Comment by sudosysgen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sudosysgen | Hacker News Reader

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I think this is a really weak argument, for two reasons. Firstly, a 1-2% rent decrease on the short term for a 10% increase in a supply at 500m?? This is pretty ridiculously low, if this is the best that can be done it's barely worth mentioning.

The important thing here is that people leaving a city due to unavailability of housing thus stopping the growth in the price of housing is something that we only just see happen, it's a lot less delocalized and it's a long term process, so I really don't see how the real world effect of zero from increased supply is supposed to counteract this second order effect.

The second issue is that while in theory neoliberal YIMBYs are often for public housing, when their plans are put into practice this part is completely ignored. If you see a crucial aspect of your plan being ignored, which is also by far the hardest to implement, and yet don't put it front and center to stop this, it's clear that you're okay for trading that off. Which means that the real world effect is for rent to just keep on increasing.

Whereas cities with progressive solutions (which also include increasing supply, but fittingly with the weakness of the effect don't make it completely central, often seen much more than 0-2% temporary decreases.

> This is pretty ridiculously low

False equivalence. The other option in most cases isn't no decrease in rent (i.e., 0%), it is an increase in rent (> 0%). So if with no increase in supply the rent increase would have been 10% (like it has been on my rent for the past several years in San Diego), than it suddenly seems like a pretty good deal.

The 1% decrease is instantaneous at the opening of the building compared to other spaces where no building was done at 0%. It's not an annualized rate. "No impact" in the study means that there is no detectable correlation, not that rent doesn't increase nor decrease.

Beyond that, if it actually was a 1% total decrease (which it isn't), you can bet your ass the author would have written that as 7.6% relative decrease cause by construction, instead of 0-2%.

My read is that the 1-2% effect is an average effect of each instance where a parcel was replaced with denser market rate housing.

Imagine what the effect size would be if we had enough market rate housing built to increase supply by 100% within 500m. I imagine it's more than 1-2%.

It's not realistic to increase supply by 100% within 500m. But sure, say we did.

Assuming more or less linear increases, instead of 1-2% you get 10-20%. Let's also ignore the large temporary decrease in supply and price stickiness of rent.

You "paused" rent increases by 1.5-3.5 years. For something that will likely take more than ten years to accomplish. And then there's not much more that can be done.

If instead you increased supply by 30% in affordable housing (which is much more reasonable, and of course you could do more or add some market rate housing on the top), build very strong public transit systems and allowed construction of high density private housing away from the city centre, and implement rent control, you will do much, much more than stopping 1.5-3 years of rent increases and then not being able to do much. You will actually have a durable solution.

Why not? It sounds like it would only require replacing ~10 parcels with higher density housing on average within a 500m circle. That seems highly achievable, especially in San Francisco where density is abysmal!

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