[masswerk]

Prices like these seldom go down, that damage is already done. The best to hope for is probably a decrease in price increase.

[hemloc_io]

We just seldomly build housing to the point where it reduces prices.

Building housing to meet demand will reduce rents.

They did it in Austin already. https://www.kvue.com/article/money/economy/boomtown-2040/aus...

It's doable, but for some reason Liberal areas in the US just cannot figure it out. Particularly California.

[masswerk]

I'm personally not from the US, but rather from a city that ist often cited as an example for counteracting irrational prices on the housing market, Vienna. (Back in the 1920s, when rents for a new home where found to be unsustainable by meeting 25% of an average worker's wage – or what may be deemed more idyllic conditions nowadays –, the city decided to invested massively into communal housing.) Having said that, I think the major problem is that homes have been turned into assets and that the short term monetization of these assets, as in short term limited contracts and Airbnbs, is a major danger to established communities. (Depending on where you're coming from, this may be even a good thing, like in flexibilization of the work force, but it is somewhat disastrous for the general living conditions and social climate, even the buildings themselves – as there is no long term interest on the side of their inhabitants –, and only adds to general displacement effects.)

[bsder]

Erm, Austin is "solving" this mostly by creating an ever larger, car-centric sprawl.

That only works when you have essentially unlimited uninhabited land on your borders.

[rufus_foreman]

>> That only works when you have essentially unlimited uninhabited land on your borders

That's pretty much everywhere in the US other than the coastal cities.

>> ever larger, car-centric sprawl

Car-centric sprawl means people can buy a single family house for a little over the cost of construction. There are good aspects to it.

[bsder]

> Car-centric sprawl means people can buy a single family house for a little over the cost of construction. There are good aspects to it.

Only because the cities subsidize the suburbs and rural areas.

If you made the suburbs and rural areas pay for their own road construction and maintenance, for example, those houses would be vastly more expensive.

[nojvek]

You have links to back it up?

We pay a decent amount of Federal tax which should be going into infrastructure like roads.

The maintenance is paid by states which should come from state property and income taxes.

[bsder]

Every Strong Towns post ever (this one is typical): https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/5/kansas-citys-fa...

I don't always agree with their proposed solutions, but their data tends to be pretty irrefutable. Suburbs are weak to negative tax revenue areas and absorb money from the cities which are strong tax generating entities--especially when the infrastructure maintenance costs come due 20-30 years after construction.

There was also an article (probably in the LA Times) about two towns close together out on I-5. One of them threw in with the city systems and one of them didn't want to get annexed and stayed apart. The one that remained independent was shocked at how expensive maintaining their infrastructure was--to the point that they did things like leaving roads as gravel because they couldn't afford blacktop. Unfortunately, I can't cough that article up anymore with how bad Google has become.

[noirbot]

And this really seems like it's going to keep going that way in Austin. Any time I'm driving around, I'm passing under-construction apartment and condo buildings all over town. It's nuts. On my regular commutes, I pass probably 10-20 buildings, and just within a mile of me, there's maybe 5 multi-hundred unit buildings that are nearing completion.