The New York Times Just Used Austin to Make a National Argument. Here's the Part You Only See From the Ground.

This morning the New York Times editorial board ran a long piece arguing that America needs to build more housing. Their headline example was Austin.

That is not a small thing. The most influential opinion page in the country looked at every major metro in America and pointed at our city as the proof that the supply argument actually works. Their lead number is the price-to-income ratio. In 1950 the median American home cost about 2.5 times the median household income. By 1985 it was 3.1. Today it is almost five. In San Francisco it is 12.4. In Austin it is 4.6. Still high by historical standards, but the lowest of any major growth metro in the country, and the only one moving in the right direction.

The piece's other headline number is one most Austin homeowners already feel. Local home prices are down roughly thirteen percent from their peak. Rents have fallen too. According to the data the editorial relies on, Austin broke ground on 140 homes per 1,000 households over the past decade. San Francisco managed 22. New York 23. Boston 27. We were not building a little faster than the coast. We were building five to six times faster.

So the editorial is right on the facts. What it cannot do, written from a desk in Manhattan, is tell you what that looks like at street level. That part is our job.

What actually happened here

Most of the building came in apartments. From 2021 through 2023, Austin permitted 957 new apartments for every 100,000 residents. San Antonio, the closest Texas comparison, permitted 346. By 2024 we were delivering apartments faster than any city our size in the country, and the result was the one supply-and-demand told us to expect.

The NYT specifically points to projects like the new 66-story downtown high-rise (now the city's second-tallest building) and Easton Park out in the southeast, where two-bedroom homes have been trading below $325,000. Those two examples were not accidental. They were chosen because they capture both ends of what Austin actually did. Build dense and tall where you can, and let new suburban-scale product compete on price at the entry level.

If you have walked a lease tour in the last year, you have seen the other side of it. Two months free. Waived admin fees. Six hundred dollar move-in credits. Buildings near the Domain offering eight weeks free. None of that is normal. All of it traces back to the same supply story the editorial is celebrating.

The part of the argument that frustrates a lot of Austin locals

The editorial makes a claim that lands hard with some Austin residents. It says that building luxury apartments helps affordability at the bottom, because higher-income renters move into the new buildings and stop competing for older, cheaper ones. The technical term is filtering.

For years the response to that in Austin has been a version of "sure, in theory." The data from the last three years actually backs it up. Rents in the newest, most expensive Class A buildings fell about three percent. Rents in older, non-luxury Class C buildings, the ones working families actually rent, fell roughly eleven percent. The biggest beneficiaries of all the gleaming new towers were not the people moving into them. They were the people in 1980s-era walkups three miles away whose rent finally stopped climbing.

That is not a moral argument about who deserves what. It is just what the numbers show. And it is the part of the editorial's case that we think is most worth sitting with, because it cuts against the intuition almost everyone has when they see another crane go up on South Lamar.

What the editorial cannot see from New York

A few things worth saying out loud, because they matter if you actually live here, are thinking about moving here, or are trying to sell a house here.

The building was not evenly distributed. The new towers went up where land was zoned for them. East Riverside. The Domain and the rest of North Central. Mueller. Downtown. The South Lamar corridor. Parts of East Austin. The established single-family neighborhoods we work in every day, Tarrytown, Northwest Hills, Westlake, Rollingwood, Circle C, Allandale, Brentwood, Crestview, saw very little new construction. Prices in those areas softened, but they did not crash, because a 380-unit mid-rise on Riverside is not really a substitute for a 1950s ranch on a quarter-acre lot with a good elementary attached. Different products, different buyers, different math.

The relief has a clock on it. Multifamily starts in Austin have fallen off a cliff. New apartment construction starts hit a ten-year low in 2024. Under-construction inventory is down more than fifty percent year over year. Developers who rode the boom are not pulling permits at anything close to the same pace. The renters enjoying eight weeks free this spring should understand that the pipeline filling the market right now is the last wave, not the next one. By late 2027 and into 2028, you should expect Austin rents to firm up again. Possibly sharply.

Schools changed nothing. The supply story did very little to add seats in the districts buyers actually move here for. A family relocating from Minneapolis or Chicago is not just buying a house. They are buying access to Eanes ISD, or Lake Travis, or a specific elementary in Round Rock or Leander. A thirty percent jump in the regional housing count is not the same thing as a thirty percent increase in seats at Bridge Point Elementary. That mismatch is part of why pricing has softened so unevenly across the metro. Inventory in some attendance zones still trades briskly. Inventory three miles away sits.

The water question is real. Austin handles wastewater recycling about as well as any major American city, and that buys us time. It does not solve the underlying math if growth keeps compounding. Texas faces serious long-term water questions, and Austin sits in the middle of them. Any honest read of this market's next decade has to take that seriously, especially for buyers thinking in twenty-year horizons rather than five.

Austin's specific policy mechanism was carrots, not sticks. The editorial gets this right and it is worth underlining. Austin did not get its results by mandating affordability into every project. It did the opposite. It offered developers more height and more density in exchange for adding affordable units or environmental features. Other cities tried mandates and saw permits collapse. Denver is the cleanest example. Austin's permit volume kept climbing. Local policy nerds have argued about this for a decade. The last three years answered the argument.

What this means right now if you are buying or selling in Austin

For buyers, this is the most negotiable Austin market we have seen since 2014. Inventory is up. Days on market are stretching. Price reductions are normal again. Rates are not low, but they are no longer the shock they were two years ago. The fundamentals the NYT is describing, the same fundamentals that pushed prices down thirteen percent, are exactly what gives you leverage on a purchase right now. That leverage is not permanent. The same supply story that opened this window is what will eventually close it.

For sellers, the harder truth is that the boom reset what buyers walk in expecting. Buyers touring your home this spring have toured eight or ten others. Pricing to a comp from late 2022 is not pricing to the market. Condition matters more than it has in a decade. Staging matters. The list price you choose in week one shapes everything that follows. We have watched well-prepared, accurately-priced homes still go under contract in two to three weeks in the right zip codes. We have also watched aspirationally-priced homes sit for ninety days, take three reductions, and finally trade for less than they would have at a realistic number on day one. The market is rewarding sellers who are honest with themselves about it.

The bigger picture

The reason the New York Times chose Austin is the same reason we keep telling buyers relocating from California, the Pacific Northwest, Illinois, and New York that this market is unusual. We are one of the only major American cities that actually ran the experiment at scale. Build a lot of housing, fast, with carrots instead of sticks, and see what happens to prices. The answer was the one the supply-siders predicted. Prices came down. Renters got relief. Buyers got leverage. New residents got room.

The piece does not dwell on the side effects. Traffic. Water. School capacity. The shape of neighborhoods that changed faster than residents expected. The people who got priced out before the relief arrived and are not coming back. Those are real, and they are part of any complete story of what just happened here.

We are glad the editorial board pointed at our city. We also think the picture is more complicated than the graphs allow. That is what local actually means.

If you are buying, selling, or relocating to Austin and want a real conversation about which neighborhoods the supply story has and has not reached, that is what we do. Reach out anytime.  512-466-5224

The Schmitz & Smith Group is an Austin-based real estate team with more than 300 client reviews on Google, recognized in RealTrends top team rankings, Austin Elite 25, and with luxury home credentials including CLHMS and Platinum Top 50.