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.
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.
I am not, however, an expert on this.