blog about Austin gentrification (sales, condos, how much)

[creepy]

Here is a good blog about the gentrification of Austin.

Austin Housing Sucks

I am all about uncovering the truth of what is happening here with 100 people moving here each day. All the affordable housing being converted to condos for the rich. Lower numbers of poor people only because they had to move out of the county/city.

We want diversity and that includes all income levels.

If you are proud of what you are doing why not put your faces out there were we can see them? You are "turning" our city for a profit.

[orngkat]

Didn't they used to call them carpetbaggers?

[Aquitaine]

I see a lot of populist drivel. "The corporate tax breaks are disgusting."

Wtf do corporate tax breaks have to do with the cost of housing?

Supply and demand. She wants a bogeyman to blame for the fact that hordes of people would pay a fortune for her house. What that has to do with corporate tax breaks I don't know.

[unihills]

Originally Posted by Aquitaine

I see a lot of populist drivel. "The corporate tax breaks are disgusting."

Wtf do corporate tax breaks have to do with the cost of housing?

Supply and demand. She wants a bogeyman to blame for the fact that hordes of people would pay a fortune for her house. What that has to do with corporate tax breaks I don't know.

Wouldn't corporate tax breaks result in higher taxes for everyone else? Somebody has to make up that revenue shortfall for the city budget, no?

[Novacek]

Originally Posted by unihills

Wouldn't corporate tax breaks result in higher taxes for everyone else? Somebody has to make up that revenue shortfall for the city budget, no?

Compare the total "corporate tax breaks" to _just_ the public safety budget.

It's easy to see what's driving the cost of living in Austin.

[HappyTexan]

Originally Posted by creepy

Here is a good blog about the gentrification of Austin.

Austin Housing Sucks

I am all about uncovering the truth of what is happening here with 100 people moving here each day. All the affordable housing being converted to condos for the rich. Lower numbers of poor people only because they had to move out of the county/city.

We want diversity and that includes all income levels.

If you are proud of what you are doing why not put your faces out there were we can see them? You are "turning" our city for a profit.

No you don't.

The city has to approve every single permit to build.

[Aquitaine]

Wouldn't corporate tax breaks result in higher taxes for everyone else? Somebody has to make up that revenue shortfall for the city budget, no?

The short answer is 'no' but as I'm not a fan of corporate tax breaks, I'll get on board and say that you could end up a case like this. But I'm not sure what kind of tax breaks the author has mind. There are two kinds of 'corporate tax breaks,' at least in dealing with the type of populism the author likes:

1) Anything that can be written off in a tax return, e.g. capital expenses, equipment - these are the "big tax breaks" that oil companies get (and every other company) because if you sell 10 widgets for $100 each but you had to buy a widget producing machine for $100, you got a 'tax break' on $100 because we tax net income and not gross income (usually). This is not even relevant here because Texas has no income tax; it does have a corporate franchise tax but it's not especially large and shortfalls would have zero impact on housing in Austin.

2) Specific carve-outs for industries or individual companies, like the Texas enterprise fund that gives individual companies incentives for coming here (like Apple). These are also usually on the state level and so don't impact local or county taxes negatively - in fact, they arguably do the reverse, because the company and its employees all have to live and pay taxes locally even if the company is getting a pass on sales tax or whatever else the Governor's office wants to let them out of.

Then you have things like 'commercial rates' for energy or water, but this is just like having a commercial account at UPS - you buy in bulk and you pay less per unit of use. Nothing to do with taxes.

The only other thing I can think of is the argument that commercial property is under-appraised for TCAD purposes, which would indeed suggest that residential property appraisals must make up the difference -- but the math doesn't even come close to working out. First, it's a stretch to say that anything at all 'must make up the difference,' because you could just decide to under-appraise commercial property to encourage business activity and budget accordingly; maybe you could blame this for lack of money for infrastructure, but to link it directly to increases in things like school district or health fund taxes is sleight of hand since it isn't a zero-sum game.

You can't have 130+ people moving to one town every day for years and not have demand go through the roof. That is the biggest contribution to our property tax bills and it isn't the county's fault or the city's fault or rich people's fault. It's just how it is, and if you're sitting on a $400k piece of property, my sympathy for the author extends only so far as regret that she would be forced out - but if I lost my job and couldn't pay our thousands of dollars in property taxes, that's the world telling me that I can't afford to live where I live. It's ludicrous to suggest that some affordable housing initiative is going to fix things for people sitting on $400k pieces of property.

The second biggest contribution is that supply has not kept up with demand. If we could produce one new housing unit for every family moving here each day, prices would grow much more slowly. Since we can't, we have people over-bidding on properties that get sold in 48 hours. How much more information do you need to conclude that the market has changed underneath you? The author will get a lot of likes from left-leaning folks who bemoan anybody being forced out of their neighborhood but those same people are unlikely to vote for rezoning anything in their neighborhood to multi-family (not that that's unique to the left, either).

It's fashionable these days to complain with a lot of vulgarity about facts of life that we've understood for hundreds of years and imagine both that a) a small group of entities, probably private, is responsible for it and b) a (different) small group of entities, probably government, can do something significant about it. The result is 'signature proposals' for affordable housing that benefit lawyers but whose total occupancy wouldn't house the number of people that move here in one week.

[Novacek]

Originally Posted by Aquitaine

You can't have 130+ people moving to one town every day for years and not have demand go through the roof. That is the biggest contribution to our property tax bills and it isn't the county's fault or the city's fault or rich people's fault.

But that's not how it really works. On a collective level (not necessarily the individual level) appraisals and property taxes are disconnected.

If there had been no demand, and property had only increased by 2% /year, we'd still be paying the same property tax bills (approximately).

The city sets the budget first, then figures out what the rate needs to be to meet that.

Appraisals could be cut in half for everyone tomorrow, and it wouldn't do a damn thing for our taxes. It's spending that drives up property taxes. Not appraisals or demand.

[orngkat]

I live near the blog's author. Except for various VMUs going up that mostly house a certain demographic, the lion's share of new dwellings being built are 3000 sf+ houses with $750,000 price tags and up. I would be all for some "middle housing" in the hood but the developers don't seem at all interested in going that direction.

[ATX Wahine]

That's a "good blog"? Reading nothing but foul language, angst, and stories of taking a baby to a bar to drink pitchers of beer?