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Comment by Apreche | Hacker News Reader

But what about the desirability of San Diego? Was the decrease in rent only because of the increase in supply, or is there also lower demand?

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Right. What the reporter calls a "surge in supply" is an increase in "active listings", which doesn't differentiate from listings due to new construction vs listings due to people leaving.

Also, I could not find the "active listings" data in Zumper's report[1]. And then I noticed the chart with the active listing data says it was made by Brenden Tuccinardi/KPBS, so this was done by a reporter, not a Zumper data analyst. It's a bit fishy.

[1] https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/national-rent-report

San Diego also has the strange property of being on an international border!

TJ and SD are really two parts of the same metropolis - any investigation has to see how population ebbs and flows across that border, and what the housing prices did on both sides.

Very off the cuff but I do see some news about shrinking population - https://www.reddit.com/r/sandiego/comments/1s71z3a/san_diego...

That says more about affordability than desirability since rents have gone up over the decade but there's been a steady trickle out to cheaper locales

You are reversing cause/effect though.

SF rents have gone up, that didn't decrease demand. Why did SD rents drop, not because people left because it was too expensive, that doesn't make sense.

That's not what I'm saying. While they dropped recently due to the supply surge, looking at the last decade SD rents had been climbing:

https://www.costar.com/article/1297403833/san-diego-apartmen...

This suggests that San Diego has been getting more desirable over time (denser, more jobs, more culture, etc). The people who'd been around for some time that could hack the old SD rents couldn't deal with those rising costs and had been spilling over to Temecula, Phoenix, etc.

I suspect lower demand was more likely (although more supply never hurts).

San Diego has a ton of contractors dependent upon the federal government. I imagine the shenanigans of the current administration caused a bunch of them to pack it in and leave town.

The majority of the "more housing = cheaper rent" success stories crowed about on the internet correspond with net population exodus. Austin, Minneapolis, now San Diego.

Edit: I think we should build several million more units of housing in the US. I'm salty because all the new housing I've seen is ugly shitboxes owned by national property firms that make everywhere feel like nowhere.

Austin does not appear to have undergone a "net population exodus", at least not one visible on any of the charts I found (I stopped after FRED).

I think you need to look at rate of change ( 1st derivative ), not net terms.

Meaning population increase slowed down relative to new housing builds. OP didn't say this, but it's what I assume.

I think the claim made used both the word "net" and "exodus" and was simply false.

Do you have a source for the claim that the population of Austin has decreased recently?

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