alt Hacker NewsDenver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market
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Even if the rents were merely unchanged, 20k new units means 20k new families that can move to Denver without displacing anybody.
Lets keep the trend going. Lets get them back to 2019 levels! It would be a real feat if they can keep the cost going down instead of up.
It's really encouraging to see these kinds of success stories. I really hope people who are concerned about affordability start to view things from more of a "yes and" point of view. We can work on reducing the barriers to building more housing of any kind while also advocating for more social housing development.
Not saying it's not noteworthy, but Austin rents have also been trending down lately.
I just recently heard the term "accidental landlord", which is someone who can't (or won't) sell at a price low enough to actually get rid of their house, so they rent it out. I know that's a factor in Austin; I wonder if it's part of the story in Denver?
With rents escalating notably from 2022, getting back to 2019 rates would provide substantial relief for numerous families, assuming that's the objective.
>back to 2022 prices
If we could be so lucky - out median rent it FIFTY PERCENT up over 2022 prices.
Is it wrong of me to be sad that it's rent and not home prices?
How is this measured? I've seen similar articles for Melbourne, where the average per dwelling is reducing, but the quality of the average dwelling is reduced faster; less bedrooms, low quality noisy single aspect apartments.
But if you track the price of a pre-existing property it's growing just as fast.
As a side note, if anyone here is in Denver and wants to grab a coffee or cowork sometime, hit me up.
It all just goes to show that government building, or creating some financing framework for building, very plain housing and selling for cost to keep supply ahead of demand would be an effective policy.
Doesn’t rent need to keep going up so the top-heavy segment of retirees can have a steady stream of inflation adjusted income and capital gains for their remaining years? This doesn’t seem sustainable, politically
Let’s interview the people living in all of these high quality new builds and see how much they’re loving or not loving their new digs.
The last paragraph should temper our enthusiasm. Allowing people to build more when there is a shortage is the best way to have markets solve problems.
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“ Meanwhile, the pipeline of new apartment buildings is drying up. The number of properties under construction is down by roughly one-third from the peak in 2023, the report found. That likely means fewer units coming available in the months ahead, potentially giving landlords room to start raising rents again.”
I just need to subsidize demand and then prices go up, people get angry, and I just need to subsidize demand and then...
Rents are high because landlords are greedy and are paying already inflated house prices.
Owning is expensive because banks are greedy, pumping out the created credit for mortgages, which is an imaginary number based on no actual value, because somehow banks are allowed to create money!
Here's the plot twist: you spend 30 years or even more (in Canada that has reached 70 years!) to pay the mortgage only to find out that you actually don't own the house and you're on a perpetual rent called property taxes.
And unless the root issue is resolved by banning banks' Ponzi fraudulent schemes, and implementing a policy to change housing into a depreciated asset just like Japan did, nothing will change substantially and will only change marginally to prevent people from going out rioting in the streets.
Denver is a boom and bust town. Every once in a while, it thrives for a decade, then busts with an exodus of people (myself included). It will rebalance and boom again.
Living in So CO, I smh at what's going on up there. The cost of living elsewhere in the state can be 1/3 to 1/2 the price. The govt and corporate employers could easily decentralize and stay in CO.
Is $1800 per month supposed to be a normal or acceptable rent? Rent should be less than $1000 a month. And even that's only 30% if you're making over $50,000 a year.
One, maybe not the only one, hands off, automatic, 100% "all-natural", do nothing solution to the "housing crisis": Hope the birth rate, i.e., on average the number of babies born per woman, stays significantly under 2.0 or even 2.1, maybe 2.2.
So, the population will shrink but with some maintenance (roof, painting of exterior siding, kitchen/bath, HVAC, windows/doors) mostly the housing supply won't.
The Internet may reduce the time and money commuting to work and/or the need to be in high density, expensive housing areas for a job.
I live in Denver, I don't believe this article is true. I just got a renewal offer where they wanted to raise my rent by 30%. I have generally negotiated this down with my landlord (Greystar), but I also am well aware and they're more blatant about the fact that they use RealPage ever since the courts gave them a pass for blatant price-fixing and collusion. Greystar and two other major REITs own nearly 60% of all rentable residential properties in the Denver metro area, so pardon my skepticism, but I call BS on the thought that rent has or will ever go down in Denver.
Edit: The plural of anecdote /is/ data.
Remember, this is a good thing. Property values should not outpace inflation.
yeah well, the last time things were affordable the price was 1200. 71 dollars off 1850 isn't going to do anything
Funny, I just got a lease renewal email today and they want another 7%. Call me skeptical.
back to 2022 rents! wow..yeah..., but why 2022? Feels like cherry picking the one year that makes today's numbers look okay
run it against 2000-today, or even 2020, and the story probably gets way uglier
It's funny how for so long people fought the basic law of supply and demand and tried to force 'affordable housing' to be built exclusively, while the prices of homes skyrocketed. I think leaders knew better, but they just didn't care because they were making money on their property. It also seems like a form of generational theft from boomers to millennials. Housing supply was always being added until boomers got theirs, then they made it overly restrictive to choke supply and drive up prices.
In other news, San Francisco rents are up $223 from a year ago, with median rent rising 11% year-over-year [1].
But hey, at least we’re safe from the dangers of gas stoves. /s
[1] https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/san-fran...
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Developers don't build units to lower prices. If prices go down, it's because developers overbuilt or there are other macro factors at play. I suspect it's a bit of both.
A core tenet of capitalism and neoliberalism is private property. We're rapidly approaching a point of land reform. I think private property is a mistake. Note: this is distinct to personal property. You can own your own home, maybe even a second home. Anything beyond that should be outright disallowed or taxed into oblivion.
We should simply not allow people to hoard property. It is state-sanctioned violence to deny people shelter by intentionally driving up the price of a basic need. Housing unaffordability is the number one contributor to homelessness, which I think is up 18% last year.
I realize that's a pipe dream. What can we do instead? Do what Vienna does. Austria is a social democratic country that's still capitalist in nature. Yet ~60% of the housing stock is owned by the government. It is remarkably cheap to do so.
Public-private partnerhips or simply looking to the private sector to solve these problems are nothing more than wealth transfer from the government to billionaires.
It's a nice victory story for the YIMBYs hoping to win over the upper-/middle class trying to retain the narrative that the market will provide "affordable" housing (not what this even demonstrates, but anyway), but this isn't going to get people off the street. We need a public housing sector to appropriately meet everyone's needs. Otherwise this is just a game of justifying "who deserves housing", a discussion over which I'll never agree with the market.
It will just go back up 3% next year to match inflation. 20k apartments and the rent only lowers 3%? What a joke. Only the real estate industry is celebrating this.
Just because this doesn’t magically solve the housing crisis, doesn’t mean it’s not a good start. We have to stop looking at magical solutions that will solve all our problems in one shot. We have to start somewhere.