Quote:
Originally Posted by 2oh1
I wish someone could get city council to realize that making housing more expensive to build makes housing more expensive, period.
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That’s really only true for a one-to-one replacement. But if you raze a single-family house that rents for $5000/month and replace it with a building of 20 apartments, each renting for $3000 per month, then the statement is quite obviously false, no matter how expensive it was to build the apartments.
I don’t really see any reason why building more higher-end apartments with parking is a problem, especially in neighborhoods like NW 23rd, where there are plenty of low-amenity apartments without parking (or even laundry). Until the high-end apartments have lots of vacancies, I would guess that there are likely relatively wealthy people who are occupying cheaper apartments just because they like the neighborhood. If they had the opportunity, they might move to a nicer place and generate vacancies in the cheaper end of the market. So I could easily imagine a reasonable scenario where rents on existing apartments might actually fall if there were higher-priced options in the neighborhood. It is by no means obvious that building a higher-rent building must necessarily drive the rents of the older buildings upwards as well, especially if the new building creates significantly more housing supply than the structure it replaced.