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Joe Fish

@sadbusdriver.bsky.social

340 followers 370 following 490 posts

PhD student doing urban econ and industrial organization. Former highest paid cashier in the Midwest. Not a real bus driver

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 16h

my contribution to @besttrousers.bsky.social discourse:

1) census contract rents in Brooklyn make sense given observed incomes
2) zillow asking rents give implausible implied levels of rent burdens
3) zillow does way worse at explaining rent:income in high immigrant counties; census does not

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 17h

a related point is that most new apartments are >200+ units and cost > 50 million to build.

developers don't like to hold on to these and so try to sell them once they lease up. but to sell, you need somebody to buy. who else but large public/private investors has the money to do this? Local gov?

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 18h

be cool if pe stakeholder published their data so i could check this, but isnt this just a map of which places have built a bunch of new apartments? (relative to the size of their existing housing stock)

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 23h

Agreeing w/ you tbc, but for other people:

1) RealPage promises users a 3-7% revenue lift
2) estimates of "breakup the large landlords" policies find large effects (~10%) *but only in a very small number of markets*
3) most markets aren't concentrated

bsky.app/profile/sadb...

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 1d

Some papers have looked explicitly at the "break up big landlords" angle. Breaking up big landlords can lead to pretty large price declines! Like ~10%! *But only in a very small number of markets* (about 5% or so)

It's not a general affordability tool
www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/jny7m...

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 23h

the issue is that even within year X building type X zip code bins, there will be large differences in prices.

Some units won't be maintained well, some units will be in high crime parts of the neighborhood, etc. Those units will be both lower price and less likely to enter zillow's data

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 1d

not to say there aren't issues with the survey data (sweetheart deals, rent stabilized units, etc), but the "zillow says rents are X" reports people like to post have selection issues.

E.g., If you read zillow's methodology, they lean really hard on year built + apartment size to capture quality

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 1d

i made this point on the other site, but those commercial rent data that people cite for "median rental in NYC" have bad coverage of low income areas.

If you look at coverage rates or compare commercial rent averages vs contract rents from eviction filings, you see huge divergences

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 1d

Per usual, people are bad at reading these articles

1) investors are defined as bought via an LLC, LP, etc. Per the article, institutional investors are net sellers
2) there's no obvious spatial correlation between % investor-owned and prices or price increases

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 1d

Also, the "break up big landlords" isn't really a viable affordability tool, although it can work in very specific markets

(usually markets with lots of high rises in neighborhoods with few substitutes -- think location specific amenities like great views or beach access)
bsky.app/profile/sadb...

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 1d

Some papers have looked explicitly at the "break up big landlords" angle. Breaking up big landlords can lead to pretty large price declines! Like ~10%! *But only in a very small number of markets* (about 5% or so)

It's not a general affordability tool
www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/jny7m...

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 1d

Some papers have looked explicitly at the "break up big landlords" angle. Breaking up big landlords can lead to pretty large price declines! Like ~10%! *But only in a very small number of markets* (about 5% or so)

It's not a general affordability tool
www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/jny7m...

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 1d

the other thing is RealPage quotes like a 3-7% revenue lift depending on the pitch deck they use. Which is fairly big as far as effects in the academic rental market literature go, but also clearly in the "helpful but not sufficient" bucket

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 9d

Only one of those prizes was funded by dynamite blood money and it ain’t the Swedish central bank one

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 9d

Preaching to the choir, but homelessness is mostly a "prices are too high problem"; high prices are mostly a "vacancies are too low problem"; ergo, homelessness is mostly a "there aren't enough vacant homes problem"

pbs.twimg.com/media/GI_Pbl...

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 10d

Eg if you look at office costs
As a rough approximate for differences in costs for big multi family projects there’s huge implied room for reductions without even touching any labor costs

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 10d

Kinda depends on what levers you pull. If California waved a wand and got European (or even Texan) costs for multi family you’d probably need prices to fall like 20-50% before projects stopped penciling

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 10d

Developers don’t internalize whether their projects will push down other landlords rents

If you waved a wand and upzoned a bunch of land, a lot of projects would pencil, developers would build them, and prices of other landlords’ units would fall

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 11d

apropos of nothing, it's kind of annoying how the flavor-of-the-month criticism of economic methodology is so incurious about why mainstream economists do things the way they do

armchair sociology and aversion to qual research apparently affects economists of all methodological persuasions

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 15d

Price discrimination gets you some of the way there, I guess

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 15d

shot in the dark: does anyone know of models that get market power where the market power doesn't come from

1) quantity restrictions
2) bargaining

Motivated by Ticketmaster, which seems to have market power and doesn't seem to obviously restrict quantities or bargain

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 16d

In general though,
1) the correlation between high rents and high homelessness is real and is a long term phenomenon
2) short run fluctuations can be because of rent hikes, but they're also likely to be kind of random blips / unrelated to rent trends (see all the discourse on the 2024 increases)

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 16d

Interestingly, you can kind of square the circle by noting that increases in rents do predict increases in homelessness, but only for cities that were already expensive.

It's a lot worse for rent hikes to hit cities with no slack, than to hit relatively affordable ones

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 16d

The best predictor of homelessness are high rents.

What's interesting is that this correlation is driven by differences in *levels* of rents

*Changes* in rents do a very poor job of predicting changes in homelessness, either short term (last year) or medium term (last 8 years)

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 18d

not sure if this is pro/anti stancil-thought

Reposted by Joe Fish

M. Nolan Gray 🥑 @mnolangray.bsky.social · 25d

SB 79 HAS PASSED!

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 28d

Hopefully soonish! (A buddy of mine did a bunch of interviews with developers in Brazil as part of her dissertation, but sadly nothing I can link to as of now)