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Comment by phantasmish | Hacker News Reader

If house prices and rent being this much higher than they were in, say, 2000, relative to wages, wasn’t enough to trigger an enormous housing construction boom, I don’t think further-increasing rent or house prices are likely to do much good. Something about that “signal” is already badly malfunctioning.

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The pricing signal malfunctions when homeowners and landowners control land use to such a degree that regulatory constriction stops housing. Usually this is zoning as the primary blocker, but there can be other blockers too.

One of the problems with rent control is that it pushes the class politics so that renters with housing act more like landowners than they do new tenants, and they conspire to also block housing. People are change averse, even if they don't mind the change after they see it; before the change it's a big threat. This hurts any tenant that needs to move due to things such as becoming an adult, finding a new job, starting a family, getting a divorce or ending a relationship, etc.

Rent control is great as a tenant protection to prevent evictions via rent increases, but it is only a short term protection for tenants otherwise, and can hurt tenants greatly if there's not enough building.

There's good evidence it's mostly zoning and permitting. You might be shocked if you look at the SFH zoning in your city when you realize how much the municipal gov has just banned denser housing development.

The lack of construction is mostly to do with most major US cities just not allowing enough construction. You can see the contrast with the handful of places like Austin that do allow construction, where rents have consistently dropped year-to-year even though the population has increased significantly.

This. It’s NIMBY politics at the local level. Go to your county/city board meetings and ask for plans.

Agreed. And local NIMBY can get surprisingly personal and politically vicious fast.

I have a friend who argued in public forums (local newspapers+blogs) for denser housing being more walkable and sustainable (in a wealthy small neighborhood we both lived in.) "Small towns" was/is the nationwide name for the trend.

Unknown opponents dug up and published dirt on him that even his wife, friends and employer didn't know. It was quite sobering.

And so they keep blocking efforts by resorting to smear tactics. Own it and reverse it back on them. Debate class 101, they have nothing if they attack you personally.

It sucks that your friend had his closet ransacked for skeletons. This is why I’m completely honest with mine.

You're gonna go to those meetings and find that it's not "what's allowed" that's fucking people out of the ability to construct things, it's all the capricious requirements that the process saddles them with before being allowed to do what is allowed.

I don't think construction has nearly as much relevance for Austin as you might think. Speaking as a former Austin resident, I left Austin in 2022 because rent highly spiked and I was effectively priced out of where I was staying (my rent spiked in the realm of 40%).

Rent has been cooling off in Austin because the amount of people moving there has heavily gone down and tech companies have either stopped opening new buildings there or have outright started to leave. The huge rise in rents was effectively due to a 'tech speculation' bubble as a result of every major tech company saying they were going to move to Austin and it was going to be the new tech capital of the US.

There are a lot of counties that also use construction permits and inspection requirements as a source of income and charge absurd fees for it, on top of being slow and unpredictable even if you do pay. And a slow inspector or slow permit approval also costs money in the form of builder's and laborer's time that you get charged for as they sit around waiting for someone else to arrive.

Look what happened in Austin, TX, which has much less housing regulation tamping down construction than CA (despite a good deal of local NIMBYism).

Prices spiked during the pandemic, and in response a shit ton of housing was built, much of it multifamily residential. Rents went down significantly and home prices are down 20% since the peak.

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