The housing trap

Do we all actually want housing affordability?

The housing trap
Blazer Tag in South Austin on Saturday afternoon.

Talk to me!

Some of you may not be aware, but you can reply directly to this email and I'll see it. I love hearing from readers and it gets lonely on this side of the computer screen. So if you have any thoughts, nice or nasty, in response to anything I write, please don't hesitate to tell me! Or just say hi. I'm a big fan of human interaction.

In addition to friendly chit-chat, I'm also always hungry for information. If you have any insight into the issues I'm covering (or not covering!), I'm all ears. You can rest assured that anything you tell me is confidential unless you authorize me to publish it. I take the protection of my sources very seriously.

Are renters & homeowners on the same team?

The Wall Street Journal (pay wall) has a front page story today on the decline of the Austin real estate market. The headline:

YIMBYs on social media are clowning on the gloomy framing.

For anyone who has been engaged in Austin politics, it's hard to imagine that a decline in the cost of housing would be a cause for despair. At least on the surface, the housing debate in this town has always been about how to bring prices down, not about whether they should go down.

But if you scratch below the surface you'll realize that not everyone was actually rooting for prices to decline.