Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

https://denverite.com/2025/07/25/denver-rent-prices-drop-q2/

by matthest • 12 months ago

311 374 12 months ago

matthest2• 12 months ago

Supply and demand 101 continues to work.

koolba2• 12 months ago

Someone should try this with medicine. Instead of subsidizing insurance (demand side), let’s spend the money to bring doctors to the USA from all over the world and have them work in free clinics (supply side).

adgjlsfhk1• 12 months ago

we also could just stop having the federal government limit the number of residency slots so we could have enough doctors trained in the US.

madars• 12 months ago

You don't even need to import foreign doctors: just increase the number of residency slots.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y72• 12 months ago

We already do that? I mean, minus the free clinic thing.

hangonhn4• 12 months ago

You basically can’t or it won't have the same effects because medicine doesn’t really follow the same dynamics as most other markets: the supplier (doctor) has an information asymmetry and thus makes most of the decisions, while the buyer (patient) is not usually the payer (insurance) so aren’t really incentivized to save.

Kenneth Arrow famously analyzed the healthcare market and made the above insight: https://assets.aeaweb.org/asset-server/files/9442.pdf

I know he was a Nobel Laureate but not sure if this is the work that won him the Nobel.

Updated: I should qualify my statement by pointing out this is for the US healthcare system.

ChuckMcM• 12 months ago

So funny that. Weirdly even if you build nothing but market rate housing, housing gets more affordable. :-)

DaveZale4• 12 months ago

Living in So CO, I smh at what's going on up there. The cost of living elsewhere in the state can be 1/3 to 1/2 the price. The govt and corporate employers could easily decentralize and stay in CO.

at-fates-hands4• 12 months ago

How far south are you? I lived in Colorado Springs for a few years as a ski bum and all my friends in Denver used to mock me driving back and forth, but my rent was almost $500 cheaper living in Springs.

You're 100% right though.

scblock2• 12 months ago

Commuting from the Springs to Denver every day, so 22-23 days a month, 60-70 miles one way...

Is that worth $500?

Quick math:

$4/gallon, 35 mpg, 120 miles a day, so $14/day in gas, plus extra maintenance, and the 3 hours a day of your life you'll never get back.

Couldn't claim with a straight face myself that the math works.

DaveZale4• 12 months ago

just a little west of Pueblo. We're about 1/3 of the cost of living in the Denver area.

We get plenty of migrants from the Denver area and elsewhere.

Of course, the sales tax and other taxes are going up. Probably heading to a truly rural area with a nice community soon. I lived in many big cities over the years. They are toxic and unsafe. I know that because I worked in public health. If you look at the morbidity and mortality by zip code, you'll see yourself. Affordable city living has a dark side.

Not to say that city life isn't great when you're in your 20s or 30s. It is fun and jobs are everywhere. But I've seen enough fatal car crashes for a lifetime.

lenerdenator2• 12 months ago

Now do KC.

belmead• 12 months ago

Howdy, fellow KC resident. They are still building apartment complexes in Lenexa, but they are all near the Public Market, so. Not exactly the cheaper side of things. South KC is growing, but mostly higher-end homes it seems.

lenerdenator2• 12 months ago

I was thinking KCMO proper, I'd do about anything for a safe, affordable place near the state line in Jackson County.

deadbabe• 12 months ago

Um the rent is still insanely unaffordable?

JumpCrisscross22• 12 months ago

Um the rent is still insanely unaffordable

You have to pass 1st Street to get to 5th.

selimthegrim• 12 months ago

Unless you go to jail.

no_wizard2• 12 months ago

Lets keep the trend going. Lets get them back to 2019 levels! It would be a real feat if they can keep the cost going down instead of up.

mixdup• 12 months ago

that's unlikely. the pipeline of new units will be slowing, it's just that a bunch of projects that got spun up at the peak are finally delivering, but new starts have been down so we're probably approaching the bottom of a trough

no_wizard2• 12 months ago

So this is at best a temporary fix not a long term solution

MangoToupe10• 12 months ago

It's a nice victory story for the YIMBYs hoping to win over the upper-/middle class trying to retain the narrative that the market will provide "affordable" housing (not what this even demonstrates, but anyway), but this isn't going to get people off the street. We need a public housing sector to appropriately meet everyone's needs. Otherwise this is just a game of justifying "who deserves housing", a discussion over which I'll never agree with the market.

mgfist• 12 months ago

0.2% of Americans are homeless.

Why is housing always about the homeless? Yes, getting people off the street is important. But there's few other topics where a solution that helps 99.8% of people is dismissed because it doesn't help 0.2% of people (I don't even agree that it doesn't help them, but I'll be charitable for the sake of making my point).

MangoToupe10• 12 months ago

Why is housing always about the homeless?

To me, poverty is basically the only thing worth talking about when it comes to politics. Nothing else is going to get me to the voting box—to me, a platform that doesn't focus on poverty reduction doesn't even understand the point of government, the economy, or trying to work together.

I suspect other folks who think this way are going to be disproportionately loud.

at-fates-hands4• 12 months ago

Right now in cities homelessness is often associated with addiction or mental illness. We spend billions every year giving these people resources to get off the street, get treatment for addiction or mental illness. Right now? Many, many, many of those people have no desire to get off the streets or get clean or get treatment for their mental illness - despite the copious amounts of safety nets and other programs designed specifically to help those people.

I agree, we already have programs designed to help those who need it - focusing on the larger percentage of the population just makes sense if you're concerned about having bigger positive outcomes.

next_xibalba2• 12 months ago

So you're telling me if an additional, say, 100k units came on the market in Denver in the next year, housing prices wouldn't fall dramatically such that all working people could afford housing?

Working people should be able to afford housing near where they work. So let's press the gas pedal on building. The mentally ill and drug addicted should be subject to mandatory treatment or jail until such time as their underlying condition is mitigated to the extent that they can work and afford housing. Free housing doesn't work. In fact, it exacerbates individual dysfunction. It is cruelty masquerading as kindness.

MangoToupe10• 12 months ago

all working people could afford housing?

Hey, if that's the metric you're pushing for, good for you. I'm pushing for housing as a human right. I never caught the calvinist bug of "torture the non-productive until they conform and perform" method of population management.

jeffbee4• 12 months ago

Lowering the rent stops people from becoming homeless which is a necessary element of ending homelessness.

MangoToupe10• 12 months ago

Lowering the rent stops people from becoming homeless which is a necessary element of ending homelessness.

Sure but by this reasoning you could justify any effort as sufficient. At some point you have to make the personal judgement on what effort is enough. I don't really see any effort focusing on anything short of homelessness as worth the oxygen in the room it consumes.

tptacek13• 12 months ago

Until you reach transient shelter beds, which may not be saturated in a region (in some places in Chicagoland the work is going into outreach to get people off the street and into shelter beds as much as it is in expanding the number of beds), every additional unit of housing you build frees up some unit at or below that unit on the stack of housing. The effect percolates all the way down to long-term supportive housing rooms.

I don't really understand the intuition people have for how anything else could be the case. You make new housing available, people move into it, leaving vacancies. Pretty simple.

Marsymars3• 12 months ago

every additional unit of housing you build frees up some unit at or below that unit on the stack of housing. The effect percolates all the way down to long-term supportive housing rooms.

This makes intuitive sense to me, but I've really struggled to explain it in a way that makes it click for people.

MangoToupe10• 12 months ago

I don't have the impression most of my "fellow" americans even gave a damn about homelessness to begin with, so perhaps what you read as misunderstanding the market might simply be a disagreement of values—one party cares about the homeless, the other cares about salaried employees. May we all truly rot in shit.

throwmeaway222• 12 months ago

yeah well, the last time things were affordable the price was 1200. 71 dollars off 1850 isn't going to do anything

JumpCrisscross22• 12 months ago

71 dollars off 1850 isn't going to do anything

The point is the modern urban economic illiteracy that pretends supply and demand don't exist in housing (except when it comes to short-term rental stock, in which case it magically reappears) is wrong. Our housing crisis is a supply-side problem.

tokioyoyo2• 12 months ago

It’s a supply-side problem, but with majority of people being either indifferent to the problem or against downward pressure on the housing prices (most people don’t rent). The prices have skyrocketed, and most people who bought in the last 5 years wouldn’t want their assets to depreciate, if they spent 500K+ on it.

wagwang2• 12 months ago

This is only half the truth. The reality is that demand is propped up by fannie/freddie and mortgages in general. The fact that the government will buy investment property mortgages is bonkers. In reality, you should only be allowed to mortgage the raw materials and labor of a primary home, everything else is just leveraged speculation. There's also a immigration question, but should be purely solved using new supply. Finally there's a question of, should you even be allowed to own investment properties in cities. A real land reform would be huge for the country; ie. forcing landlords to sell investment properties in any area where rent exceeds $x.

jeffbee4• 12 months ago

I recently denounced some Boomer for this exact comment at a Berkeley public hearing. Unsurprisingly, $71 per month at the margin is quite useful to many people.

Jtsummers• 12 months ago

In Colorado, that's about 5 hours of labor for minimum wage employees (ignoring taxes, but at that income taxes are low). If you're working full-time, you average 174 working hours a month so that's about 2.9% of a minimum wage earner's gross income, which is nothing to scoff at for those folks who are earning at that level. And when you consider taxes (payroll which can't be easily avoided, and whatever level of income tax they have to pay) it's probably pushing closer to one day of work to take home that $71.

jameslk• 12 months ago

Doesn’t rent need to keep going up so the top-heavy segment of retirees can have a steady stream of inflation adjusted income and capital gains for their remaining years? This doesn’t seem sustainable, politically

jldugger• 12 months ago

Well, if they own their home and have a diversified portfolio, then they should be able to weather a small hit to income.

If they rent, well, this directly helps their budget.

DaveZale4• 12 months ago

taxes and insurance are both much steeper than just a few years ago.

Gov. Polis has forced lifting limits on occupancy to override local restrictions. It's just getting more crowded.

JumpCrisscross22• 12 months ago

Doesn’t rent need to keep going up so the top-heavy segment of retirees can have a steady stream of inflation adjusted income

No. Maybe 10% of retirees earn rental income [1].

and capital gains for their remaining years?

The value of the home should be plenty to live off, whether by sale or borrowing.

[1] https://bradleyclark.com/blog/generating-retirement-income-w...

pphysch• 12 months ago

Doesn't seem sustainable civilizationally, either, if the young and poor are propping up the old and rich, rather than older generations nurturing the youth.

ch4s3• 12 months ago

Residential real estate is very rarely a large component of people’s retirement savings or income in the US, and equities historically outperform real estate.

Giorgi• 12 months ago

[flagged]

yapyap• 12 months ago

communism? was there lead in the paint they painted your walls with?

no real argument was made for communism, however a housing / renting market controlled by the government with regulations instead of letting the “free market” (((oligopoly))) run it’s course screwing over the poor and middle class while the richest of the rich pool all these profits to build bunkers and do stupid shit.

yeah, a regulated market is better. especially when and if the government regulating the market is sane. thats a requirement for laws and or institutions relying on regulation

calvinmorrison• 12 months ago

was there lead in the paint they painted your walls with?

yes unfortunately as long as my landlord gave me the LEAD PAINT notice i didnt have any other options.

JumpCrisscross22• 12 months ago

a housing / renting market controlled by the government with regulations instead of letting the “free market”

It's curious how the largest landowing families in New York and San Francisco are strong supporters of these anti-market policies.

dang• 12 months ago

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. They include:

"Don't be snarky."

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

vlakreeh• 12 months ago

This is not a solution. The average rent is still $1832, which is still unaffordable for people in Denver making the median income of $54.3k if you apply the rule of thumb where rent shouldn't exceed 30% of your monthly income.

JKCalhoun7• 12 months ago

Is it wrong of me to be sad that it's rent and not home prices?

JumpCrisscross22• 12 months ago

wrong of me to be sad that it's rent and not home prices?

Rents are higher frequency than home prices. Ceteris paribus, prices follow yields.

jeffbee4• 12 months ago

Yes, it is in fact quite wrong and one of the biggest obstacles in American society is fetishization of homeownership.

unethical_ban3• 12 months ago

Why is it wrong to want to have equity in the place you live? "Ownership" could be a house, it could be a townhome, it could be flat. But in the US, "owning" an apartment is very rare, while real estate investors buy up all the valuable land in the urban cores of cities and rent it.

JKCalhoun7• 12 months ago

You may object to it, but a home has been the smartest investment I've ever made.

AnthonyMouse4• 12 months ago

The problem isn't home ownership, it's zoning regulations being done locally so that areas full of owner-occupied single-family homes are the only ones eligible to vote on whether higher density housing can be built there, in combination with the "got mine" attitude that causes them to vote in the way that constrains supply.

It's good for people to be able to own their homes. They should be able to own their homes instead of paying a large fraction of their paycheck to landlords as rent or banks as mortgage payments. But that requires housing costs to get lower rather than higher, which in turn requires some kind of state- or national-level policy to prevent local homeowners from sustaining the opposite.

specialist2• 12 months ago

fetishization

Yes and: As you know, encouraging home ownership is policy. Meant to reduce elderly poverty. It worked, plus all sorts of adverse effects that now hitting hard.

I'd rather we had pensions, universal healthcare, and maybe ponies.

staringback2• 12 months ago

Not wrong at all. Previously owner-occupied single family homes will continue to be bulldozed and replaced with 8 story wooden boxes, owned by national corporate landlords of course.

JumpCrisscross22• 12 months ago

single family homes will continue to be bulldozed and replaced with 8 story wooden boxes, owned by national corporate landlords of course

Source? Why of course?

iamtheworstdev• 12 months ago

home prices are falling in a lot of places. :shrug: denver could always be next

Arubis• 12 months ago

Anecdotally, Denver home prices appear to be down compared to a few years ago as well. The ~850sqft unit next to mine sold for $700k 2-3 years ago and I’m certain it’d go in the low 600s now.

comte7092• 12 months ago

Denver home values peaked in May of 2022 and have yet to recover:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DNXRSA

harambae• 12 months ago

What you're saying is technically true, but that graph shows the current prices very close to the all time high.

righthand• 12 months ago

It will just go back up 3% next year to match inflation. 20k apartments and the rent only lowers 3%? What a joke. Only the real estate industry is celebrating this.

JumpCrisscross22• 12 months ago

20k apartments and the rent only lowers 3%?

20k is about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Given the backlog of demand, you'd expect to see inelasticity at the entrance.

[1] http://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US0820000-denver-co/

aynyc• 12 months ago

Just because this doesn’t magically solve the housing crisis, doesn’t mean it’s not a good start. We have to stop looking at magical solutions that will solve all our problems in one shot. We have to start somewhere.

JumpCrisscross22• 12 months ago

because this doesn’t magically solve the housing crisis

It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.)

[1] http://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US0820000-denver-co/

seanmcdirmid10• 12 months ago

It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.)

That is only if you believe that more capacity does not induce more demand, which really isn't true as long as the city remains popular for jobs/climate/nature/etc.... People not moving to Denver because the rent is too high will decide to move to Denver if rents decrease (and the demand they add will cause rents to increase, wash/rinse/repeat until an equilibrium is reached). You also have cases where a city becomes even more attractive because of growing density alone (NYC, Hong Kong, Tokyo).

standardUser2• 12 months ago

You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater

If you buy a house for $400k, and suddenly it is worth $300k, you don't need to be "bailed out" for your purchase decision. You should have been certain that the house was worth $400k to you at the time of purchase. Otherwise you're a speculator, and we shouldn't be bailing out speculators.

It's called buyer's remorse. We accept it when it's a car or a TV, but suddenly when it's a house we're supposed to give massive government support to correct the buyer's mistake?

mateo411• 12 months ago

I think Denver home prices have decreased by 4% since the peak in 2022.

I don't think anybody is going to be permanently underwater. Home prices changing should be a second order effect of building more apartments.

phkahler• 12 months ago

Nope. Smaller more affordable homes would be a better solution. Most people who rent cant afford to buy, but rent is a worse deal long term.

majormajor2• 12 months ago

It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.)

"Committing to doing this every year" is VERY different than doing it in one particular year. Yes, that would solve it. But of course, 2022 was part of a very unusual cycle including a lot of migration and you should note the last line in the article:

Meanwhile, the pipeline of new apartment buildings is drying up. The number of properties under construction is down by roughly one-third from the peak in 2023, the report found. That likely means fewer units coming available in the months ahead, potentially giving landlords room to start raising rents again.

7e• 12 months ago

It is instructive to look at how we got expensive housing in the first place. Expensive housing comes from a surplus of people. How did we get all those people? By building more housing and having people breed there.

New housing is only a temporary salve and perpetuates a vicious cycle. The people who move into these new units will have more babies, because they have new habitat. These babies will grow up and eventually drive up housing prices. Even before then, people will move or emigrate into cheap housing and fill it up. Housing then becomes expensive again, only with more people filling up the earth: polluting the air, straining water supplies, clogging roads, uglifying neighborhoods with massive buildings, overrunning parks and trails.

Thankfully, expensive housing, in part, has reduced American baby making to 1.6 per woman, a sustainable rate. Unfortunately, because humans are living longer, the US population still continues to rise. The U.S. Census Bureau currently projects that the resident U.S. population will peak at nearly 370 million around the year 2080, before it gradually declines to about 366 million by 2100. If immortality is invented before 2080, the population may never go down, ever.

Meanwhile, the latest estimates put the current U.S. population (as of mid‑2025) at approximately 342 million. The population has increased roughly 4.5x since 1900. From building new housing.

Braxton1980• 12 months ago

And what happens if all that new stock isn't needed?

Detroit?

theoreticalmal4• 12 months ago

Why would we consider bailing out entities that are financially solvent? These homeowners may have an underwater investment, but they (presumably) can still pay the mortgage to get it paid off

dwaite• 12 months ago

Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis.

That would be an incredible commitment, and not something which has happened. This burst of new rental property is already subsiding, with an expectation that rents will again raise next year. Moreso, it would be hard to get private organizations to commit to building such a massive glut of property knowing that they are tanking the market that would pay back their investment.

That is why this doesn't magically solve the housing crisis.

bearcobra• 12 months ago

It's really encouraging to see these kinds of success stories. I really hope people who are concerned about affordability start to view things from more of a "yes and" point of view. We can work on reducing the barriers to building more housing of any kind while also advocating for more social housing development.

JumpCrisscross22• 12 months ago

We can work on reducing the barriers to building more housing of any kind while also advocating for more social housing development

One of the NIMBY lobby's greatest wins was putting these options on the ends of a policy spectrum.

They're not. They're complementary. If it's cheaper to build, it's cheaper to build social housing. And if you have a vibrant construction sector, you can build more public housing faster.

tptacek13• 12 months ago

They're not always complementary. For instance, IZOs are a social housing intervention, and work against the goal of increasing supply.

AnthonyMouse4• 12 months ago

Probably the best thing you could do in terms of social housing construction would be to have the government put up some capital to buy land and build new housing on that land, then immediately sell it and use the proceeds to do it again and again with exponential growth because it's actually profitable.

But that's also what construction companies would be doing regardless except for the subsidy, at which point you might be better off doing something like exempting construction companies from property taxes for two years if they at least double the number of housing units on their land in that time.

srameshc• 12 months ago

With rents escalating notably from 2022, getting back to 2019 rates would provide substantial relief for numerous families, assuming that's the objective.

wagwang2• 12 months ago

I just need to subsidize demand and then prices go up, people get angry, and I just need to subsidize demand and then...

raldi• 12 months ago

Even if the rents were merely unchanged, 20k new units means 20k new families that can move to Denver without displacing anybody.

scblock2• 12 months ago

Funny, I just got a lease renewal email today and they want another 7%. Call me skeptical.

Babkock• 12 months ago

How dare your experience differ from mine on the internet. I demand you show me proof of your rent going up, Denver man!

12700180802• 12 months ago

Remember, this is a good thing. Property values should not outpace inflation.

Marsymars3• 12 months ago

It's not terrible if property values fall somewhere between inflation and GDP growth.

AnthonyMouse4• 12 months ago

Presumably GDP growth per capita, but even then, why would that be any better than "not a cent more than inflation", or for that matter even for housing prices to decline over time (e.g. through increased automation in construction)?

jmyeet• 12 months ago

Developers don't build units to lower prices. If prices go down, it's because developers overbuilt or there are other macro factors at play. I suspect it's a bit of both.

A core tenet of capitalism and neoliberalism is private property. We're rapidly approaching a point of land reform. I think private property is a mistake. Note: this is distinct to personal property. You can own your own home, maybe even a second home. Anything beyond that should be outright disallowed or taxed into oblivion.

We should simply not allow people to hoard property. It is state-sanctioned violence to deny people shelter by intentionally driving up the price of a basic need. Housing unaffordability is the number one contributor to homelessness, which I think is up 18% last year.

I realize that's a pipe dream. What can we do instead? Do what Vienna does. Austria is a social democratic country that's still capitalist in nature. Yet ~60% of the housing stock is owned by the government. It is remarkably cheap to do so.

Public-private partnerhips or simply looking to the private sector to solve these problems are nothing more than wealth transfer from the government to billionaires.

jt2190• 12 months ago

Source: https://www.aamdhq.org/news/vacancy-and-rent-report----july-...

tristor• 12 months ago

I live in Denver, I don't believe this article is true. I just got a renewal offer where they wanted to raise my rent by 30%. I have generally negotiated this down with my landlord (Greystar), but I also am well aware and they're more blatant about the fact that they use RealPage ever since the courts gave them a pass for blatant price-fixing and collusion. Greystar and two other major REITs own nearly 60% of all rentable residential properties in the Denver metro area, so pardon my skepticism, but I call BS on the thought that rent has or will ever go down in Denver.

Edit: The plural of anecdote /is/ data.

chrisco255• 12 months ago

What you've quoted here is anecdotal evidence: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anecdote

Crime can trend down and yet there will still be victims of crime.

angrydev• 12 months ago

Greystar is a notoriously bad landlord and your personal anecdote does not change the data.

matthest2• 12 months ago

Shop around and see what others are offering. I believe your anecdote, and I've also seen several other anecdotes about how rents have dropped - someone said as much as $1k.

I'm sure it's a big mix right now.

typewithrhythm• 12 months ago

How is this measured? I've seen similar articles for Melbourne, where the average per dwelling is reducing, but the quality of the average dwelling is reduced faster; less bedrooms, low quality noisy single aspect apartments.

But if you track the price of a pre-existing property it's growing just as fast.

mooreds• 12 months ago

The basic laws of supply and demand work!

hnthrow903487652• 12 months ago

"hey guys check this out i figured out people will pay anything to avoid dying on the streets haha supply demand number go up. what about if we do food and water next"

diogenescynic• 12 months ago

It's funny how for so long people fought the basic law of supply and demand and tried to force 'affordable housing' to be built exclusively, while the prices of homes skyrocketed. I think leaders knew better, but they just didn't care because they were making money on their property. It also seems like a form of generational theft from boomers to millennials. Housing supply was always being added until boomers got theirs, then they made it overly restrictive to choke supply and drive up prices.

graycat2• 12 months ago

One, maybe not the only one, hands off, automatic, 100% "all-natural", do nothing solution to the "housing crisis": Hope the birth rate, i.e., on average the number of babies born per woman, stays significantly under 2.0 or even 2.1, maybe 2.2.

So, the population will shrink but with some maintenance (roof, painting of exterior siding, kitchen/bath, HVAC, windows/doors) mostly the housing supply won't.

The Internet may reduce the time and money commuting to work and/or the need to be in high density, expensive housing areas for a job.

mritterhoff• 12 months ago

A decreasing population has a lot of collateral damage economically. I'd rather lessen zoning restrictions and let the market build.

graycat2• 12 months ago

collateral damage ...

Right.

mathattack• 12 months ago

The last paragraph should temper our enthusiasm. Allowing people to build more when there is a shortage is the best way to have markets solve problems.

—-

“ Meanwhile, the pipeline of new apartment buildings is drying up. The number of properties under construction is down by roughly one-third from the peak in 2023, the report found. That likely means fewer units coming available in the months ahead, potentially giving landlords room to start raising rents again.”

reactordev3• 12 months ago

Denver is a boom and bust town. Every once in a while, it thrives for a decade, then busts with an exodus of people (myself included). It will rebalance and boom again.

throwawayq34232• 12 months ago

Why do you say this and why did you leave? I'm curious.

reactordev3• 12 months ago

Because that’s Denver’s history. Founded by land speculators after beating Indians in the Colorado War of 1865, only to become a gold rush town, then go bust, become a gang haven, bust again, then boom again with Carnations, then bust again, then boom again with industrials and nuclear waste, to go bust again when nuclear power was divested, then to boom again in the 90s with more gangs, bust again, then boom again in the 2010s with the green rush.

I left because I was sick of having to weather the storm of boom and busts, saw $250,000 homes become $950,000 homes (no change to the home itself) and prey upon the young people moving there to ensure they are financially burdened with Boulder Boomer retirement plans.

seanmcdirmid10• 12 months ago

All western cities are boom towns, Seattle is famous for the "Will the last person to leave Seattle, turn out the lights" billboard. SF is a canonical boom town as much as LA is. Maybe SLC would be excluded, but it was founded under special circumstances.

tamimio2• 12 months ago

Rents are high because landlords are greedy and are paying already inflated house prices.

Owning is expensive because banks are greedy, pumping out the created credit for mortgages, which is an imaginary number based on no actual value, because somehow banks are allowed to create money!

Here's the plot twist: you spend 30 years or even more (in Canada that has reached 70 years!) to pay the mortgage only to find out that you actually don't own the house and you're on a perpetual rent called property taxes.

And unless the root issue is resolved by banning banks' Ponzi fraudulent schemes, and implementing a policy to change housing into a depreciated asset just like Japan did, nothing will change substantially and will only change marginally to prevent people from going out rioting in the streets.

teaearlgraycold2• 12 months ago

As someone that rents I have little sympathy for people paying property taxes annually that are less than what I have to pay in one month.

There should of course be sanity in the system. If you’re retired and can’t the afford property taxes on your home it’s not okay to squeeze you for that little bit of money.

bufferoverflow• 12 months ago

You're not making any sense. Someone paid for a house, they fully expect to pay a lot less than renters do. That's the point of buying a house.

nandomrumber• 12 months ago

You, as a renter, are paying the property tax.

The cost is passed on to the end-user.

lbourdages2• 12 months ago

70 years? That's just plain false.

This website from the government of Canada here says the max term is 25 years, or 30 if it is your first property: https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...

Edit: ah, I missed one part. You can have longer terms if you have more than 20% cash down. TIL.

brailsafe2• 12 months ago

They didn't say 70 year mortgages, they said 70 years to pay off a mortgage, which is still a bit exaggerated (maybe), but would come from the contingent of people who got themselves into variable rate fixed payment mortgages for comically expensive properties, and that had a significant amount of interest remaining before the feds started cranking up interest rates.

If rates go up from 2% to 6+% while you're holding onto a $2m detached house, it's a bad situation to be in.

https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2022/11/staff-analytical-notes-2...

true_religion• 12 months ago

People refinance to take lower rates or pull equity out of the property and that resets the clock.

tamimio2• 12 months ago

Nope, it’s true and even hit higher, this is one example of many: https://files.catbox.moe/rpp5fp.mp4

Yeah, it’s a scam, the whole thing is one giant scam, yet it’s legal and normalized and everyone is ok with it!

tlogan3• 12 months ago

Rents are high because landlords are greedy

I understand the frustration, but it’s probably unfair to single out landlords specifically. Greed isn’t unique to landlords: it’s a universal human trait. We’re all greedy.

History reminds us of at least one person who famously preached against greed, and humanity’s reaction was to nail him to a cross.

graeme5• 12 months ago

This article suggests rents are high because we make it difficult to build homes. Are Denver landlords less greedy than landlords in Seattle?

missedthecue• 12 months ago

Prices going up is corporate greed. Prices going down is corporate generosity. Basic economics.

CalRobert3• 12 months ago

Are you telling me that places with low rents don't have greedy landlords and banks?

theoreticalmal4• 12 months ago

I guarantee with 100% certainty that if you were in a landlord position, you would be asking the highest rent that would keep your units occupied. You call it greed now, but landlords it’s simply business. You negotiate the highest salary you can, right? And the lowest car purchase price? And go to the cheaper of the two gas stations? Why is okay for you to be discerning but not a landlord?

joshmlewis• 12 months ago

As a side note, if anyone here is in Denver and wants to grab a coffee or cowork sometime, hit me up.

Glyptodon• 12 months ago

It all just goes to show that government building, or creating some financing framework for building, very plain housing and selling for cost to keep supply ahead of demand would be an effective policy.

rossdavidh• 12 months ago

Not saying it's not noteworthy, but Austin rents have also been trending down lately.

I just recently heard the term "accidental landlord", which is someone who can't (or won't) sell at a price low enough to actually get rid of their house, so they rent it out. I know that's a factor in Austin; I wonder if it's part of the story in Denver?

ipnon• 12 months ago

In a proper market economy there are many accidents in everyone’s career as they adapt to changing market conditions. Only in a planned economy do some market segments face no surprises.

Incipient• 12 months ago

back to 2022 prices

If we could be so lucky - out median rent it FIFTY PERCENT up over 2022 prices.

tlogan3• 12 months ago

In other news, San Francisco rents are up $223 from a year ago, with median rent rising 11% year-over-year [1].

But hey, at least we’re safe from the dangers of gas stoves. /s

[1] https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/san-fran...

CalRobert3• 12 months ago

Inhaling combustion products isn't great... not sure why you'd link those things?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9819315/

"We found that 12.7% (95% CI = 6.3–19.3%) of current childhood asthma in the US is attributable to gas stove use. The proportion of childhood asthma that could be theoretically prevented if gas stove use was not present (e.g., state-specific PAFs) varied by state (Illinois = 21.1%; California = 20.1%; New York = 18.8%; Massachusetts = 15.4%; Pennsylvania = 13.5%). "

Indoor combustion seems like a very good thing to eliminate.

tlogan3• 12 months ago

In San Francisco, the housing crisis poses a far greater and more immediate threat to children’s well-being than this issue. Lack of stable, affordable housing affects everything: education, health, safety, and long-term opportunity.

We can debate other problems, but unless we address the fundamental need for proper housing, everything else should be secondary.

LoganDark• 12 months ago

Is $1800 per month supposed to be a normal or acceptable rent? Rent should be less than $1000 a month. And even that's only 30% if you're making over $50,000 a year.

jondwillis• 12 months ago

Let’s interview the people living in all of these high quality new builds and see how much they’re loving or not loving their new digs.

theoreticalmal4• 12 months ago

Why?

WhereIsTheTruth• 12 months ago

back to 2022 rents! wow..yeah..., but why 2022? Feels like cherry picking the one year that makes today's numbers look okay

run it against 2000-today, or even 2020, and the story probably gets way uglier

Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market

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