Derek Thompson

What we've seen essentially is that Austin built an enormous number of homes in the 2010s and early 2020s.

And average rents have gone down, down, down over the last 18 to 24 months.

Austin is like the canonical story here.

But the story that I find more impressive in a way is Dallas, Texas.

Dallas, Texas, between 2019 and the early 2020s, added a population equivalent to the size of urban Boston.

Hundreds of thousands of people moved into the Dallas metro.

And if Dallas were like Los Angeles and San Francisco, the average price of a home in Dallas, Texas right now would be around $3 billion.

But that's not what happened.

$3 billion?

No, I'm just joking.

It would be so absurdly high.

You have to calculate it like Bitcoin.

But what happened instead, housing prices in Dallas have actually declined over the last three and a half years.

Dallas built so much that construction increased per capita throughout this period.

Dallas builds more housing today than any other metro in the country.

That is a triumph of allowing the housing market to work.

And that's because housing is not a special kind of good.

It's a good that, like so many other goods, is responsive to supply and demand.

Given a steady level of demand, if you restrict supply, prices go up.

If you add supply, prices stabilize.