Justin Fox, Columnist

Want Cheap Rents? Build Expensive Housing, Then Wait

Those pricey condos will get more affordable as they decline with age.

May 18, 2016 at 4:06 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

San Francisco's downtown housing.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

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The new housing that developers have been building in America’s cities in recent years hasn't necessarily been cheap housing.

This is perhaps most glaringly apparent in Manhattan, where the prices of condominiums in the skinny skyscrapers going up just south of Central Park range from $17 million to $100 million. But it’s true even in Houston, where, as I have noted with approval a couple of times recently, developers have been putting up lots and lots of apartment buildings. This is from the May “Economy at a Glance” report by the Greater Houston Partnership, a regional business group: