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A comment on Austin's Surge of New Housing Construction Drove Down Rents. Parent comment

Re:Austin's Surge of New Housing Construction Drove Down Rents by underlipton on Thursday March 19, 2026 @11:37AM (#47441261)
I don't know how much I buy this. Washington, DC added about 60,000 units between 2015 and now, so a little less proportionally to Austin (with 1 million residents vs 650k). Metro area, 160k more in DC, with a population of 3 million (vs 2.5 million in Austin). Even if DC's unit add is slower than Austin's, you'd expect median rent changes to be within the ballpark, right? Maybe only a slight increase instead of the small decrease Austin saw?

No. Rent doubled.

I don't know if Austin or DC is an outlier, but considering how many states sued property managers and their rental management software providers over price-fixing, I'm leaning toward Austin. In the rest of the country, building more doesn't lower rents. Lowering rents lowers rents. And you have to force landlords to do so.

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Re:Austin's Surge of New Housing Construction Drove Down Rents by ej88 on Thursday March 19, 2026 @02:29PM (#47443762)
Accounting for inflation, rents barely moved from 2022-2024 in D.C.: https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-yea...

I suspect most of the rent increase is due to inflation (sticker price). Nonetheless rents are still rising, which means 60k units were not enough to outweigh demand.

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Re:Austin's Surge of New Housing Construction Drove Down Rents by underlipton on Thursday March 19, 2026 @03:19PM (#47444482)
I'm sure 3 years noted for their high inflation rates are indicative of the preceding 7 years which were not. /s
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Re:Austin's Surge of New Housing Construction Drove Down Rents by ej88 on Thursday March 19, 2026 @06:42PM (#47447439)
either way, it's clear they didn't build enough
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Re:Austin's Surge of New Housing Construction Drove Down Rents by underlipton on Saturday March 21, 2026 @02:33PM (#47469870)
It's not, because it's not clear that building actually lowers prices.
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