Correct the amount of apartments remain the same. The number of people moving around to new apartments dropped so the 2 month gap from a tenant moving out and into a new place disappears. This was what increased unavailability a constant queue of demand. Suddenly apartment costs will drop and cost of living will follow suit. This is a boon. The tech industry is what stirred this originally where businesses were not stabilizing in the wages for tech. People were forced to move to take a better offer and so it created an artificial inflation purely on the demand gaps. Now people are settled back in post covid and things are just too expensive to move around availability including jobs will skyrocket and the pay will rise too reproducing this exact cycle we just went through. It is a cooling off phase for now.

Those aren't necessarily in conflict, if, as per the article, new units were increasing at an even faster rate. E.g.,

> The biggest wave of new rental buildings in nearly four decades is expected to cut the pace of rent growth across the country.

Our population growth doesn't meet that it is because of artificial unavailability of apartments. A 2 month gap between each apartment as people move around because they either wanted to live somewhere else or got a job that paid more. This constant moving causes too many issues like increased cost of living, over hiring (bad company performance) and under hiring (good company performance) each feeding into each other. As the market stabilizes and companies don't rush to make the next battle royale and force massive pay increases because of the above it will stabilize or even plummet back to normal costs. HOWEVER it will cause more vacancies in jobs and more vacanies in apartments because there isn't this queue or artificial unavailability of a role or place to stay which eventually will causes the above to happen again.

That is a quote from the article - "Apartment vacancies are piling up." But no accompanying graphs or further discussion, other than that sentence itself.

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

I think this would have had a harder time making the front page with the title the site guidelines suggest should have been used.

Per the article:

> Now, many of those same places that shot up in price are seeing slides in demand and rents are going down. Between April and October of 2022, rents fell 3% in Las Vegas, 2% in Phoenix and 1% in Tampa, according to Apartment List. All three of those cities saw rents rise more than 30% during the preceding two years.

> nearly half a million new apartment units—the most of any year since 1986—are expected to complete construction by the end of 2023. That will come after more than 400,000 units were completed during 2022...The coming increase in new apartments is most likely to affect rents at higher-end buildings, because there might not be enough people who make enough money to rent them, according to CoStar.

> many housing economists don’t think job and wage growth will be strong enough to sustain much in the way of rent increases [in 2022]

tl;dr Prices are going down in many of the hottest markets in the country. Vacancies are starting to happen and are expected to increase, particularly in higher-end apartments going into 2023.

Found in HTML source code for the article contains this WSJ-provided summary in a description meta tag for Twitter, another possible source for this submission's headline:

> "Apartment vacancies are piling up as a wave of new rental buildings are built, cutting the pace of rent growth across the country"

(I agree that some improvement is desirable.)

It's the lead sentence in the first paragraph.

>Apartment vacancies are piling up. The biggest wave of new rental buildings in nearly four decades is expected to cut the pace of rent growth across the country.

If it grows slower than inflation it may effectively decrease.

My area South, rent has shot up around 30-40%.

Now I also know a number of people that got burned very badly by Covid tenants that stopped paying and it took 16 months to evict them.

I've heard people blame rent increases on eviction moratoriums but that doesn't add up for me. The national eviction moratorium was only on federally funded properties for a very short period.

Some states passed their own laws but most did not last over a year, especially in southern states where renter protection tends to be weak.

Where would it take 16 months to evict a tenant for non-payment in the US?

San Francisco and Berkeley at least:

http://hrcsf.org/rights-relief-during-covid19/

http://ebclc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2020.07.02-Berke...

California. But also probably they are counting from first missed payment to actual eviction. Usually you don’t start trying to evict the day after rent was due.

Plus, "my expenses went up, so now I can raise prices" isn't supposed to be how markets work.

Cost of supplying the services is one of the biggest determinants of price. If prices fall below cost for too long then the entire market collapses.

If one provider's expenses went up, they generally can't raise prices, but if every provider's (even potential ones) expenses go up, then they can.

I’ve had it take nearly two years to evict in California. It requires a very motivated tenant but absolutely possible.

Yikes. That is a an absolute nightmare for a landlord. Where I live, I can evict a tenant if they violate their rental agreement and they have 3 days to vacate.

How on earth do you see a judge and get a judgement within 3 days? where I live you get a 3 days notice to leave if you want to avoid the judicial process, but you can stay and get your day in court in which case you'll be there significantly longer.

I don’t know. It’s brutal. You need an eviction from a judge, but it’s simple to get. You just apply with reason.

In the city of LA the eviction moratorium has been in place for three years, and will probably be extended out again.

I don't know a single person who owns property they don't live on, and you know multiple, and they've all had to evict non-paying tenants? Seems odd.

"rent has shot up around 30-40%" "Covid"

That's two reasons why people are having trouble paying rent, and it sounds like those folks you know are responsible for one of them.