43 comments

[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 61.7 ms ] thread
Supply and demand 101 continues to work.
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.
Um the rent is still insanely unaffordable?
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 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.
yeah well, the last time things were affordable the price was 1200. 71 dollars off 1850 isn't going to do anything
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
Is it wrong of me to be sad that it's rent and not home prices?
Anecdotally, Denver home prices appear to be down compared to a few years ago as well. The ~850sqft unit next to mine sold for $700k 2-3 years ago and I’m certain it’d go in the low 600s now.
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.
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.
With rents escalating notably from 2022, getting back to 2019 rates would provide substantial relief for numerous families, assuming that's the objective.
I just need to subsidize demand and then prices go up, people get angry, and I just need to subsidize demand and then...
Even if the rents were merely unchanged, 20k new units means 20k new families that can move to Denver without displacing anybody.
Funny, I just got a lease renewal email today and they want another 7%. Call me skeptical.
How dare your experience differ from mine on the internet. I demand you show me proof of your rent going up, Denver man!
Remember, this is a good thing. Property values should not outpace inflation.
It's not terrible if property values fall somewhere between inflation and GDP growth.
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.

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.

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.

The basic laws of supply and demand work!
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.