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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Today I learned that over the past decade, housing unit production in DC outpaced population growth. According to the YIMBY urbanist crowd, this should have led to lower prices and yet prices went up, up, up.

Honestly, we will be in a better world when these simpletons are ignored.[/quote]

Prices actually did go up in DC considerably more slowly than the national average, and considerably slower than other high cost cities.  See:

https://realestatedecoded.com/case-shiller/

You can see in the second chart that adjusted for inflation, DC prices increased only modestly through 2019.  You can also see from the first tables that we've had some of the slowest price appreciation over the past year.  You can also see in the "Real Monthly Principal and Interest Price Index" that, once you adjust for both inflation *and* declining mortgage interest rates, DC has basically not gotten any more expensive at all for homeowners who take out mortgages, and it's cheaper to own in real terms than it was in the early 1990s or mid-2000s.

The demand curve slopes downward.[/quote]
And yet, they still went up by a lot. Never down.[/quote]
To be clear, we are talking about renting, not owning because that was the bulk of housing production and DC has traditionally been in the top 10 most expensive cities to rent in America for the last decade and in some surveys in the top 5. Building more did not make it cheaper.[/quote]

The best data that I could find on this comes from the Zillow Observed Rent Index, which has monthly data going back to 2014.  I compared the data over the six-year period from January 2014 to January 2020 to exclude the effects of the pandemic.  Over this period, DC rents grew by an average of 2.01% per year, less than half the national average rental growth rate of 4.18%.  In fact, of the 50 largest metro areas in the data, only 4 (Baltimore, Virginia Beach, Oklahoma City, and New Orleans) had slower rental price growth than DC, and none of those are exactly hotbeds of economic growth and opportunity like DC.  Except for Baltimore, every single one of the top 30 markets had rental price growth that was at least 1/2 a percentage point faster than DC.

https://www.zillow.com/research/data/

Was it enough to make rents go down?  No.  But rents in the DC metro barely increased faster than inflation, unlike virtually every other major metro.  Increasing the supply by building housing works.[/quote]

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