Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

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Sigh. NO it didn't. One fact of life: new construction does NOT lead to lower housing prices. Sad, but true.

So what did? Likely COVID. The _only_ way to decrease the housing prices is to decrease the population. As proven by countless cities, including the world's most liveable Copenhagen.

So does my prediction hold for Austin? Let's see.

Austin TX population in 2019 (ACS estimate, data series ACSDP1Y2019.DP05): 979263.

2021 (ACSDP1Y2021.DP05): 944658

2023 (ACSDP1Y2023.DP05): 979700.

2024 (ACSDP5Y2024.DP05): 979539.

So yep, my prediction holds true. The housing prices in Austin were stagnant because its population decreased during COVID and barely recovered to pre-COVID levels.

Want another prediction? Seattle's home prices will fall down, because its population is now (likely) decreasing. Not because of a rush of new construction. We'll see updated population released stats in April.

Edit: I sent a letter to the editor of Pew. We'll see if they have a shred of honesty (doubt it).

Edit 2: honest researchers take care to control for other factors before jumping to conclusions. For example, they could have found a comparable city that also had falling rents but _no_ significant new construction.

And hey, I did that. According to https://vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/indicators/asking-rents the rental price in SF was $4060 in 2019, and it fell to the low level $3319 in 2024 before starting to climb in 2025. Can you guess what was happening with its population?

how surprising, never would have seen that coming

Austin is not a success story. It is a treading water story, and an example of lying with statistics because most of where it's cheap to live in "Austin" literally wasn't Austin when these measurements start. They just literally redrew the lines in part to make this headline.

If you want a success story, look a Vienna. That's what actual community and housing looks like and its because of the exact opposite of what econ clowns on here believe, non-market housing.

You say progress, I say enshittification.

What this article says: *The median apartment rent in Austin has dropped X% over the past 5 years*

What this article does not say: *Apartments in Austin cost X% less to rent now than they did 5 years ago*

It's completely possible for the cost of the average apartment in a city to go down, while the cost of existing apartments increases. How does this happen? The enshittification of rentals. Units get smaller (apartments in Austin are shrinking), they get built near highways (air pollution), they lose amenities like parking, they pop up places where they previously weren't allowed (smaller ADUs, basement units, see article), they get subdivided (landlord throws up a wall and turns a large 1br into a cramped 2br).

If supply and demand were really working the way its heralds claim, then we'd see the price of existing units going down. This article offers no evidence that this is happening. I don't believe for a minute that it is.

Instead, it's the same story as always: your rents will keep going up. You can move somewhere cheaper and shittier if you want. The people who profit will congratulate themselves while decrying the thing they actually fear: rent control.

https://www.statesman.com/story/business/real-estate/2025/05...

The laws of supply and demand don't apply to housing in the Bay Area.

We need affordable housing, not more housing for rich people, made by rich developers. Just because my house is worth $3M and I have $3M in stock options doesn't mean I'm rich. I'm working class, I had to come back from paternity leave to log-in to Slack on my laptop every damn day, and tell Claude how to write this damn software!

Did you sign the petition to block the apartment building down the street? It would RUIN our neighborhood!!

As an aside, I am not part of the problem!! I care about poor people!!! I am a good person!!!!

Oh you want proof? Look at my front lawn: "In this house we believe black lives matter, science is real, love is love..."

Proof point 2: look at my Tesla! "I bought this Tesla before I knew Elon was crazy!"

Plus I voted for Kamala. I'm GOOD. People in Kansas are DUMB and BAD.

I feel like the economics around the Texas real estate markets are getting really twisted due to other factors.

The quality of construction in these new builds is generally very bad. If you compare a Texas home built in 2025 with one in 2015, I can guarantee you will find shocking differences once you pull back some of the drywall or have kids jumping around upstairs. I had a 2023 build for a year before I realized I had a hot potato situation on my hands and decided to bail.

The new builds used to command a premium, but in some communities the situation has completely inverted. Buyers are coming in and explicitly avoiding anything built in the new millennium. Information is flowing so much more freely around real estate and the unspoken bullshit scams prevalent within. We've now got home inspector influencers on TikTok showing first time homebuyers exactly what to look out for. We didn't have these kinds of information channels when I was shopping for my first home.