I've seen people go through the incredible pain of having to either turn down job offers because they can't sell in a month's time and relocate or be drowned in the myriad issues involved in selling/renting out.
Personally I can't justify buying a house to myself until I either hit my 40s or have picked a corner of the world I want to settle down with a family and probably die and get buried there.
EDIT: why downvote? I'm not opposing people buying houses, I'm opposing demonizing renting out when for lots of people it's the preferred option.
Lots of people can't and get stuck in the cycle. In the UK at least, they're often just paying other peoples' mortgages.
I disagree.
Example scenario of many young Europeans in their 20s:
- living in small or mid-sized city
- job offer pops up paying significantly more across the country, either capital or one of the top cities
- move and earn significantly more (even when adjusted for CoL)
- continue progressing careerwise
- job offer pops up elsewhere, possibly in other EU countries, pays significantly more
A reasonable person in their 20s would allow themselves the chance to focus on professional career growth/salary growth up until they hit their mid-30s in which they can start considering settling in a given place and purchasing. Before that it's nonsensical.
To give my own example, I went through various cities across several countries, starting at 12k, then a few years later job offer in another country for 33k, then a few years later at 54k, then at 115k, all before 30 years old (because I allowed myself to be anchor-free).
The rest who stayed put in the same city? 12k to 30k in the same span of time.
Anyone telling a person in their 20s: "buy a house and stay put" is giving terrible advice. The advice should be something along the lines of: "what you do in your 20s will bear fruits in your 30s, stay open-minded, adventurous, don't be afraid to burn out and discover your limits, see the world before your parents get old, and try your hardest".
If you can’t benefit from that then you spend that deposit on renting, which means you can’t buy in your 30s and are trapped in the rent cycle.
However, it is also likewise a trap. Prices have moved quicker than people can save, unless they have a lucrative career or live like a monk
I know one person trapped like this, he's 30 this year. He has good savings but can't afford to buy on his own, bank won't lend enough on his salary, he needs a partner, but it's harder to find one when you live at home.
This allowed me to afford an apartment while my siblings who stayed are basically stuck renting.
I disagree with this - assuming the average white collar job (given HN), you _will_ progress salarywise from your early 20s to your early 30s.
When I was a Jr. Software Dev at 23, I both didn't have the money to afford a house where I got all the job offers (which wouldn't make sense), nor would it have been a good idea given I would've wanted to stay open to chasing higher salaries after 1-3 years elsewhere (which I did).
Maybe some decades ago it was common to spend your whole professional career in the same city, but as a dev I've had jobs pop up in different cities, heck even different countries!
If I had attempted to buy, I would literally have financially died (not to mention wouldn't have been able to pursue better jobs elsewhere at the drop of a hat - month's notice).
His tenants will never be able to save enough money for a down payment, so they are stuck in a endless cycle of paying someone else's mortgage, just for the privilege of having a roof over their heads. If wages were fair, if mega corps like Blackrock weren't allowed to buy entire neighborhoods, maybe his tenants will have a fighting chance of owning a place for themselves, even if it is just a small two bedroom apartment.
A dude I used to work with - he used to buy a couple of apartments in buildings right when they get started (he has contacts all over a major city). By the time the buildings are finished 3 years later, the "value" of those apartments have already gone up anywhere from 10 to 20 percent or more, depending on the area. He'd sell for a profit, rinse and repeat. His only goal is to flip - sometimes he buys apartments without even looking at them. Of course it is legal, but is it ethical?
This whole thing is just depressing.
why downvote
for lots of people it's the preferred option.
Renting is definitely more flexible, but it is also basically just a regressive tax that transfers wealth from those at the lower end of the income distribution to those closer to the top.
If housing was affordable, I think you'd find that most would opt to own and there would be less ability for those with means to prey on those without.
The problem with renting, in areas like the parent poster is talking about, is that in those areas almost anyone who can hold down a full time job, even a low wage job, can afford to buy a house. When you rent an apartment, you end up living around the people who can't hold down a full time job. Which is not always ideal.
You really believe that if there were less upfront fixed costs, that developers wouldn’t still default to building “luxury” as long as nothing was stopping them? The profit margin incentives are all still the same, regardless of the level of community/political opposition.
there are only so many people looking for those units. As more units are built the competition to sell those units will heat up. Either prices drop on those units, or theyre replaced by units that are cheaper to build. Right now they can sell all the luxury units they build so no reason to build anything else. So removing the barriers doesnt itself make luxury less appealing for developers, but it increases the number of units built and that makes luxury less appealing for developers. It will still make sense to build luxury, but it wont make sense to build only luxury.
There are other reasons too. Personally I would not mind living in communist style blocks and I know some others agree. If it was legal to build those they might be created because you can fit so many more units on a plot compared to luxury housing.
Can you give an example of this?
California's largely the other extreme. Even large parts of San Francisco are zoned for single family housing (or maybe duplex if you're lucky). So already things like larger apartment buildings or mixed-use buildings that can be more profitable are out. CEQA allows for a lot of public feedback which is in turn allowed to grind projects to a halt.
For example there's undeveloped land in Brisbane, just south of San Francisco. It's near a freeway (CA-101) and commuter rail (Caltrain). The city of Brisbane's been (successfully) trying to block any development that would include residential buildings — they want office jobs not new residents. I don't know enough about other cities to make relative comparisons, but again in SF the department in charge of permitting (DBI) has seen a number of bribery and conflict-of-interest charges recently. Look at any big project in California really. Corruption at the city/county level may differ but the process by which anyone can gum up the works is a state mandated one.
> well meant
The individuals behind these regulations (anti-housing activists like Marc Andreessen and the local NIMBY politicians) are well educated and wealthy. They know what they're doing.
Desirable real estate is also much more constrained by geography than Texas.
Prop. 13 prevents localities from meaningfully taxing property values, capping nominal rates at lower than the national average effective rates and reducing effective rates even further by limiting assessment increases to much less than the usual value increase in between transfers.
This forces localities to rely on sales and income taxes (both local and redirected shares of state taxes, both directly and as allocations of state funding for particular functions), which are much more volatiles, and do not reward attracting moderate income residents who pay low income tax rates and for whom housing and sales tax exempt basics are a much larger share of their spending.
But that’s a long way from explaining everything going on, government regulations have a real impact.
As far as I know the state government of California doesn't build homes. Smaller local governments can change zoning laws and the like but don't due to NIMBY stuff talked about here.
Home builders aren't virtue signalling.
Finally, if new apartments are constructed how would that be better solution to those already renting existing older apartments who are under rental stress?
For instance Washington State forces cities to make zoning plans that align with state housing needs. Similarly they set rules near public transit in some cases.
Ok, but this comes at the severe detriment of having to deal with the Texas government. Why not just move out of the country at that point?
It will always be higher priced than most other places, unless maybe it looked like Hong Kong, but that might so reduce how desirable it is.
If coastal California added 10M apartments, I bet they would fill up. But what is the quality of life impact?
The entire real estate industry and our government is designed to make housing prices go up over time. Voters are behind it because it gives the impression of increasing wealth but it's an illusion for most people. If the median price is $200k and you buy a house for $200k and the median price and your house goes up to $600k, you still only have one housing unit's worth of wealth and you need to live somewhere.
All increasing real estate prices does is enrich a tiny minority by stealing from the next generation. And the negative externalities are massive. Housing makes everything more expensive.
If you look at NYC, you can see that a lot of apartments get built but almost all of them are for the ultra-wealthy to park money. You aren't increasing the available housing.
In the 1990s the average house price in London was 70k pounds. Now it's over 700k. Are wages 10x? No, no they are not. The whole thing is a giant Ponzi scheme to keep people in debt so they're compliant little workers.
Unoccupied housing or otherwise housing purely for investment is certainly a problem. If they aren’t renting at least with AirBnB they would actually be better served by holding gold in many cases.
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2025/05/01/berkeley-housing-ren...
Note: I developed the data used in the article.
Now you can argue that's because of greatly increased development, but I don't think that applies to SF (or SJ) and it doesn't match the Berkeley timeline anyway.
[1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-bay-area-rent-prices...
This is false though.
Austin, Texas built a lot of apartments and then rents fell 22%. That's a big win for a lot of people seeing lower prices!
NYC is not a place that builds very much in proportion to the population.
I think that the claim that "supply and demand do not apply to housing" is an extraordinary one, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
https://youtu.be/tx02tY8ABfA?si=JbSiDMTdkHs5LrOk&t=62
They don't want to take that next small step that will help somebody, they want to change everything all at once.
This is false. Just look at the chart [1]. All that's happened is some of the pandemic price gouging, something landlords were being sued over [2].
We simply cannot capitalism our way out of this problem.
> i think that the claim that "supply and demand do not apply to housing"
Where did I say that?
Speaking more generally, the idea of a "free market" is a myth, particularly for housing. It's one of the most manipulated and politicized markets there is.
But supply and demand do apply and it has been a political goal for decades to ensure that supply will be constrained.
[1]: https://www.kut.org/austin/2024-06-13/austin-texas-rent-pric...
[2]: https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2025/01/u-s-accuses-si...
The housing market is, indeed, anything but free. That's a core idea behind the YIMBY movement: make it legal to build more kinds of housing, rather than just meet demand by outward sprawl.
> But supply and demand do apply and it has been a political goal for decades to ensure that supply will be constrained.
That's what YIMBY is about: fighting back against those constraints. They have hugely detrimental consequences for people, the economy and the environment.
In terms of "capitalism", I think most YIMBYs are pragmatic - capitalism is the system we have in the US, so we need to leverage it as much as possible to get the housing we need. If we could get Vienna style social housing, I think a lot of YIMBYs would be happy to sign up. You still need Vienna style zoning and building codes to get that, though.
They invest in housing because it's scarce because we don't build enough of it.
And if you look at the actual numbers, large-scale institutional investors just aren't that big a factor. It's another bogeyman for people desperate to avoid the solution to not having enough housing: building more housing.
Austin is an example of the market balancing out when allowed to do so.
San Francisco collected $522 million in real estate transfer property tax in 2022. This year will be less than half that.
The inflationary rebound after the pandemic and lower than normal interest rates created an artificial market that otherwise may not have existed.
https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2025/04/tower-anchored-b...
https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2025/04/at-troubled-port...
https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2025/05/02/portland-city-lea...
angra_mainyu•13h ago
I feel the numbers would be best contextualized as ratios of demand (e.g: prospective homeowners).
As a rough first approximation, Google gives me the US population in 1974 as: ~212.53M, with the 2025 population at: ~347M.
So it'd be more significant with: 1.63 * 693k = ~1.131M new apartments.
Of course, this is a rough approximation which doesn't take into account a host of other factors, but you can already guess things are not as optimistic as the headline would make it seem. That said, I'd guess those factors would further increase the "households per capita", with phenomena like the shrinking of nuclear families relative to the 1970s.
For example, googling average household size gives me: 1974=3.44 and in 2025=2.51. This yields roughly: 61.78M households in 1974 vs 138.24M households in 2025. Which means we'd ideally want to see something closer to: 2.26 * 693k = 1.57M new apartments.
deeThrow94•12h ago
angra_mainyu•10h ago
kasey_junk•8h ago
jeffbee•7h ago
Man, boomers had smarter parents than boomers' children had. When the much more numerous millennials wanted houses, boomers told them to go jump in a lake.
tharmas•5h ago
Poor stewards.