The housing situation in Canada is insane and is so obviously due to not building enough housing and bringing too many people into the country via immigration. The fact that it costs 1200$/month for a room in a rural area is incredibly damning.
I went to college in Ottawa, and now I live in Austin Texas. It's similar in size, although Austin has been growing more lately. Curiously, they are also both capitols, college towns and they have a river flowing through them.
A major difference is that Austin has a new development with 200-400 unites on every block it seems. Cranes are everywhere downtown, and even in random neighborhoods they have huge new developments. Ottawa has no shortage of land, there's a huge amount of available land to develop in either direction, but they evidently aren't building nearly as much.
The result? I'm looking at 2 bedroom apartments, and they are 1000$ cheaper than they were 3 years ago when I first moved here. Rent has gone down and continues to go down. I'm seeing studio apartments in the middle of the city renting out for 800$ now!
> bringing too many people into the country via immigration
The housing situation has clearly severely declined post pandemic at the same time that immigration was restarted and increased, but I gotta point out that Vancouver has had a severe homeless crisis my entire life, long, long before this recent government changed immigration rates or even came to power.
As far back as 2007 I was reading articles about how Vancouver was net losing the sort of affordable housing that those most at risk of homelessness depended on. Unsurprisingly the amount of homeless in Vancouver has continued to increase.
But you're absolutely correct that the core of this problem is a severe lack of building. Both a lack of construction of market product and below market publicly owned housing. Building more homes is the solution to get our way out of this crisis and end homelessness.
If there is any real villain here to blame IMO it is Jean Chretien, who with the severe austerity budget of 1993 completely got the Federal government out of all social housing development and building of housing plunged to near nil for decades.
True, on all points, but it wasn't just him, it's been a decades long process of multiple parts of the economy failing imo. One does wonder though how things would be if we simply cancelled zoning and other needlessly bureaucratic development restrictions in the 80s, and enabled automatically correcting policy that was outside the hands of both property owners and politicians. Every time I see an anti tower sign in east van it makes me want to throw a rock through that person's window, and the fact this tension exists on a local level is ridiculous.
We have a natural experiment: Minneapolis vs. Madison.
Minneapolis abolished the single-family zoning and parking requirements in 2018. And it worked, developers swarmed the city like vultures attracted to carrion.
Madison did no such nonsense.
Can you guess the impact of these policies on housing costs?
FWIW: as a Minneapolis resident, my experience is that there is active hostility and grassroots rejection of adding dense housing in neighborhoods that are traditionally single family homes. I would be curious to see how much dense housing has actually been built post-2018 relative to the historical norm, as the small number of apartment buildings I've seen go up along light rail and buss corridors have fought tooth and nail against certain demographics in the neighborhoods.
So... you want all new buildings to have parking minimums? First of all, pass, but secondly what about that article justifies your cynicism, and lastly what exactly is the root of your anger? Do you just love being isolated to the point that you think everyone else hates or should hate living somewhere where they don't need a car?
I'd be pretty annoyed about only being able to own something that had to have a dedicated parking space. What a waste.
There is too much complexity in that single example and the law of supply/demand has been proven too frequently for it to not make sense that increasing demand to meet supply would reduce cost.
Firstly, your link is focused on zoning changes, specifically how they are insufficient to prompt addition supply to be built.
From your linked blog post:
> Freemark finds extremely mixed and uncertain evidence for the effects of upzoning, and one of several reasons he identifies is that the link between upzoning and actual housing production is tenuous. In other words, “Are they allowed to build it?” is a different question from, “Are they building it?”
Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases the supply… which indicates agreement that the price problem is one of insufficient supply.
EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact price. This is the contention of the comment I responded to, and it is fundamentally different from the claim that zoning changes fail to increase supply.
> Firstly, your link is focused on zoning changes, specifically how they are insufficient to prompt addition supply to be built.
Yeah. The misery pushers (urbanists) can't admit outright that their ideology is leading to disaster, can they? So they now need not only zoning restrictions lifted, but the state must also build housing and give it out to "deserving" people for cheap.
> Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases the supply… which indicates agreement that the price problem is one of insufficient supply.
I'm not arguing against supply-and-demand in general (I'm not a communist idiot). I'm arguing against the _density_ increases.
> EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact price.
But it did. The real estate transaction index clearly shows that there were no positive effects from the new construction.
Moreover, I analyzed all the real estate sales in the US, Canada, and parts of Europe since 1995. I have not found a single example of a large (>100k population) city that decreased the housing sale prices by increasing density.
Even during the crash of 2007, the dense housing crashed less than comparative nearby sparse housing.
The scholarly literature is also unambiguous. The best effects of density increases are either mild (transient effects on rent), or indirect (migration chains).
You keep referring to people who like cities that function as cities as "misery pushers" and then in the same breath doing as much as you can to create an association between increased density and all these hypothetical negative possibilities. Likewise it just seems as though you've developed some level of prejudice based on the negative experience you're contending with in your neighborhood, and then extrapolating that quite severely, because you think you've been lied to. It's tricky to reconcile how if you were inclined to be optimistic about the prospect of urbanism to begin with, you'd be so intensely and easily convinced otherwise, or surprised that the creation of an arbitrary higher density building didn't turn your low density town into European capital city overnight. Like how does it happen that you lived in no specific place in Europe for example, then to where you are now, and one thing gets built which convinces you that actually every city in Europe is and has always been wrong.
Your chart shows two lines that seem to represent sales of something over time in nearby cities, which may or may not be relevant, but are at most a narrow slice of what one would need to look at in order to understand what's going on over in Minneapolis if anything.
You then create a strawman who thinks the removal of zoning restrictions will automatically lead to a utopia in which we have no other human problems or economic systems to contend with, even going so far as to dismiss someone on the basis of a lacking argument against a claim that nobody made.
> You keep referring to people who like cities that function as cities as "misery pushers"
That's an apt description.
> in the same breath doing as much as you can to create an association between increased density and all these hypothetical negative possibilities.
Why are they hypothetical? Density has long been associated with worse outcomes (higher crime, etc.). I can provide plenty of citations to scholarly literature.
> Like how does it happen that you lived in no specific place in Europe for example, then to where you are now
I grew up in Russia (Izhevsk), moved to Germany (Karlsruhe), then to Ukraine (Kyiv), and (briefly) to the Netherlands before coming to the US. I did not have a car in any of these places.
> and one thing gets built which convinces you that actually every city in Europe is and has always been wrong.
Yes. I'm able to compare the life in the US and in Europe first-hand. And Europe has plenty of dark secrets of its own. For example, Copenhagen in Denmark became the world's most liveable city by ruthlessly controlling its population. It still has not reached its peak number in 1970-s. Bet you didn't know that?
> Your chart shows two lines that seem to represent sales of something over time in nearby cities, which may or may not be relevant, but are at most a narrow slice of what one would need to look at in order to understand what's going on over in Minneapolis if anything.
I have real estate data with street-level information. It's not a public dataset, so I'm replicating my results using public datasets.
> You then create a strawman who thinks the removal of zoning restrictions will automatically lead to a utopia
No. I'm saying that removal of zoning limits to allow increased density does NOT lead to lower prices. It leads to increased density and increased misery as a result.
Minneapolis is simply a good example of this. There is another very good one: Seattle (where I live now). It increased its density by 25% over the last 12 years, many times leading the nation in the number of active construction cranes. The result? Faster price growth than even in SF.
> No. I'm saying that removal of zoning limits to allow increased density does NOT lead to lower prices. It leads to increased density and increased misery as a result.
I never made that claim.
> It's not a public dataset, so I'm replicating my results using public datasets.
You'll need to do better than just comparing real estate sales. If you're going to make a coherent argument based on data, it should at least attempt to show the relationship between more datapoints than just arbitrary sales and time, especially with only a 6 year timespan. Whether there's something there or not, you're not providing a substantial enough analysis to be compelling here.
It's fine if you don't like denser areas. Plenty of people who grow up in denser cities move out because they feel like they're sick of people, but cities wouldn't be cities if they're wasn't a reason to be there, and many people prefer it. There's not a chance in hell I'd move back to a car dependent hellscape, because I grew up in one, and that's true misery to me.
> It increased its density by 25% over the last 12 years, many times leading the nation in the number of active construction cranes. The result? Faster price growth than even in SF.
Again, weird cherry-picked comparison that wouldn't surprise anyone who's aware of the two tech hubs.
Austin is an interesting case. It tripped me up a bit when I saw it.
But it turned out that my prediction was correct because the Austin population went _down_ during the pandemic.
Population:
2019 - 978,763
2022 - 975,418
2023 - 979,882
The overall Travis County population went up a bit. And the prices, in the places other than Austin, are also up.
I can also give a prediction, if Austin population growth recovers (not a given), the price growth rate will quickly outpace the surrounding Travis County.
Looking at the population of Austin proper is pretty silly here, and similar just looking at Travis. The city proper lost population from 2019-2020 as many cities did during the early pandemic, but grew each year since. The Austin metro area has grown every one of these years.
In every comparable city in the country, housing prices are up. In Austin, they are down.
> In every comparable city in the country, housing prices are up. In Austin, they are down.
Now compare the population. Travis County population (sans Austin) went up, so the prices are also up. And Travis County actually has _more_ new units than Austin proper.
The driver for the price decreases in Austin is the population drop, not the new construction.
Population dropped 2019-2020, but population has increased each year since 2020, both in Austin proper and austin greater metro area. Housing prices increased until about 2022 when they started dropping, and (along with rent) have been trending downwards since.
If your point is, "construction has to outstrip population increase in order to decrease prices", then well, yeah, we agree fully.
If your point is that huge amounts of new units going on the market in Austin does not have a significant impact on prices, I don't think that's supported by any evidence or makes any sense.
Those abolishments are way less intense than you're thinking. There's still a ton of restrictions that make building even the triplexes that they technically legalized actually get built. Things like floor/area ratios and setbacks, which make building dwellings that people want difficult.
You live near one of these developments? Your reaction may be correct, but my experience has been that the density has brought amenities. A brewery, a cafe, and a good restaurant moved into vacant/underutilized spaces. My street hasn’t been had issues with long-term parkers. Crime’s no issue. IDK. My experience doesn’t align with your certainty.
I actually do live in a neighborhood affected by densification, although not in Minneapolis. The "amenities" got worse, a couple of local small stores were demolished and replaced with apartment buildings. A couple of these apartment buildings are "low barrier housing", meaning that they are given to junkies. So the property crime in the area skyrocketed (not helped by newly opened transit), and we don't have a single 24-hour pharmacy in the area anymore.
The street parking is now oversubscribed, so my friends often have to circle around the area for quite a while to find a spot when they visit me.
These changes actually made me look into the question of density. Before that first-hand experience, I used to be a pro-urbanist victim of propaganda. And yes, I lived in Europe and I got my driving license when I was about 30.
That’s unfortunate. Maybe it can be done well or be done poorly. From my experience as a homeowner in Minneapolis, the dense housing has been net neutral/positive.
I don't think you read and understood the article you just linked. That is talking about a very broad set of reforms, not the single family home zoning abolishment.
>and bringing too many people into the country via immigration.
In a functioning economy, more immigration will just result in more housing being built, as long as the immigrants are working. Especially since the cost of housing construction is largely the cost of labor. Immigration is a distraction from the core inability to build more housing.
Can I create a small company of a half a dozen new immigrant trades, buy single family homes, tear them down and build new fourplexes? Nope this is largely banned (though ever so slowly changing in some areas).
The severe regulation has distorted the market and created a housing shortage that is legally prevented from being addressed no matter what available new immigrant talent is at hand.
>And yet the non-functioning economy might be a result of the excessive immigration.
It's not. If you have a narrative for how immigration could explain why there's record-high home prices and yet there isn't a corresponding spike in construction, then please post it. Because this is pretty obviously a problem of suppressed supply.
I’m not implying that immigration is the only reason for higher housing prices. My opinion is that 0% interest rates and loose credit are the primary reason.
However, simple supply/demand would suggest that immigration AND 0% interest rates both affect demand quickly while supply requires securing land, building homes and getting approval to build homes takes significant time. Migrations are happening at a faster rate than housing can be built so it definitely has an impact on prices.
On HN and on tech twitter I often see this statement: “the reason rents are high is because we don’t build enough houses.”
But I don’t think that’s really true, I think that’s very simplistic. The missing observation is that housing has become an asset class in a way it wasn’t in the past. Large numbers of people purchase houses to rent seek as landlords, and the only limit to the demand for rent seeking is the ability of those landlords to borrow money. So a major determinant of rent is now the ability to borrow money, the interest rate, and the number of people wanting to be rent seeking landlords.
Increasing the housing supply by the amount physically practical in say the course of a decade is probably unlikely to make much difference to rents if the primary driver of rent prices is the ability of rent seekers to borrow to buy the new properties. First time buyers can’t compete on borrowing because they have smaller deposits or less access to capital, so they are forced to rent, which means the rent seekers can continue to buy up properties.
In the UK, buy to let mortgages have become a substitute for pensions for the baby boomer generation. Encouraged by the government, housing as a yielding asset has essentially taxed the young to pay for the boomers retirement.
Whilst housing can be used as a rent seeking asset, it is very unlikely building new houses is going to lower rents. Landlords will simply always be able to outbid renters, so rent will remain at the height of whatever the renters can afford, I.e. extract the maximum rent possible. There is an endless demand for housing from rent seekers, provided they can rent out that property.
Couple this with the fact that the government in the UK at least has used the property market to hide the reality of the economy - that the economy is basically collapsing - there is so much vested interest in maintaining the status quo that no regulation will be introduced that will cause rents to drop, such as limiting the access of rent seekers to capital, or preserving properties for owner buyers etc.
Tl;dr - rents are expensive not because there is too little housing, but because we need them to be expensive.
Then why doesn't the government put limits on the no. of houses/flats a canadian family can buy? Allowing wealthy individuals to keep buying housing for rent-seeking isn't going to help the problem. Beyond the one for staying, how many more should they be able to own, if any?
From the houseowners' perspective, if they can only own one that they stay in, what alternatives the government needs to structure to balance the restriction, assuming the restriction is put in place? Should everyone put their savings in stock market etc and be subject to losses due to it? Because they too need a stable and inflation pegged income for their retirement.
The thing is even if the government did this, it’s easy to get around it, many landlords simple setup an incorporation or even multiple ones to purchase properties. It’s easy and cheap in Canada.
> Then why doesn't the government put limits on the no. of houses/flats a canadian family can buy?
Well, mainly the answer to this in public discourse is the same reason people say "we just need to build more flats" --- because people believe in the magical powers of "markets", like there's some natural law that leaving things to the market will lead to desirable outcomes.
But the actual politics of it is that if you did this, then where are you going to get the boomers pensions from? And where is the economic "growth" going to come from? See my other comment.
We're all in a big ponzi scheme because we exported most of our real welath-generating activity.
We've seen London prices drop recently. That's mainly because we've seen higher interest rates and a flight of capital from the UK. People aren't as confident in the ponzi scheme continuing. It may also be in part because of huge drop in population post-brexit, although AFAICT there are no accurate numbers on that because the government doesn't want to admit that Brexit is a disaster.
I would guess Austin might be seeing a drop because it was "the big thing" for a while but now the consensus is it is not going to rival San Francisco. The rent seekers are moving elsewhere because there are bigger capital gains to be made? Just a guess, but you can probably verify it by checking house prices in Austin vs San Francisco.
In Austin, it's because they are building a huge amount of housing!
Like yeah, it probably is less profitable to speculate on housing in Austin, where pricing is improving because of increased supply, you need to do a little more than hand wave of your argument is that the causation goes in the other direction.
This is an interesting perspective on increased supply that I haven't considered before. It is remarkable how similar the Canadian housing situation is to the UK's.
It's the same everywhere, and even China is copying the model. Housing is a fixed asset and everyone needs one, so the moment you allow people to borrow to buy and let then the renters are stuck and the house prices soar.
The reason it's the same everywhere is that this model magically creates "growth" and "wealth". My house is worth £100K. House prices increase. So now there is more wealth in the economy (there isn't, but economists think there is). Now it is worth £120K.
I remortgage and - voila! I have £20K to spend. Now I can spend that extending or upgrading my house, now the plumber and decorator have jobs, and Amazon or whoever sell new curtains, and everyone is happy.
This is a particularly useful model to follow if you don't actually produce any real wealth, because you exported all your manufacturing jobs abroad and whilst we like to pretend an economy can run on services, in reality we run a massive trade deficit and are selling off assets to pay for it (guess which assets we sell --- we export house ownership to rent seekers from abroad! My last landlords were based in China and I live in the UK! The system works)
There are things we can do besides/in addition to permitting more housing construction. Namely, lowering the barrier to entry for construction:
If we reduce the minimum lot size, then we reduce the minimum land purchase required in order to construct housing. And of course, lower upfront investment means lower risk and more newcomers are financially capable of buying in in the first place.
Lowering turnaround times for approval would also lower costs, and broadening the range of housing that gets by-right approval is a common way of doing that. Another is to just set a cap on the approval period, e.g. after 100 days, if you haven't received a response rejecting your application, then it's approved by default, and any rejection must be accompanied by a specific stated reason for rejection.
The overarching problem, though, is that there needs to be a political will to reduce housing costs (as you implied). But even that is partially missing the point, IMO - plenty of NIMBYs are acting for rational non-financial reasons - they're afraid that higher local density will increase local traffic and take up the finite local free parking spaces. Free parking is especially problematic, because paid parking will never satisfy people who see other people getting free parking in the same area. And of course the whole car-traffic problem is driven by cities being especially car-centric, with car traffic fundamentally not scaling up well compared to public transport.
Yep. One might ask what happens if you don't have a functioning economy? Well, this kind of state. A massive failure for anyone but those who don't have theirs.
Why is a drive for growth bad? Seems like the double-speak of saying growth is bad while happily profiting off of and simultaneously restricting it is whats bad.
Growing up in a prairie city I heard this sentiment from people who simply don't like other people constantly, and I'm like "When did you try growing, you stagnant deteriorated shithole!?", and sprawl doesn't count. They hate ambition, they hate people, they hate taxes, and have no interesting ideas. They hate traffic, but refuse to do anything but drive. Their healthcare system and infrastructure is failing, there is no new economic activity happening; get busy growing or get busy dying. It doesn't work though if you stop for 70 years and then try to catch up.
A lot of what you say here I agree with. I'm not sure that I'd define maintenance of infrastructure as growth though, and I too hate sprawl.
Growing the economy is great, but only if done in such a way that it's sustainable. Growth or death is too simplistic, perfectly captured by the grandparent comment. Bringing in immigrants to generate growth when you can't house the current population seems crazy. Things don't have to get bigger to be successful. You could make a business and have zero employees and make a living. Does it need to be a massive company that's growing? There is always a limit, and something will eventually prevent growth, so why does it have to be an external force?
Where I am we are trashing the waterways and the land in pursuit of money. You can't swim in most our rivers anymore - the recent numbers look good though, as the government redefined 'swimmable' and now it's 'safe', despite the contaminants.
https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/explainer-new-swimmable-water-...
That's at best a less-than-complete view of immigration.
For immigrants themselves, it is usually an issue of self-determination and freedom.
I can't say I'm fully privy to the immigration debate in Canada, but framing it as an issue of "growth" could not be a complete view of the advocates of immigration. Especially with the level of acceptance of refugees in Canada.
The not enough housing aspect is completely incidental to immigration. In my city, the overriding reason that we have not built enough housing for even our own children is that people show up to block any environmentally friendly housing proposal, largely arguing against growth. In other words, using the framework you are right now! And it's a rather twisted version of the "we can't have growth" framework because it ignores the underlying reason for not allowing growth: environmental sustainability. So instead, the only housing that gets built is the most environmentally disastrous type of housing: sprawl far away from the locations where people need to be for their jobs and everyday life, causing massive environmental destruction.
I would argue that there are few more counterproductive ways to talk about the environment than to bring up a "need for growth." First of all almost nobody actually cares that much about growth in 2025 and secondly it has disastrous consequences when the rubber meets the road.
I don't care about growth, nor do most people I know. We don't need to endlessly consume to be happy. The world won't end when this economic system unravels either, it's not the first and it won't be the last one to fail.
It was massive turmoil for sure, but world didn’t end (I’m referencing your earlier comment, not downplaying the devastating fall).
How would continual growth work? We will run out of everything.
Continual growth is possible in at least two ways:
1) standard sigmoids, which never stop growing yet are also finite
2) standard ecological growth, where growth is never ending but so is death. This is much more typical of systems like capitalism than sigmoids growth. New upstarts experience exponential growth for a whole, then peak, and then die.
Of course be careful of mentioning these standard scientific observations around those in the degrowth cult, as the cognitive dissonance may cause an unpleasant explosion.
In our current, over-regulated market: yes absolutely. In a healthy market, cost of low-end housing should approach the cost of labor + raw material (plus necessary overhead for e.g. inspections, plus a reasonable risk-adjusted return on construction). Cost of materials/labor simply slides/scales with additional stories / more difficult terrain.
Land/space, while not an infinite resource, is hardly limited on the scale necessary to house people outside of extremely small niches. Views of central park are always going to be expensive, but there are a lot of square miles <45minutes to times square where someone would very profitably build and run (e.g.) an SRO if they were allowed to.
Also in healthy market bottom end should be housing build decades ago and already fully paid for. Now it would mean large mid-rises. But still, entirely reasonable standard of living when you are not been brainwashed into needing expensive wasteful single family buildings.
In a functioning economy, people won't be feeling pressure to move into a handful of population centers.
Canada has PLENTY of free space for construction, and modern construction is pretty cheap and efficient. But economic forces are concentrating the growth in a few areas. Well-intentioned efforts to force "affordable housing" and "walkable neighborhoods" make these forces even worse.
The root cause fix is to stop the economic forces that pack people into ever smaller areas.
People have been moving from rural areas to cities since the beginning of the industrial revolution. People want to improve their economic lot, and that is the most likely way to do it. I didn't know of it is even possible to stop that in a capitalist society.
Fantastic links. The same thing has come to mind when thinking about my home town. They amalgamated all the suburbs back in the 70s, and they're just these sprawling desolate rural towns still, which almost certainly cost the overall city an unsustainable multiple of what they contribute, and they're still building new cul-de-sac laden hellscapes, that sometimes don't even have sidewalks, and who's only supply of services are provided by the largest big box stores you see everywhere. It's brutal.
I have the sense that if these suburbs had to figure out they're own shorter term scaling strategy, especially without being able to infinitely kick the infrastructure can down the road, things would be required to change a bit more rapidly. What they have instead are these miserable little cabin-esque bungalows with deer running about, concrete that is literally crumbling to gravel, and a very weird thread of prejudice against apartments of any kind.
The market is correcting from that thing that was in full swing three years ago (the pandemic) and drove prices way up for a number of factors, basically none having to do with construction:
There is a concerted disinformation campaign out there to prop up homeowner and landlord property values by denying the housing shortage. Not just in Canada, but throughout the Anglosphere.
>>> there's a huge amount of available land to develop in either direction
You are missing the point. Its not how much land there is, or there isn't. Its what regulations will prevent you from building anything.
Contrast what's happened in the last 2 decades in Austin, TX vs Boise, ID for example. Both cities with huge amounts of land available. Both cities attracted major migration. Yet, only one of the 2 has very little building code preventing things from being built. Boise rents for a single family house (2 bed 2 bath) went from $500 per month in 1995 to ~$3100 in 2022, for example.
At least some of the difference is that building codes can be a lot more lax in Texas as compared to Canada. It rarely gets as cold, and certainly not for as long.
> The result? I'm looking at 2 bedroom apartments, and they are 1000$ cheaper than they were 3 years ago when I first moved here. Rent has gone down and continues to go down. I'm seeing studio apartments in the middle of the city renting out for 800$ now!
That's not a result of new construction. It's a result of the Austin population declining in absolute numbers: 978,763 in 2019, 975,418 in 2022. It bounced back a bit to 979,882 in 2023.
Travis County grew a little bit, but all the growth is in the suburban areas.
That 2023 number is roughly a thousand larger than that 2019 number. The changes to all of the numbers you're quoting are in the noise as far as considering changes to the cost of housing.
I went to college in Ottawa, and now I live in Austin Texas. It's similar in size, although Austin has been growing more lately. Curiously, they are also both capitols, college towns and they have a river flowing through them.
A major difference is that Austin has a new development with 200-400 unites on every block it seems. Cranes are everywhere downtown, and even in random neighborhoods they have huge new developments. Ottawa has no shortage of land, there's a huge amount of available land to develop in either direction, but they evidently aren't building nearly as much.
The result? I'm looking at 2 bedroom apartments, and they are 1000$ cheaper than they were 3 years ago when I first moved here. Rent has gone down and continues to go down. I'm seeing studio apartments in the middle of the city renting out for 800$ now!