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Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

Yes, this. Also, hate to use this argument but this simply doesn't match my lived experience. My rent and income have been going up for the last 10 years and yes that means I'm paying more and more for housing. However, my city rubber-stamped a glut of housing in one neighborhood and as my income went up, I was able to negotiate my rent down.

This phenomenon is a direct contradiction to the thesis of this paper. It is true, the people who people the glut of housing are currently freaking out because their margins are threatened. That's probably a good thing..upto a point [1].

The solution seems simple: rubber-stamp, nay, encourage developers into building gluts of housing so they demolish their own margins into dropping the price of housing.

[1] https://oaklandside.org/2025/02/14/oakland-downtown-apartmen...

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As somebody who has been involved politically with trying to increase supply (unsuccessfull), so that more people could experience what you are, I would note that Tori experience does not technically deny that supply is a big component of pricing.

It just says that there has to be something more too.

However, NIMBYs will use this paper inappropriately to argue against policies that enable your type of price drops.

Markets depend on both supply and demand, and there’s been a massive decline in the number of adults living together.

So the underlying explanation is likely that your personal salary has basically zero impact on the housing market, once you make enough to cover rent you end up paying the market rate. What matters in terms of short term trends is the marginal increase or decrease in people’s willingness to have roommates, live with their parents, etc.

When times are good and more people are gainfully employed the demand suddenly shoots up, in a downturn people suddenly move in with others become homeless etc. By comparison adding 2% housing units just doesn’t have nearly the impact it seems like it should.

The market also depends on your wants. One house is not always equivalent to another. Location matters of course. However layout, color and other features matters (some of them are trivial to change some not).

Adam Smith observed that when people got more money they tended to spend it on better housing. That observation is mostly true today.

People do get better housing, but the share of income spent on housing drops as wealth/incomes rise at the individual level.

There’s just diminishing returns on the value of spending more on housing vs other things like going on interesting vacations.

Can you help me understand your argument. It seems to hinge on the idea the existence of a counter-example proves it wrong? I could see how this would work for a logical argument or a proof, but I'm finding it difficult to see how it fits into proving ultimately a statistical finding incorrect. I generally see statistics as being able to tease apart situations where there are counter-examples and we're looking at things like proportions between categories and such.

Yea which is why I started with “hate to use this argument”. Definitely anecdotal but the kernel of truth is that income and rent going up could be a correlation with a different causation and as many have pointed out in this thread the paper inadequately controls for this.

This is especially dangerous now as papers can be used as hard truths in a misinfo driven information culture to see policy.

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