Comment by sorcerer-mar
12 hours ago
I think urbanists should be a lot more cautious of throwing Austin around as a success story. It is still too early to say whether they've found a good equilibrium in supply/demand that limits price increases or they're cresting a major COVID-triggered speculative glut which will be very damaging to the city.
I'd bet that Miami is just a few years ahead of it (entering serious decline) and within a decade Austin will be seen as an obvious-in-retrospect cautionary tale.
[flagged]
Austin is a success story in the same way Detroit is.
Austin population cratered and it still has not recovered to 2020 level. That's why the housing costs there decreased.
In other words: force citizens out of your city, and the price will fall.
This is not true, I don't know if you live here or why you repeat it.
Population has receded slightly in the last couple years in Austin proper, is still greater than 2020, and the metro area has not shrunk year over year at all, although growth has slowed.
> This is not true, I don't know if you live here or why you repeat it.
Population by year:
2019: 978,763
2020 high estimate for Jan 1 (996,369) - https://austin.culturemap.com/news/city-life/01-15-20-austin...
2020: 961,855 (Census, low mark)
2023: 979,882
2024 (estimated high mark): 986,928
So yes, the population cratered from a high in early 2020. This brought down prices with a 2 year lag, as owners started to get rid of empty units. The prices will come right back up now, that the population is recovering.
ACS, the Decennial Census, and the Austin Demographer has the data we need. Let's take a look https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2023.B01003?q=B01003:+T... and https://data.census.gov/table/DECENNIALPL2020.P1?q=P1:+TOTAL... (no ACS in 2020 because of COVID, but we got the Census) and https://demographics-austin.hub.arcgis.com/
You'll see that the ACS 1-year was not performed and released in 2020 due to data quality
I think there is no single source that shows population decrease post 2020 to a value in 2020 from the same source. But the sources do differ, so likely what has happened is that you have not performed proper data hygiene. You cannot regress across sources without compensating for cross-source differences.
In this case we have the property that 2021 onwards shows increase in ACS and that Austin Demographics shows increase from 2020 onwards but that there is difference between 2020 numbers between sources.
We also see that Austin Demographer has higher number in 2019 than ACS sample https://demographics-austin.hub.arcgis.com/documents/cf1519a...
This means it's probably not good idea to compare 2023 ACS number to 2020 Austin Demographer number. Fortunately, we have Austin Demographer number from 2019, 2020, and 2025. From all this, we can conclude that cratering hypothesis is likely false. We must conclude that following statement of yours is unlikely:
> Austin population cratered and it still has not recovered to 2020 level.