The article links to
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/10/28/texas-housing-afford...
to explain the increased construction:
> Austin’s housing crisis had become undeniable. How to solve the problem became a dominant theme in the city’s 2022 elections.
> "People just kind of got to this point where they had had enough," Council Member José "Chito" Vela said. "They just were like, 'okay, what we were doing on housing for the last 20 years is clearly not working.'"
> The council members YIMBYs helped elect passed several reforms aimed at juicing the city’s housing stock.
Who knew that the one and only solution to a housing crisis (besides forcefully removing people from the area) would actually help the problem of a housing crisis.
The takeaway from this should be "Never listen to anyone who offers a fix for high housing costs if they say anything other than "Build more housing""
Some interesting snippets from the article also in-play here:
> above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth
> The region’s population and job growth slowed as apartment building took off.
> San Antonio, Dallas and Plano have also seen declining rents — but they haven’t fallen as fast as in Austin.
> While nearly 17,000 apartments are under construction, according to MRI data, builders have pulled back on new projects amid the glut.
> Austin rents sit about 17% above pre-pandemic levels, Zillow figures show. Nearly half of the Austin-Round Rock region’s renters are “cost-burdened,” according to a report last year published by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies — meaning that they spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities, leaving less money in their pockets to spend on other essential needs like groceries, clothes and transportation.
This is obviously far better than them not falling at all, but as a place with a big Covid migration boom + crazy pricing market, it will be interesting to see if it turns into a long-term decrease compared to the pre-Covid prices.
Slowed job growth compared to the Covid-migration will likely help keep the prices from ramping back up, but slowed construction as prices already started to dip could counteract that to mean it ends up more like "pre-Covid status quo" than "much more affordable than it used to be."
They built in a boom - which is better than NOT building in a boom like some places have done - but there's a lot more work to be done.
Question is: will being hands-off there be enough, or will there need to be more proactive government intervention to encourage continued building in a more "normal" market?
It would also be interesting to compare the effect of the mentioned YIMBY politicians with policies in other areas of TX where rents have fallen post-Covid. There is a LOT of underutilized land already available around the major cities in the state, it's not like the SF Bay Area. That's where more active intervention might be needed since for the couple decades before Covid developers were happy to build at a rate that let prices still go up quite a lot.
Supply and demand 101 is undefeated.
The quickest way to build new housing is to turn short term lets (e.g. AirBnB) back into long term lets.
A slower way is to extend and improve public transit (so effectively growing the desirable 'inner city' area).
Affordability would benefit from rolling back some of the financial engineering that makes people believe they can pay more than they can actually afford.
It would be interesting to know if land prices have changed over the same period. Also whether any other comparable cities have had similar falls in price.
You don't suppose people are choosing to live elsewhere for any "political" reasons do you?
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20+ year resident of Austin here. I skimmed the article so maybe I missed it, but one thing that is lacking is the actions of private equity real estate purchases. During 2021/2022 (I'm not sure exactly the start/stop of the window) house values went up 50%+ here, and rent went up correspondingly. At the time, P.E. first were responsible for 40% of all home purchases.
I just had a look at zillow, as imperfect as that is, it estimated my home value in Jan 2020 at $882K. It shot up during covid and peaked in May 2022 at $1.7M. It is now $1.2M. Anyway, the point is I think the private equity buying spree was also responsible for much of the run-up, which has since cooled off somewhat.