[vitus]

I'm not sure I understand the math in the thread that arrives at 8.75% inflation (or 8.75% off).

160 / 140 yields 14% increase in price per unit, and (1 - 140 / 160) yields a discount of 12.5%.

But also, this isn't necessarily an indicator of inflation simply due to debt financing / monetary policy -- recall that in the early days of the pandemic, there were severe shortages of paper and cleaning products (TP anyone?). If inflation were in fact in the double digits, I'd expect to see it across the board (e.g. in the price of eggs / milk which you can't play as many games with).

[davrosthedalek]

People very often fail to translate a fraction like 0.875 into a percentage. It's really obvious when people try to calc death rates from covid. Say 1 in 1000 is then suddenly 0.001% instead of 0.1%

[Arete314159]

Houses in my city have gone up 10% since Jan. 1st. Rent is up in my complex about 10% since last year. And Procter & Gamble have already announced price hikes to come in the fall. Not to mention lumber up, what, 3x or something now?

[vitus]

Any chance there's correlation between a spike in the price of lumber and the cost of housing? As another commenter says, sawmills are capacity-constrained.

New construction being much more expensive would certainly add supply-side pressure. Add to that hesitancy toward showing places during a global pandemic and pent-up demand, and I'm not surprised that the cost of housing is up.

I'd expect that if your local cost-of-living increases were in fact due to inflation, we'd see it broadly across the country, which doesn't seem to be the case. Not to say that there aren't places with significant increases in rent! But it's more likely a local phenomenon than a nationwide one.

https://www.apartmentguide.com/blog/apartment-guide-annual-r... shows the biggest increase is in 2BR apartments at around 5%, but near the 10% that you're experiencing (meanwhile, studios are actually down in price over that same period). That suggests to me that demand is shifting toward larger apartments (perhaps in the context of wanting more WFH space). And, it seems largely driven by less-expensive rental markets -- the biggest declines were expensive places like SF and NYC where people decided there wasn't much value in being in the city when everything was shut down and they didn't need to go to the office.

(Also, YoY comparisons are maybe weird right about now since you're comparing the peak of pandemic fear/uncertainty with us hopefully rounding the corner with broader vaccine uptake and caseloads dropping in the US.)

[ac29]

The lumber thing is complicated - theres no shortage of timber, but there is a shortage in sawmill capacity. Why? Mills got hit hard in the aftermath of 2008 housing crisis / recession, and havent ramped up to any significant extent because they dont want to get hit with another crash after spending the money to increase capacity.