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First American City to Tame Inflation Owes Its Success to Affordable Housing
(www.bloomberg.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Net-new luxury housing is good for affordability, because when someone moves into a more expensive unit, that frees up their current more affordable unit.
More to the point, Seattle literally just legalized missing middle housing in most of the city earlier this year. That's good for affordability, but new housing takes time to build. And developers will try to build the most lucrative project they currently can.
Housing is a matter of supply and demand. When you're in a housing shortage, prices will be high and most of the new supply will be luxury. The solution to a housing shortage is to build more housing, period. If you build housing faster than increasing demand from population growth, prices of units will go down. If you build housing and prices stay high, you didn't build enough. Build more. Remove NIMBYs ability to prevent new builds.
Which is not to say that building public housing or other projects to subsidize housing is a bad idea. But it's really, really hard to do that effectively during a housing shortage and solving the shortage is good for everyone except homeowners who wanted to use their equity as their retirement nest egg.
It's not about trickle down, it's about building to meet the capacity. I live in this area and can tell you first hand. I live in a cheap building and all the luxury condos going up has made it so my landlord cannot jack up rents anymore. They were doing it constantly before the building boom and now they can't even fill multiple units at the rents they want to charge.
Vacancy rates don't reflect what people think they do, and actual long term vacancy rates are a fraction of what people think they are.
In particular: the census' published vacancy rates includes all housing that isn't someone's primary occupancy on census day to be unoccupied.
The vacancy rate includes buildings that are tied up in estate, forclosure or divorce proceedings, housing that is actively being renovated, that can't be rented until it's renovated or is mostly constructed. It includes units that are actively on the market. It includes units that just got rented or sold but where the new tenants will move in a week after the census. It includes housing where the owner is in jail, or on an extended work assignment elsewhere. It includes private vacation homes and AirBnBs.
You can argue about the ethics of evictions, forclosures, AirBnB and vacation homes, but the vacancy rate is fundamentally a snapshot of current occupancy. A certain amount of short term transient vacancies are expected, because many normal processes take time. You don't sell your parents house and have someone move into it the day your parents die, after all. Vacancy rates are not evidence of a conspiracy to artificially lower the amount of housing in an area by holding units off market.
To my knowledge, the census doesn't actually track the rate of long-term habitable vacancies, units that could be sold or rented tomorrow but aren't on the market.
I would almost guarantee that the amount of people leaving affordable housing to luxury housing is a completely negligible percentage, like <1% of home buyers. Prove me wrong, I guess, but your argument that building more luxury housing somehow benefits the middle and poor classes just reeks of nonsensical bullshit, sorry.
Directly? Obviously, that's pretty rare.
But housing is something like a game of musical chairs. If Alice moves into a luxury unit, that leaves their old unit open. Bob then moves into Alice's old unit, Charlotte moves into Bob's old unit, Dave moves into Charlotte's old unit, etc. until Zoey moves into Xanders old unit.
The question isn't 'how likely is Alice's old unit to be affordable?', it's 'how likely is it that Zoey's old unit is affordable?'