“You see, rent is still outrageous, causing people to go homeless, and has only had a moderate drop from historic highs, so obviously we didn’t do Abundance hard enough”

I’m not arguing that building more solves all problems, but rent did go down, which the first post said never happens (but actually happens regularly). This doesn’t have to turn into some thing where we all dig in and hate the other side. Building more housing is necessary but not sufficient.

Building more is necessary. However turning over the entire regulatory and administrative aspect of building to a cartel known for price fixing is a but shortsighted

Great, we agree! CA YIMBY isn’t doing that at all. Check out the recent agreements with unions that Sen Weiner made for his bill to build more housing near transit.

Thank you for this response

Yeah it sounds like those rents were coming down pretty naturally as the result of an artificial peak around 2021-2022

Wood prices at home depot around that time was double to triple the pre-covid cost

Still is in the Bay, about double

Yeah if only we just create another pandemic and then recall all of our remote workers every time we need rent to be cheaper this will work everywhere:

Newsweek? Really?

It’s a quote from real estate and housing economist Danielle Hale.

And it says that inventory rising helped reduce rents after a bunch of people moved to a new city.

After people left the city* Housing is still unaffordable, homelessness is still rising, and as your article stated, the benefits are temporary because development stopped when rents lowered. So best case scenario this strategy hasn’t solved the actual problems and its benefits are temporary.

Right, that’s what necessary but not sufficient means.

Are you agreeing with the initial post that building more housing can never decrease rents? It’s not true, and that is the only argument I’m making.

Building more housing could decrease rents but the system we have incentivizes development to maximize ROI, not to create affordable housing. Developers will not build to the point where it lowers their ROI.

This is not true. Developers build until it isn’t profitable for them, which is why there are many examples of building more housing lowering rent.

www.upjohn.org/research-hig...

From this article:

And? Building more housing is necessary but not sufficient. That is the basic YIMBY liberal stance.

Yeah I should have mentioned that another thing which can cause rents to go down is normalization of building material costs after the huge covid increases, particularly in outliers like Austin that were seeing big population increases at the same time

www.berkeleyside.org/2025/05/01/b...

Was wondering why that articlr was focusing on rent controlled units bornstein.law/changes-for-...

www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/a...

You keep showing outliers as if that means something www.apartmentlist.com/research/ren...

The post said rents never go down if you build more. That’s not correct. That’s literally the only point I’m making. Much, much more needs to be done to lower housing costs, and that includes building more multi family housing.

No, the original post said someone whining that "the left" made their rents go up over 20 years is a baby brain

Sorry, you’re right. I meant the post that I responded to. I agree that it’s stupid to blame the left for rents going up.

Ok good. Would you also agree that allowing developers and investors to do whatever they want by deregulation also does nothing to reduce rent costs?

Eh, I mean, I get what you’re going for with that framing, and having never argued for letting anyone do anything they want, it seems like just bait rather than discussion.

Building more housing lowers housing costs. There are lots of ways to get there, and I’m open to looking at what works. I think “regulations” like red lining and SFH zoning are bad. That doesn’t mean I’m against all regulations.

Look at the work that CA YIMBY is doing to get unions requirements for housing built near transit. That bill changes zoning near transit stations, but it’s not letting developers do whatever they want.

It's what they were saying

The implication in saying the only thing that makes rent go down is an area losing demand, is that building cannot reduce costs by increasing supply. This is not true. It has been demonstrated in numerous areas.

And more importantly, going back to my original posts, no simply building more does not meaningfully reduce costs, they have only ever increased. Hyperinflated markets like Austin are outliers