JeromePowellAdmirer t1_j9prlw5 wrote on February 23, 2023 at 6:25 PM

Beware of the user trying to use month-over-month rent data to "disprove" this, a one month sample is extremely noisy.

Not to mention New Rochelle is the one place in Westchester that builds the most! The rest of Westchester is terrible, but New Rochelle actually builds quite a bit of housing.

There's also a composition effect going on here.

The average rent is obviously going to go up if more of the sample consists of new units. But that doesn't say anything about what the old units are priced at!

Example:

Before building: 2000 new units at $3500, 2000 old units at $1650

After building: 3000 new units at $3500, 2000 old units at $1650

Average rents are higher after the construction, but no one actually saw a change in rent. The changes in rent are driven by NYC not building enough and people moving in from there, not the new construction itself, which only raises average rents through composition.

Blecher_onthe_Hudson OP t1_j9pt2xf wrote on February 23, 2023 at 6:34 PM

To be fair, when non-construction based gentrification takes place because people more affluent than the current residents move to an area for lower prices, all the rents and prices move up as the area becomes more desirable to the more affluent. But that population is only on the move because of limited supply leading to even higher prices where they're coming from.

JeromePowellAdmirer t1_j9pv0rk wrote on February 23, 2023 at 6:46 PM

Why banning construction won't do a thing but make it worse.

Has already played out in Manhattan and outer neighborhoods of San Francisco.

Most expensive places in America because when you refuse to build more supply, the rich will simply outcompete the poor for bad-quality housing and then renovate it on the inside. That is literally every expensive area of Manhattan. And the ones that don't get renovated, still get bid up anyways, because people don't choose where to move based on whether there's new housing there, else everyone would be moving to Williston ND where a bunch of oil boom housing from 5 years ago sits empty.