#housing

In the Seattle region, average apartment rents have climbed about 5% since 2022, according to ALN Apartment data. In the Austin area, rents moved in the opposite direction. They fell about 6% in 2023 and another 4% in 2024 and 2025.

Austin is not cheap. But in recent years, it became a national outlier. While rents kept rising in many big cities, Austin’s fell.

To understand Austin’s experience, it helps to start with the pandemic, when Austin saw one of the sharpest rent spikes in the country. Remote work tempted thousands of newcomers to move there. Rents jumped 20% to 25% year over year

new apartments with pools and gyms. That kind of housing often draws criticism, because rents are higher than in new buildings than in old buildings. But housing researchers say it still matters. Building newer, more expensive apartments frees up space in older, cheaper apartments, which decreases the pressure for rents to rise in older buildings.

“Seattle has tended to be an everything bagel kind of place, so they may want to pass pro-housing reforms, but also it wants to have tenant protections and inclusionary zoning and things on top of that that may limit the effectiveness of the supply oriented policies,” Schuetz said.

“Texas is a good example of just a plain bagel," she continued, "You want to increase supply, you're gonna pass a lot that increases supply without any frills on top.”

One example: Austin has eliminated the requirement that developers include parking spaces at their apartment buildings.

Another example: Austin has an affordable housing fee that builders pay, as Seattle does, but in Austin the fee is an option that allows the builder to build taller buildings, whereas in Seattle the fee is required whether the builder takes advantage of the extra height allowance or not.

“I can’t fully explain, but we’ve actually seen eviction filing rates go up in the city as rent prices have gone down,” McGlinchey said. And Texas law limits how much cities can protect tenants.

There are broader concerns, too. More people mean more pressure on roads, water systems, and more construction on environmentally sensitive areas. “Austin has strong environmental protections,” McGlinchey said, but “people worry at the same time, are we sort of eroding what people love about this city while just sort of building, building, building to address this demand that we've had for housing?”

McGlinchey does not expect Austin’s rent drops to last.

on his first day in office he created two taskforces aimed at creating new development: one will review city-owned land to see if it is suitable for construction, another aims to “identify and remove bureaucratic and permitting barriers” which slow down the building of homes.

A highlight, and a thumb in the eye to those who said Mamdani would be thwarted by the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, came when that pair released a plan on Thursday to provide free childcare for two-year-olds in New York City.

Elsewhere, Mamdani has been conducting small but meaningful fixes. Thousands of people cycle across the Williamsburg Bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn every day, yet for years cyclists have been forced to negotiate a skatepark-esque dip at the Manhattan exit.

Pleas to fix the ramp have gone unheard for years, but on Tuesday Mamdani simply popped up at the Manhattan side of the bridge, with a spade and a crew of department of transport workers, and had the aggressive dip smoothed into a nice, gentle incline.

But the collective consciousness is shifting. Research is revealing that walkable cities make people happier, less lonely, more satisfied with life and physically healthier. Movements are afoot around the globe toward sustainable urbanism, slow travel and 15-minute (or less) cities – such as Nordhavn in Copenhagen and superblocks in Barcelona.

Kind of a shitty, misrepresented framing for this article, but those that bother to read may see that his positions are more nuanced and dare we say open-minded than the title might lead one to believe. Just like any media coverage of a politician, the media reports on the most extreme things you can probably find an inflates them. Yet if you see the guy speak in an interview or even bother to read beyond the sound bite you see he’s quite well informed.

During a lengthy interview on the Odd Lots podcast, Mamdani went into more detail about the kinds of deregulation he supported to enable more housing construction, such as ending parking minimums and two-stair requirements. He also criticized the New York City Council's practice of "member deference," whereby the Council will reject housing projects that are opposed by the councilmember whose district they'd be built in.

It would go much too far to say that Mamdani has had a deeper ideological shift to a more market-oriented perspective. He has continued to insist that rent freezes and faster permitting of new housing can coexist as complementary policies.

While on-time mortgage payments are known to increase one’s credit score, many renters don’t have any history of credit. Esusu reports on time rent payments to credit bureaus so renters can build their scores. Over 50 million Americans lack a credit history with the three major credit bureaus: Experian, Equifax and TransUnion.

HENRY GRABAR: Parking is the largest single land use in many American cities. If we were designing society from scratch, would we have placed car storage on the pedestal that it now occupies?

You know, one of the things that immediately jumped off the page for me when I was reading your book is the fact that, by square footage, there is more housing for each car in this country than there is housing for each person. And on its face, I have to say that statement feels incredibly problematic, but is it?

GRABAR: I don't think it's that surprising when you start to think about it. I mean, there are more - we build more three-car garages in this country than we build one-bedroom apartments. Almost every jurisdiction in this country requires parking as a part of every single building type, whether you're building a school, an apartment building or an office or a restaurant, the law requires a certain number of parking spaces. So we have parking minimums in every jurisdiction in this country, whereas for housing, we often have maximums. We say, on this plot, you can only put one unit of housing. You can only put two units of housing. So the fact that we've ended up with a surplus of parking and a shortage of housing is no surprise. In fact, it's by design.

For a $400,000 mortgage at a 6.5 percent interest rate, the monthly payment on a 50-year mortgage is $2,254.87 compared to $2,528.27 for a 30-year mortgage. And yet, this modest decrease in monthly payments will be offset by a dramatic increase in interest payments: from $510,177.95 on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage to a staggering $952,920.53 on a 50-year mortgage.

The reality is that even 30 year mortgages don’t make sense and never did. A 30 year fixed rate mortgage would never be offered by private markets without government incentives. They nearly masked the fact that Americans couldn’t save and couldn’t afford housing. They went onto exacerbate the problem by making Americans primary if not so retirement investment in their home. This incentivize homeowners to value scarcity in housing as lower supply will create scarcity and drive up the price of their “investment”, but in this case, the investment is housing for others.

The 50 year mortgage is a scam. I’m just not sure if the administration actually knows that or not.

By the numbers: Consider someone taking out a $500,000 home loan. The current rate on a 30-year mortgage is 6.22%, per Freddie Mac. For these calculations, let's assume that a 50-year loan's interest rate exceeds the 30-year by the same margin that the 30-year rate exceeds a 15-year rate.

That translates to a 6.94% rate on the 50-year loan — which would then have a monthly payment of $2,985, only $83 less than the 30-year mortgage. Zoom in: In the early decades of the loan's repayment, the 50-year borrower's payments would almost entirely go to interest, paying down the debt much more slowly.

After five years, for example, the 30-year borrower would have paid off $33,481 of the loan balance, versus $6,707 for the 50-year borrower. After three decades, when the 30-year mortgage is fully paid off, the 50-year borrower would still owe about $387,000.