Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market (opens in new tab)

> You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater

If you buy a house for $400k, and suddenly it is worth $300k, you don't need to be "bailed out" for your purchase decision. You should have been certain that the house was worth $400k to you at the time of purchase. Otherwise you're a speculator, and we shouldn't be bailing out speculators.

It's called buyer's remorse. We accept it when it's a car or a TV, but suddenly when it's a house we're supposed to give massive government support to correct the buyer's mistake?

> It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.)

That is only if you believe that more capacity does not induce more demand, which really isn't true as long as the city remains popular for jobs/climate/nature/etc.... People not moving to Denver because the rent is too high will decide to move to Denver if rents decrease (and the demand they add will cause rents to increase, wash/rinse/repeat until an equilibrium is reached). You also have cases where a city becomes even more attractive because of growing density alone (NYC, Hong Kong, Tokyo).

> It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.)

"Committing to doing this every year" is VERY different than doing it in one particular year. Yes, that would solve it. But of course, 2022 was part of a very unusual cycle including a lot of migration and you should note the last line in the article:

> Meanwhile, the pipeline of new apartment buildings is drying up. The number of properties under construction is down by roughly one-third from the peak in 2023, the report found. That likely means fewer units coming available in the months ahead, potentially giving landlords room to start raising rents again.

> Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis.

That would be an incredible commitment, and not something which has happened. This burst of new rental property is already subsiding, with an expectation that rents will again raise next year. Moreso, it would be hard to get private organizations to commit to building such a massive glut of property knowing that they are tanking the market that would pay back their investment.

That is why this doesn't magically solve the housing crisis.

Why would we consider bailing out entities that are financially solvent? These homeowners may have an underwater investment, but they (presumably) can still pay the mortgage to get it paid off

I think Denver home prices have decreased by 4% since the peak in 2022.

I don't think anybody is going to be permanently underwater. Home prices changing should be a second order effect of building more apartments.

And what happens if all that new stock isn't needed?

Detroit?

Nope. Smaller more affordable homes would be a better solution. Most people who rent cant afford to buy, but rent is a worse deal long term.

It is instructive to look at how we got expensive housing in the first place. Expensive housing comes from a surplus of people. How did we get all those people? By building more housing and having people breed there.

New housing is only a temporary salve and perpetuates a vicious cycle. The people who move into these new units will have more babies, because they have new habitat. These babies will grow up and eventually drive up housing prices. Even before then, people will move or emigrate into cheap housing and fill it up. Housing then becomes expensive again, only with more people filling up the earth: polluting the air, straining water supplies, clogging roads, uglifying neighborhoods with massive buildings, overrunning parks and trails.

Thankfully, expensive housing, in part, has reduced American baby making to 1.6 per woman, a sustainable rate. Unfortunately, because humans are living longer, the US population still continues to rise. The U.S. Census Bureau currently projects that the resident U.S. population will peak at nearly 370 million around the year 2080, before it gradually declines to about 366 million by 2100. If immortality is invented before 2080, the population may never go down, ever.

Meanwhile, the latest estimates put the current U.S. population (as of mid‑2025) at approximately 342 million. The population has increased roughly 4.5x since 1900. From building new housing.

So this is at best a temporary fix not a long term solution

They're not always complementary. For instance, IZOs are a social housing intervention, and work against the goal of increasing supply.

Probably the best thing you could do in terms of social housing construction would be to have the government put up some capital to buy land and build new housing on that land, then immediately sell it and use the proceeds to do it again and again with exponential growth because it's actually profitable.

But that's also what construction companies would be doing regardless except for the subsidy, at which point you might be better off doing something like exempting construction companies from property taxes for two years if they at least double the number of housing units on their land in that time.

> collateral damage ...

Right.

What you're saying is technically true, but that graph shows the current prices very close to the all time high.

You may object to it, but a home has been the smartest investment I've ever made.

Why is it wrong to want to have equity in the place you live? "Ownership" could be a house, it could be a townhome, it could be flat. But in the US, "owning" an apartment is very rare, while real estate investors buy up all the valuable land in the urban cores of cities and rent it.

The problem isn't home ownership, it's zoning regulations being done locally so that areas full of owner-occupied single-family homes are the only ones eligible to vote on whether higher density housing can be built there, in combination with the "got mine" attitude that causes them to vote in the way that constrains supply.

It's good for people to be able to own their homes. They should be able to own their homes instead of paying a large fraction of their paycheck to landlords as rent or banks as mortgage payments. But that requires housing costs to get lower rather than higher, which in turn requires some kind of state- or national-level policy to prevent local homeowners from sustaining the opposite.

> fetishization

Yes and: As you know, encouraging home ownership is policy. Meant to reduce elderly poverty. It worked, plus all sorts of adverse effects that now hitting hard.

I'd rather we had pensions, universal healthcare, and maybe ponies.

> single family homes will continue to be bulldozed and replaced with 8 story wooden boxes, owned by national corporate landlords of course

Source? Why of course?

taxes and insurance are both much steeper than just a few years ago.

Gov. Polis has forced lifting limits on occupancy to override local restrictions. It's just getting more crowded.

They didn't say 70 year mortgages, they said 70 years to pay off a mortgage, which is still a bit exaggerated (maybe), but would come from the contingent of people who got themselves into variable rate fixed payment mortgages for comically expensive properties, and that had a significant amount of interest remaining before the feds started cranking up interest rates.

If rates go up from 2% to 6+% while you're holding onto a $2m detached house, it's a bad situation to be in.

https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2022/11/staff-analytical-notes-2...

Nope, it’s true and even hit higher, this is one example of many: https://files.catbox.moe/rpp5fp.mp4

Yeah, it’s a scam, the whole thing is one giant scam, yet it’s legal and normalized and everyone is ok with it!

People refinance to take lower rates or pull equity out of the property and that resets the clock.

Prices going up is corporate greed. Prices going down is corporate generosity. Basic economics.

You, as a renter, are paying the property tax.

The cost is passed on to the end-user.

You're not making any sense. Someone paid for a house, they fully expect to pay a lot less than renters do. That's the point of buying a house.

Presumably GDP growth per capita, but even then, why would that be any better than "not a cent more than inflation", or for that matter even for housing prices to decline over time (e.g. through increased automation in construction)?

Commuting from the Springs to Denver every day, so 22-23 days a month, 60-70 miles one way...

Is that worth $500?

Quick math:

$4/gallon, 35 mpg, 120 miles a day, so $14/day in gas, plus extra maintenance, and the 3 hours a day of your life you'll never get back.

Couldn't claim with a straight face myself that the math works.

just a little west of Pueblo. We're about 1/3 of the cost of living in the Denver area.

We get plenty of migrants from the Denver area and elsewhere.

Of course, the sales tax and other taxes are going up. Probably heading to a truly rural area with a nice community soon. I lived in many big cities over the years. They are toxic and unsafe. I know that because I worked in public health. If you look at the morbidity and mortality by zip code, you'll see yourself. Affordable city living has a dark side.

Not to say that city life isn't great when you're in your 20s or 30s. It is fun and jobs are everywhere. But I've seen enough fatal car crashes for a lifetime.

Because that’s Denver’s history. Founded by land speculators after beating Indians in the Colorado War of 1865, only to become a gold rush town, then go bust, become a gang haven, bust again, then boom again with Carnations, then bust again, then boom again with industrials and nuclear waste, to go bust again when nuclear power was divested, then to boom again in the 90s with more gangs, bust again, then boom again in the 2010s with the green rush.

I left because I was sick of having to weather the storm of boom and busts, saw $250,000 homes become $950,000 homes (no change to the home itself) and prey upon the young people moving there to ensure they are financially burdened with Boulder Boomer retirement plans.

we also could just stop having the federal government limit the number of residency slots so we could have enough doctors trained in the US.

You basically can’t or it won't have the same effects because medicine doesn’t really follow the same dynamics as most other markets: the supplier (doctor) has an information asymmetry and thus makes most of the decisions, while the buyer (patient) is not usually the payer (insurance) so aren’t really incentivized to save.

Kenneth Arrow famously analyzed the healthcare market and made the above insight: https://assets.aeaweb.org/asset-server/files/9442.pdf

I know he was a Nobel Laureate but not sure if this is the work that won him the Nobel.

Updated: I should qualify my statement by pointing out this is for the US healthcare system.

You don't even need to import foreign doctors: just increase the number of residency slots.

We already do that? I mean, minus the free clinic thing.

This is only half the truth. The reality is that demand is propped up by fannie/freddie and mortgages in general. The fact that the government will buy investment property mortgages is bonkers. In reality, you should only be allowed to mortgage the raw materials and labor of a primary home, everything else is just leveraged speculation. There's also a immigration question, but should be purely solved using new supply. Finally there's a question of, should you even be allowed to own investment properties in cities. A real land reform would be huge for the country; ie. forcing landlords to sell investment properties in any area where rent exceeds $x.

It’s a supply-side problem, but with majority of people being either indifferent to the problem or against downward pressure on the housing prices (most people don’t rent). The prices have skyrocketed, and most people who bought in the last 5 years wouldn’t want their assets to depreciate, if they spent 500K+ on it.

In Colorado, that's about 5 hours of labor for minimum wage employees (ignoring taxes, but at that income taxes are low). If you're working full-time, you average 174 working hours a month so that's about 2.9% of a minimum wage earner's gross income, which is nothing to scoff at for those folks who are earning at that level. And when you consider taxes (payroll which can't be easily avoided, and whatever level of income tax they have to pay) it's probably pushing closer to one day of work to take home that $71.

Unless you go to jail.

I was thinking KCMO proper, I'd do about anything for a safe, affordable place near the state line in Jackson County.

In San Francisco, the housing crisis poses a far greater and more immediate threat to children’s well-being than this issue. Lack of stable, affordable housing affects everything: education, health, safety, and long-term opportunity.

We can debate other problems, but unless we address the fundamental need for proper housing, everything else should be secondary.

> was there lead in the paint they painted your walls with?

yes unfortunately as long as my landlord gave me the LEAD PAINT notice i didnt have any other options.

> a housing / renting market controlled by the government with regulations instead of letting the “free market”

It's curious how the largest landowing families in New York and San Francisco are strong supporters of these anti-market policies.

> every additional unit of housing you build frees up some unit at or below that unit on the stack of housing. The effect percolates all the way down to long-term supportive housing rooms.

This makes intuitive sense to me, but I've really struggled to explain it in a way that makes it click for people.

I don't have the impression most of my "fellow" americans even gave a damn about homelessness to begin with, so perhaps what you read as misunderstanding the market might simply be a disagreement of values—one party cares about the homeless, the other cares about salaried employees. May we all truly rot in shit.

> Why is housing always about the homeless?

To me, poverty is basically the only thing worth talking about when it comes to politics. Nothing else is going to get me to the voting box—to me, a platform that doesn't focus on poverty reduction doesn't even understand the point of government, the economy, or trying to work together.

I suspect other folks who think this way are going to be disproportionately loud.

Right now in cities homelessness is often associated with addiction or mental illness. We spend billions every year giving these people resources to get off the street, get treatment for addiction or mental illness. Right now? Many, many, many of those people have no desire to get off the streets or get clean or get treatment for their mental illness - despite the copious amounts of safety nets and other programs designed specifically to help those people.

I agree, we already have programs designed to help those who need it - focusing on the larger percentage of the population just makes sense if you're concerned about having bigger positive outcomes.

> all working people could afford housing?

Hey, if that's the metric you're pushing for, good for you. I'm pushing for housing as a human right. I never caught the calvinist bug of "torture the non-productive until they conform and perform" method of population management.

> Lowering the rent stops people from becoming homeless which is a necessary element of ending homelessness.

Sure but by this reasoning you could justify any effort as sufficient. At some point you have to make the personal judgement on what effort is enough. I don't really see any effort focusing on anything short of homelessness as worth the oxygen in the room it consumes.