Net-new luxury housing is good for affordability, because when someone moves into a more expensive unit, that frees up their current more affordable unit.
More to the point, Seattle literally just legalized missing middle housing in most of the city earlier this year. That’s good for affordability, but new housing takes time to build. And developers will try to build the most lucrative project they currently can.
Housing is a matter of supply and demand. When you’re in a housing shortage, prices will be high and most of the new supply will be luxury. The solution to a housing shortage is to build more housing, period. If you build housing faster than increasing demand from population growth, prices of units will go down. If you build housing and prices stay high, you didn’t build enough. Build more. Remove NIMBYs ability to prevent new builds.
Which is not to say that building public housing or other projects to subsidize housing is a bad idea. But it’s really, really hard to do that effectively during a housing shortage and solving the shortage is good for everyone except homeowners who wanted to use their equity as their retirement nest egg.
It’s not about trickle down, it’s about building to meet the capacity. I live in this area and can tell you first hand. I live in a cheap building and all the luxury condos going up has made it so my landlord cannot jack up rents anymore. They were doing it constantly before the building boom and now they can’t even fill multiple units at the rents they want to charge.
I would almost guarantee that the amount of people leaving affordable housing to luxury housing is a completely negligible percentage, like <1% of home buyers. Prove me wrong, I guess, but your argument that building more luxury housing somehow benefits the middle and poor classes just reeks of nonsensical bullshit, sorry.
But housing is something like a game of musical chairs. If Alice moves into a luxury unit, that leaves their old unit open. Bob then moves into Alice’s old unit, Charlotte moves into Bob’s old unit, Dave moves into Charlotte’s old unit, etc. until Zoey moves into Xanders old unit.
The question isn’t ‘how likely is Alice’s old unit to be affordable?’, it’s ‘how likely is it that Zoey’s old unit is affordable?’
Net-new luxury housing is good for affordability, because when someone moves into a more expensive unit, that frees up their current more affordable unit.
More to the point, Seattle literally just legalized missing middle housing in most of the city earlier this year. That’s good for affordability, but new housing takes time to build. And developers will try to build the most lucrative project they currently can.
Housing is a matter of supply and demand. When you’re in a housing shortage, prices will be high and most of the new supply will be luxury. The solution to a housing shortage is to build more housing, period. If you build housing faster than increasing demand from population growth, prices of units will go down. If you build housing and prices stay high, you didn’t build enough. Build more. Remove NIMBYs ability to prevent new builds.
Which is not to say that building public housing or other projects to subsidize housing is a bad idea. But it’s really, really hard to do that effectively during a housing shortage and solving the shortage is good for everyone except homeowners who wanted to use their equity as their retirement nest egg.
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It’s not about trickle down, it’s about building to meet the capacity. I live in this area and can tell you first hand. I live in a cheap building and all the luxury condos going up has made it so my landlord cannot jack up rents anymore. They were doing it constantly before the building boom and now they can’t even fill multiple units at the rents they want to charge.
I would almost guarantee that the amount of people leaving affordable housing to luxury housing is a completely negligible percentage, like <1% of home buyers. Prove me wrong, I guess, but your argument that building more luxury housing somehow benefits the middle and poor classes just reeks of nonsensical bullshit, sorry.
Directly? Obviously, that’s pretty rare.
But housing is something like a game of musical chairs. If Alice moves into a luxury unit, that leaves their old unit open. Bob then moves into Alice’s old unit, Charlotte moves into Bob’s old unit, Dave moves into Charlotte’s old unit, etc. until Zoey moves into Xanders old unit.
The question isn’t ‘how likely is Alice’s old unit to be affordable?’, it’s ‘how likely is it that Zoey’s old unit is affordable?’