Increasing Rents

Speaker: it's pretty much universally true rents are going up all around the country, but it's even more severe in migration destinations, like the sun belt of the country, Austin, Phoenix, Florida, a lot of people are moving there and there's just more demand for rents. Host: Daryl Fairweather is the chief economist at Redfin, a nationwide real estate brokerage firm that pulls together real-time statistics on both the sales and rental markets. For example, their numbers show that rents increased 31 percent in Jacksonville last year, 40% in Austin, Texas. Host: What's causing this? Speaker: We are not building enough housing for everybody who needs a place to live. We built fewer homes in the 2010s than in any decade going back to the 1960s, and at the same time, millennials are the biggest generation, and they're entering into home buying age. Millennials aren't living in their parents basement anymore or shacking up with roommates. They want a places of their own, and we didn't build any housing for them in the last decade because we are still so traumatized by the last housing crisis. We didn't put any investment into housing. Host: In the economic crisis of 2008 and 9, construction of new housing came to a grinding halt, but even when the economy recovered, home construction didn't.