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Comment by clamprecht | Hacker News Reader

At a glance, I'm a bit skeptical. It looks like they're cherry picking the high point for rent (the COVID spike).

> "Rents fell. In December 2021, Austin’s median rent was $1,546, near its highest level ever and 15% higher than the U.S. median ($1,346)."

Of course having more housing should, all things equal, lower rent. But all things certainly weren't equal, especially during this time period.

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> In December 2021, Austin’s median rent was $1,546, near its highest level ever and 15% higher than the U.S. median ($1,346). By January 2026, Austin’s median rent had fallen to $1,296, 4% lower than that of the U.S. overall ($1,353).

For comparison, in San Francisco December 2021, the median one bedroom was $2810. In San Francisco March 2026, it was $3597, an increase of 28%.

It is well known that there was a brief moment in time when people were abandoning San Francisco and “moving to Texas” (mostly Austin) that coincides when the rents peaked in Austin. I’d be not surprised if that was also the time when San Francisco rents were down.

We’re seeing a reversal in trend when SF is hot again and Austin is not. So not exactly a straightforward comparison. It could explain the SF-> Austin and back trend.

So we've got point in time comparisons between Austin and itself; the change in delta between Austin and a particular city known for restricting housing; and the change in delta between Austin and national median rents. They all support the idea that increasing supply tends to decrease costs, which by a massive coincidence is what basic economic theory suggests.

Of course, people can come up with an ad hoc explanation for why Austin's prices happened to decrease against each of those data points. But is there a single principled way to present the data that suggests increasing supply in Austin did not decrease costs?

> But is there a single principled way to present the data that suggests increasing supply in Austin did not decrease costs?

Building more housing will make housing affordable. That’s not up for debate. The extent to which is what you need to look at. You can’t ignore the effects of net migration trends. My comment mostly wanted to address the parent which arbitrarily picked up data points of 2021 and right now and was comparing Austin and San Francisco. Because those specific points in time are tied to the migration of people between the two cities at a higher rate than usual.

The number of Tech people moving from SF to Austin and back is going to have negligible influence on the average rent in the entire city.

You mean the folk with highest purchasing power (2-3x median wages of the average person in the city) moving in and out of the city have negligible impact on the average rent in the entire city? I guess the 20% increase in rent in 2021 in Austin was just vibes.

What was the increase in rent across all major cities in the US in 2021?

Yeah this would be the interesting thing to try to normalize the data against somehow.

If you just compare it to other cities you can see that Austin did much better in prices.

Idk about rent, but even as of a year or two ago, Austin metro housing index was lower than its 2016 level. Rent following a similar trajectory wouldn't be super surprising to me.

Here's a chart that presents some context:

https://www.reddit.com/r/texas/comments/1grxqur/the_austin_t...

This appears to be a correction to an unsustainable market.

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