There’s No Such Thing as Good Housing News
This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here. If you want to understand America’s strange relationship with housing in the 21st century, look at Austin, where no matter what happens to prices, someone’s always claiming that the sky is falling. In the 2010s, the capital of Texas grew faster than any other major U.S. metro, pulling in movers from around the country. Initially, downtown and suburban areas struggled to build enough apartments and single-family homes to meet the influx of demand, and housing costs bloomed across the region. Since the beginning of the pandemic, even as rent inflation has gone berserk nationwide, no city has experienced anything like Austin’s growth in housing costs. In 2021, rents rose at the most furious annual rate in the city’s history. In 2022, rent growth exceeded every other large city in the country, as Austin’s median rent nearly doubled. This might sound like the beginning of a familiar and depressing story—one that Americans have gotten …
