Taylor Marr

Industrial Policy for Housing Construction | National Affairs nationalaffairs.com/publications/d…

The world’s most unaffordable housing is not where you think (from @TheEconomist) economist.com/asia/2026/03/2…

Spain froze rents and capped increases at 2%, but rent control is already cutting supply by up to 50% and not improving conditions for renters. Spain should follow Argentina, which ended rent control in 2023 and has seen housing supply rise 180%, reports Cato’s @hiperfalcon. ow.ly/k7Mx50YztmZ

Austin built 120,000 homes after the pandemic, increasing its supply by almost a third. Rents dropped 4% from 2021 to 2025 — nearly 20% adjusting for inflation. Sorry to Hell Gate and whoever else is mad at Ezra Klein, but building homes brings down rents: pew.org/en/research-an…

This is shaping up as the most consistent finding in housing studies: Building lots of luxury housing can reduce rents at the top of the market—but the people it helps most are renters struggling to afford even the least desirable units

New from me! I find that increasing housing supply in Philadelphia by 1% reduced rent growth by -0.427% from 2022-2025 I use the change in the Philly Tax Abatement as a natural experiment to quantify how the apartment boom impacted rents - summary below! analogurbanism.substack.com/p/more-evidenc…

Why nobody really knows the scale of the U.S. housing crisis wapo.st/4rzotws

People get angry at this point but aggregate American spending on eating/drinking out or having that food delivered is at a record high, and the proportion spent on store-bought food is at a joint-record low with the peak housing bubble era.

Knocking down social housing helped poor children prosper (from @TheEconomist) economist.com/united-states/…

New York is preparing to loosen its environmental law to make it faster and cheaper to build housing in the state wsj.com/real-estate/ne… via @WSJ

@mattyglesias I made something similar 10 years back here: public.tableau.com/shared/YXYRGC5…

Dueling approaches over how to fix America’s housing crisis are splitting Minnesota’s Twin Cities wsj.com/real-estate/mi… via @WSJ

Renters (on Apartment List) can now easily find properties that allow hosting on Airbnb using the new Airbnb-friendly filter, currently available in 25 cities and set to expand. apnews.com/press-release/…

Here's something fascinating happening in the apartment market right now. The cheapest, oldest apartments (Class C) are getting crushed right now. But ONLY in cities that just delivered tons of new apartments. Let me show you the numbers: Denver: Class C rents down 13.9% Naples: Class C rents down 13.5% Austin: Class C rents down 13.3% Phoenix: Class C rents down 10.5% San Antonio: Class C rents down 7.2% Dallas: Class C rents down 6.5% What do all these cities have in common? They just absorbed a massive wave of new apartments. But here's the twist... In cities that DIDN'T get a big supply wave? Class C rents are actually RISING. 20 cities saw Class C rents go UP more than 3%. 19 of those 20 cities had supply BELOW the national average. So what's going on? It's basically musical chairs. When a brand new luxury apartment opens up, where do those renters come from? They don't appear out of thin air. They move from slightly older apartments. Those apartments now have vacancies. So they drop their rents to compete. That pulls in renters from even older apartments. And down the chain it goes. Eventually it hits the oldest, cheapest apartments at the bottom. And here's why they get hit the hardest: People living in Class C apartments are already spending a huge chunk of their paycheck on rent. To fill empty units, landlords have to cut prices A LOT. Sometimes enough to attract people who couldn't afford market-rate apartments before. It's like a waterfall effect. The water (new supply) at the top pushes everything down. But here's the important part: This proves that building new apartments - even "luxury" ones - reduces rents all the way down the spectrum. If it was just an affordability crisis, you'd see Class C rents falling everywhere. In high-supply cities AND low-supply cities. But we're not seeing that. We're seeing a perfect split: Lots of new apartments = falling Class C rents Few new apartments = rising Class C rents New supply at the top creates relief at the bottom. Also: wages have been growing faster than rents for 3 straight years. More people can afford apartments today than before. The bottom line? This is what happens when you actually build housing. Supply works. (Chart and analysis from Jay Parsons - one of the sharpest real estate economists out there)

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[@opinion] The pandemic boom and all the new supply it generated combined with high Texas property taxes that disincentivize sitting on homes is making Austin a rare metro on the path back to affordability: bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

All 8.1 million US Census blocks. Visualized smoothly in 3D. Instant population and housing totals from a lasso selection. All running seamlessly in the browser, no traditional backend. While everyone’s talking about AI, it’s an incredible time for geospatial tech.

California tries to fix its housing mess (from @TheEconomist) economist.com/united-states/…

One takeaway from this article: It's not institutional investors gobbling up homes off the MLS and helping keep prices high. It's would-be individual sellers choosing to hold onto homes as rentals. Bad market to sell if you have the cash to move and buy another house.