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  exabrial
  Incredible. So what you're saying is... we should just build more housing? Who would have thought that was the answer?
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  bix6
  > San Francisco led the nation in annual rent growth this month, with both one and two-bedroom prices hitting new all-time highs, marking the highest levels in over a decade of Zumper data. One-bedroom rent climbed 18.4% to $3,790, surpassing its previous peak of $3,720 set in June 2019, while two-bedrooms rose 22.6% to $5,270, exceeding the prior high of $5,120 recorded in September 2025.From the Zumper report. 22% gain on SF 2B is just insane to me.
• thelastgallon
  Austin’s Surge of New Housing Construction Drove Down Rents: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47433058
• Ancalagon
  I’m gonna also say this is because biotech is in decline and major employers are pulling out. People straight up can’t afford to live there on their own.
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  rossdavidh
  Should note that "top US markets" really means "most expensive US markets", not for example the largest by population.
• thelastgallon
  > San Diego sits at the 11th most expensive rental market in the nation, according to the report, with the median rent for a 1-bedroom at $2,200. Median rent for 2-bedroom apartments is $2,950.
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  Apreche
  But what about the desirability of San Diego? Was the decrease in rent only because of the increase in supply, or is there also lower demand?
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  blendo
  "we've shown a pretty significant increase in the number of new housing permits each year, we’re closing in on the 10,000 mark for the last two years"Does that mean the "surge in supply" is really a surge in permits?
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  dmitrygr
  Increase in supply lowers equilibrium price? Somebody, pinch me!
• latchkey
  This place sucks, don't come here.https://x.com/HotAisle/status/2046792071521157600 (taken tonight)
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  diogenescynic
  It's always funny when people see the law of supply and demand in effect.
• waterTanuki
  I do wonder how much of this can be attributed to many people leaving biotech for better paying jobs in the AI gold rush (a.k.a packing it up and moving to SF).More housing is always a good thing though
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  jmyeet
  So the source for this (which is stated and linked in the article) is something called the Zumper National Rent Report [1]. For anyone curious, this is their methodology [2]. This seems to be a measure of active listings based on advertised prices. So it's not necessarily an indicator of if those listings close and at what price (eg in hot markets, people can offer above the listed price). But it seems reasonably well-regarded.I'm not sure where the "19 of 20" comes from because I grabbed the data from the report into a Google Sheet and sorted and it's not #19 by 1br Y/Y, 2br Y/Y or average rent. What it shows is 1br -5.6% and 2br -7.5% Y/Y. LA was -3.6%/-2.5%.It's hard to find a comparable city to this because there aren't actually a lot of coastal cities in the US that aren't mega-cities (eg Boston, New York, Miami, Houston).It seems like San Diego built ~4000 new housing units in 2025 with a population of ~1.4M. For comparison, Miami seems to have added ~18,000 but it's population also exceeds 6M so is that a fair comparison?My point here is that the direct evidence linking building new housing units to changes in rent is weak.Not that I'm opposed to building by any means but simply blindly building more units is by itself not an answer. It depends on what you build, where you build it and whether you allow effective or actual cartels to monopolize that supply.Take Manhattan as an extreme example. There has been a ton of building along so-called Billionaire's Row and also some pockets in the Financial District, West Chelsea, the UES and so on. A lot of this stock is the so-called ultra-luxury market. Prices for some of these new units are now exceeding $7000/sq ft.That is going to help absolutely nobody. Ultra-wealthy non-residents will park money there and that's it. This blind assumption that it will eventually become prole housing is ludicrous.Housing should primarily be for shelter, not a speculative asset or investment vehicle to get wealthy by denying someone else shelter.[1]: https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/national-rent-report[2]: https://www.zumper.com/blog/our-methodology-empowering-the-r...
• nine_zeros
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• underlipton
  I see the "supply and demand" straw man is propped up well and often in this thread. Let's talk about the actual dynamics in play:1) Rent-Fixing: This is widespread across the country and the actual reason why inventory increases often (commonly) do not lower prices. There are multiple tactics landlords have used to ratchet up rates without ever letting them drop. These include lease concessions that don't affect the base rent in lieu of rate drops in step with lowered demand, warehousing that artificially limits accessible supply even when new, physical units are hitting the market, and algorithmic price-fixing had allowed landlords within a region to stay in lock step without breaking rank lower. When landlords are able to use such tactics with impunity, they absolutely do warp supply-demand dynamics and allow rent rates to stay high even in the face of expanding actual inventory. For rents to decline, you have to break large landlords' ability to set their price.2) Builder Subsidies: "Just build more and prices will drop," ignores that the incentive structures municipalities use to draw developers are an additional burden on residents. These for-profit corporations then seek to make a profit on their investment, leading to no direct meaningful inventory increase in the affordable unit range. Worse, developers often target existing affordable units for their redevelopment, destroying the very units that the new inventory is supposed to ultimately reduce demand for. In order for "build more" to drive down rents, it can't be done the way it has been, which mostly ends up being a giveaway to developers at the expense of the tax base and displaced renters.San Diego is a special case where it seems that the expanding inventory has been driven not by corporate developers, but by the construction of ADUs, which are built by homeowners out-of-pocket, are not tax-subsidized and, in fact, increase the taxable value of property. In this way, they work almost counter to traditional development, and these factors combine with their being created and operated outside of the control of corporate landlords means that they represent new and meaningful competition to those landlords. Thus, efficiencies are sought and prices drop.Encourage ADUs. Avoid subsidizing large developers and corporate landlords. If there is the political will, get the government directly involved in constructing subsidized owner-occupied, human-scale housing, as in Singapore and the pre-Thatcher UK. Relax zoning and build out public transit and car-free infrastructure in order to reduce the accessibility premium, as in Japan. That is how "build more" actually can work to lower rates.
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  throwaway27448
  What is this country's allergy with public housing? Not pursuing that feels like jumping in water with our hands tied behind our backs
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  abdullahkhalids
  Lots of people quoting basic supply and demand.People in the year 1500 could pretty reliably tell you that a rock would fall down if you released it from a height. People would also tell you that if you threw it up and away, it would go up in an arc and fall down.The innovation that Newtown and friends brought about was they made quantitative predictions about the rate at which the rock would fall down, or the arc it would follow - both to pretty high level of accuracy.The point is that, of course, building more houses has a tendency to reduce rents. The question is whether reduction is -0.1% or -10% or there is an increase of +5% because some other factor was more dominant. It would be very hard for policy makers to argue against building more housing, if there was a quantitative model that predicted exact numbers for how much rent fell down given all relevant factors, and this model had been validated over and over again by prediction (not retrodiction). Rather than "rock fall down if you drop it" model that everyone keeps quoting.