still fencing out new neighbors).
| srameshc wrote:
| With rents escalating notably from 2022, getting back to 2019
| rates would provide substantial relief for numerous families,
| assuming that's the objective.
| wagwang wrote:
| I just need to subsidize demand and then prices go up, people get
| angry, and I just need to subsidize demand and then...
| raldi wrote:
| Even if the rents were merely unchanged, 20k new units means 20k
| new families that can move to Denver without displacing anybody.
| scblock wrote:
| Funny, I just got a lease renewal email today and they want
| another 7%. Call me skeptical.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| Remember, this is a good thing. Property values should not
| outpace inflation.
| Marsymars wrote:
| It's not terrible if property values fall somewhere between
| inflation and GDP growth.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Developers don't build units to lower prices. If prices go down,
| it's because developers overbuilt or there are other macro
| factors at play. I suspect it's a bit of both.
|
| A core tenet of capitalism and neoliberalism is _private
| property_. We 're rapidly approaching a point of land reform. I
| think private property is a mistake. Note: this is distinct to
| _personal property_. You can own your own home, maybe even a
| second home. Anything beyond that should be outright disallowed
| or taxed into oblivion.
|
| We should simply not allow people to hoard property. It is state-
| sanctioned violence to deny people shelter by intentionally
| driving up the price of a basic need. Housing unaffordability is
| the number one contributor to homelessness, which I think is up
| 18% last year.
|
| I realize that's a pipe dream. What can we do instead? Do what
| Vienna does. Austria is a social democratic country that's still
| capitalist in nature. Yet ~60% of the housing stock is owned by
| the government. It is remarkably cheap to do so.
|
| Public-private partnerhips or simply looking to the private
| sector to solve these problems are nothing more than wealth
| transfer from the government to billionaires.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-31 23:00 UTC)