If there are 1000 yuppies looking for houses in Portland this year, if they don’t find their fish tank, then they start bidding on the rest of the housing stock, and increase everyone’s rent. If you build fish bowls for them they don’t have a first-order effect on rent prices.
This is an attempt to prove the principle of supply and demand (that NIMBYs often reject) from first principles.
Of course, the counter-argument from induced demand is “after those 1000 yuppies move in, then 2000 more hear about how good the fish tanks are in Portland and come along and bid up the rest of the housing stock even further”.
The degree of induced demand is an empirical question that the author provides some citations around.
Thank you, I suppose the counter argument you cited is anecdotally experienced in Portland. Over the course of a decade I went from a $700/mo 2bd/2ba condo to a $1400 studio.
Pretty much every person in my friends group experienced something similar in all four quadrants of the city (proper), Beaverton, Garden Home, Multnomah Village, Tigard, etc. If the Portland fishtanks are driving down the price of rent, I haven’t heard about it myself.
One confounding factor here is that it's quite hard to draw anecdotal conclusions, because it is impossible to test the counterfactual; the YIMBY would make the case that rents would have gone up even more in Portland if the fishtanks were not built.
And the effect is quite hard to measure; that paper I linked says "I find that monthly rents fall by $22.77 - $43.18 relative to trend, or roughly 1.2 - 2.3%, for people living within 500m of a new project" -- this is probably not noticeable by you or me with anecdotal observations, but if the study is correct, and we committed to lots of new buildings, then it could make a noticeable difference in aggregate after lots of new projects were completed.
That’s a very interesting paper about San Francisco.
In my experience in Portland over a decade, I’ve not experienced this tiny nearly unnoticeable decline that the paper suggests. I’ve in reality seen a significant increase in rent year over year for myself and pretty much my entire friend group that spans from “couch surfing” to “can comfortably rent a multiple bedroom house”
Note that the paper is just saying it fell vs trend - if the trend is +10% vs. last year, a local development could reduce that to say +8%. So both observations could be correct.
This is an attempt to prove the principle of supply and demand (that NIMBYs often reject) from first principles.
Of course, the counter-argument from induced demand is “after those 1000 yuppies move in, then 2000 more hear about how good the fish tanks are in Portland and come along and bid up the rest of the housing stock even further”.
The degree of induced demand is an empirical question that the author provides some citations around.
“Affordable housing” can be a relative term, for example see https://www.housingwire.com/articles/43818-san-franciscos-de.... It might not be affordable by the current residents.
At the end of the article the author points out that YIMBYs are mostly leftists so I don’t think they are making an anti-leftist point.