alt Hacker NewsThe bigger problem, at least in my neck of the woods, is they're not building affordable housing. By-and-large they are building luxury apartments and luxury homes. We've torn down half the city to build luxury apartments that sit at 20-30% occupancy.
Building luxury housing won't help the housing crisis until the sellers are on the brink of bankruptcy and forced to sell their properties at a reasonable price.
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If US car sales were capped at 10 million cars per year manufacturers would immediately focus on their luxury brands and leave their regular brands out of stock. When you keep strict zoning, give NIMBYs veto power, let environmental review be weaponized as a delay tactic, you are capping new construction.
Asking why they don't build affordable housing is like asking why don't they build used cars
Building "luxury" apartments dropped rents in Bozeman, Montana, which is one of those cities that "everyone wants to move to"
https://montanafreepress.org/2025/06/23/has-bozemans-rental-...
When housing is scarce, all housing, even 100 year old dumps, will sell or rent at luxury prices.
No one is building apartments made of solid gold or concrete mixed with diamonds. They are building thoroughly ordinary buildings of concrete, wood and drywall. They fetch "luxury" prices & rents because for each one that exists, there are 40 ppl trying to live where, so they raise the price or rent to capture the riches of the 40, despite there being nothing particularly special or expensive about the physical structure.
You can do this with non-profit/govt/social/public housing too - if there isn't enough of it, every unit will require a "luxury" of time to wait for it to become available, even if the nominal price or rent is affordable.
Building only affordable housing is how you get cities into a downward spiral. The people who want luxury housing are the well-to-do. They probably contribute 10x the sales tax per capita than the people who live in affordable housing. And almost by definition luxury housing causes more property tax to be paid to cities than affordable housing. Both sales tax and property tax revenues shrink. And the city gets into a fiscal crisis. The city reduces services. People leave. Housing becomes more affordable but also more undesirable.
Luxury is just a realestate buzzword that means newly built and has stone countertops. Nothing that actually meaningfully impacts the pricing.
Today's affordable housing are the "luxury" units from 30 years ago. If you want to decrease the cost of housing you need to build more of whatever people will buy.
Presumably, if they're sitting at 20-30% occupancy, somebody (like the developer) is going to be having trouble paying their bank loans. You understand what happens next? (hint: prices plummet). If that isn't happening then your diagnosis of the problem is very likely wrong.
Toronto's housing market has a similar problem, except they also mostly built one bedroom shoeboxes for investors. Will be interesting to see how this unwinds[1].
[1] https://financialpost.com/news/toronto-condo-market-falls-of...
Where is this city with 20% occupancy?
Agree. I am not seeing starter homes being built in Omaha. They keep moving further out west, north and south — there's nothing there but fields and fields. I'm not sure that they're in anyone's "back yard".
And yet, they build expensive homes because (I assume) that is where the bigger profits are.
Affordable housing is NIMBY whitewashing of reducing supply through rationining. (Note the supporters of affordable housing programmes count the largest landowning families in San Francisco and New York among their ranks.)
There is an article on the front page, right now, about Denver moderating its rents through construction [1]. We've also seen this in Montana [2].
[1] https://denverite.com/2025/07/25/denver-rent-prices-drop-q2/
[2] https://montanafreepress.org/2024/09/09/can-bozeman-find-rel...