Every new apartment calls itself a luxury apartment. Don’t get hung up on the marketing buzz words. Each new apartment that is constructed lowers the rent, particularly on old apartments. Dallas, compared to other cities, has done a fantastic job building more apartments. Rent keeps going up in Dallas because people move in faster than apartments can be built and inflation. The solution isn’t to require non-luxury apartments but to keep allowing apartments of any kind to be built. A luxury apartment today is affordable housing tomorrow
> A luxury apartment today is affordable housing tomorrow
I'm not sure I understand. You probably don't mean that literally unless "tomorrow" is 50 years from now. How does it lower rent to make some housing affordable, simply by increasing supply?
Luxury apartment from 50 years ago is an affordable housing right now is another way to look at it.
Same principle behind targeting the high end market first for new products. Affordable iPhones are the used ones or the older models… not the latest models. Outside of government subsidies, the private market doesn’t target the poor for new stuff because it doesn’t make economic sense.
Yes it lowers rent by increasing supply. Same principle behind old iPhone models going on sale when the new model comes out. The rich people buy the new phones and flood the market with old models.
If you also look at the iPhone mini experiment it had abysmal sales… the phone was a new model that targeted the lower end. People Penny pinching tend to also look at used phones or actual old models.
I mostly agree with what you said in regards to housing, but the iPhone mini is a bad analogy. It wasn’t a low end model, it was a mid/high end model with a small screen, and apparently there’s a vocal but not nearly large enough minority that likes small devices. The iPhone SE is the low end model, and it appears to be selling quite well.
Ok mid level maybe but definitely not high end. The mini did not have any of the high end features like improved camera, lidar, etc. SE is more or less rebranded old model.
But I think it still fits with my point that the new stuff doesn’t sell well with the poorer market.
Luxury apartments are often more affordable and attractive than the alternatives, which are: low density homes nearby, low density homes really far away, old as hell medium density homes nearby since nobody has been able to build anything new for decades.
I haven't been interested in buying any of the available houses in my city for 10 years now, but recently they've been developing medium density townhouses and apartments in locations that aren't the CBD, but also not suburbia. That's a fair middle ground for the middle class that we have today.
It is as simple as more units = more choices and assuming the number of people chasing those units isn't infinite, more units on the market means they now have to compete for the renters.
Build more housing is a part of the solution. Not an ideal solution but better than doing nothing.
Housing price or rent is completely uncorrelated with what kind of building it is or how old it is in most cities. Labelling something luxury and putting a shiny facade on it does very little to alter how much the building costs and rent will be inversely proportional to supply. Even large apartments are still better than detached homes as it will reduce competition for spots.
