Rents in Austin dropped by 7.4% in the past year due to new housing supply. Meanwhile in London they rised by 6.9% in the same period.

13 comments

1. Journalists want people to interact with what they say so they say controversial things.

   Also wtf has Austin Texas got to do with London?

   Don’t worry, Labour are going to try to get more houses built regardless of what a few rich white wing journos think.

2. Rose

3. NIMBYism has ruined this country. Yet the only thing this sub focusses on is knee-jerk reactions to landlords and economically illiterate policies like rent control. Meaning the underlying issue is never resolved and the problem just continues.

4. It’s almost like they’re thousands of miles away from each other 

5. So bored with this rhetoric as if London compares with Austin anyway.

   Also this knee jerk reactionary anti NiMby sentiment is boring and devoid of actual statics.

   Sure there’s a lot of sites which weren’t developed upon because of them but also of existing sites and landscapes we should be grateful for their contribution.

   We all saw how useful existing amenity spaces and generally unbuild land is for our wider benefits during lockdown.

   And developers love nothing better than building on previously unbuilt land cos it’s much, much cheaper, easier and profitable to develop.

   There’s literally millions of existing planning permissions, which weren’t delivered for various reason and the issues aren’t always to do with NiMbys. https://www.local.gov.uk/about/news/over-1-million-homes-planning-permission-waiting-be-built-new-lga-analysis

   Planning is complex for good reason. Open your mind to simple explanations for once.

6. Risen*

7. Probably notable because Austin is a major tech hub, as is London. And both had (have) a housing crisis.

8. Have you been to Austin? There is quite a lot of relatively cheap, open land around it, at least to the north, south and east (there’s a big lake and the hill country in the way on the other side).

   You’ll likely need to take I35 to get to central Austin though as the light rail goes to mainly stupid places. Unlucky.

   At this stage, the only way London rents are going to drop to a significant degree is to have more companies relocate outside, which is a bit of a swings and roundabouts thing, do more to accommodate remote working (such as satellite offices) or a full-on recession.

9. Building housing in London wont look like Austin. It would look more like the denser parts of New York. We need to convince people that 3 story terraces aren’t enough in some areas. But one of the main issues with building housing blocks is people dont believe in them when the government/companies doesnt take care of them or build them well. It can be hard to even get a mortgage to buy a flat in one because so many weren’t built to last.

10. Ah yes the very similar cities of Austin Texas and London, which have very similar transit networks, income, economies, demographics, etc…

    The one YIMBY talking point is pointing to one American city where there was a drop in rent after a sustained decade of rises and then pretending like other cities can do the exact same thing.

    We have been increasing the housing supply in London and if you look at where rents rise the sharpest it’s where we add more supply. It is more complex than “add more housing units”, if tenants don’t have security of tenure, if there are no rent controls, if there is no planning of services around new builds, then we are going to get a glut of low quality 1/2 bed apartments which won’t be cheaper.

11. Is half the world obsessed with going there though?

12. We have NIMBYism *at the same time* as mass immigration. IIRC the stats for 2022-23 were something like 700,000 net migrants into the UK (with the gross figure around 1.5 million).

    So yeah, that’s a lot of new homes needing to be built every year, and London will generally bear the brunt of that problem.

    We are actively causing the *demand* for homes to shoot up, while not increasing supply enough. Obviously that affects prices.

13. I do not know the specifics of Austin so I may be way off the mark but I do know that housing costs in the US can fluctuate far more wildly than they do in the UK. The was a big migration towards places like Austin/Ts and Miami/Fla during covid and this may just be a correction after prices went mental during that period.