That’s a bad example. Detroit isn’t an example of over building it’s an example of eroding the demand across the entire economy by outsourcing jobs. There is a big difference between a city with full employment with a robust consumer base that happens to have a ton of housing hit the market and one that has it’s entire bedrock industry carved into pieces over several generations.
If you want a valid example look at Austin Texas or Japan. Housing inventory growth in a robust economy leads to….wait for it….rent decreases.
> Now, Austin is one of the only major U.S. cities where rents are falling.
> Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capital city sat at $1,645 as of December, according to Zillow — above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth.
> The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market.
Austin had a rent and house price explosion in 2021-2022 when a lot of people moved in at the same time, rents had been falling in 2023-2025 from the peak but did not fall to the level of 2020, they are picking up again in 2026.
It happened over a longer period obviously, and what happened is the US adopted a failed industrial policy that saw our core manufacturing base shipped to China for the benefit of Wall Street and the financial sector.
Globalization wasn't a loss for all of America - the benefit of shipping manufacturing overseas was that the resulting imports were cheaper than producing domestically. After all if they weren't, people would've preferred to buy domestic. So it was a net win for the consumer via cheaper goods, but came at the expense of Detroit, Pittsburgh and other "rust belt" cities & communities.
We're still grappling with the consequences. We should've invested in transitioning those workers to comparable or better jobs but the ball got completely dropped on that.
If your purchasing power is cut in half because you lost your manufacturing job and had to replace it with running a cash register, but the cost of toys also dropped in half (but not things like food and housing, which doubled in price), are you actually better off?
No.
Average Americans are poorer now than they were before they could buy everything at Walmart. As long as housing continues to be a "Line must go up" investment, Americans will continue to become poorer as more and more of their income has to be directed to housing.
The price didn't even fall that much. One look at Temu and friends should disabuse you of the notion that we are actually getting things for "Cheap". Usually it just means product quality was drastically reduced thanks to millions spent on "value engineering", so that your new products don't last long enough to put you out of business.
Sure is great that GE can now reliably predict the lifespan of parts in their washing machines so they never make the mistake of gasp overspeccing a component so it lasts a lifetime!
I thought that as well. But the benefits of cheaper goods when manufacturing is shift elsewhere comes at the cost if the future innovations that follow manufacturing. American businesses forget that happening to the British when we took over manufacturing for England. Now China and Mexico have innovations we lack because their engineering has access to the assembly lines and see where innovations need to happen.
Detroit was the hub of the auto industry. Outsourcing and foreign competition hollowed out the central city (which deliberately didn't have public transit) and left gigantic abandoned houses and skyscrapers throughout.
There has been massive public investment and popular support to cause a revival of sorts in the city and is a success story.
This happened throughout North Carolina where I live when textiles and furniture manufacturing was off shored. I assure you it wasn’t over building that caused the same outcome. It’s almost like the is an alternate explanation that is the common thread. What could it be?
Detroit was pretty much the place where cars were designed and manufactured in the US at one point in time. The highest producing factories, the engineering, the management, most of it happened practically inside the city. Over time these auto manufacturers opened plants on lower cost of living places, spreading out across the Midwest while a lot of the engineering and management still took place in Detroit.
People often point to foreign competition for the downfall of urban Detroit but the writing was on the wall and decay starting well before foreign imports made a big splash. Between 1945 and 1957, GM, Ford, and Chrysler built 25 brand-new auto plants in the Detroit metro area. Not a single one was built inside the city limits. They weren't building these factories overseas (yet), they were building them in cheaper parts of the US. Detroit lost hundreds of thousands of well-paying factory jobs well before Volkswagen and Toyota started selling things in real numbers in the 1960s.
That’s a bad example. Detroit isn’t an example of over building it’s an example of eroding the demand across the entire economy by outsourcing jobs. There is a big difference between a city with full employment with a robust consumer base that happens to have a ton of housing hit the market and one that has it’s entire bedrock industry carved into pieces over several generations.
If you want a valid example look at Austin Texas or Japan. Housing inventory growth in a robust economy leads to….wait for it….rent decreases.
Austin sure has become so much more affordable ... Wait!
The rent in Austin is 22% lower than it was 3 years ago.
And 25% higher than 6 years ago.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...
> Now, Austin is one of the only major U.S. cities where rents are falling.
> Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capital city sat at $1,645 as of December, according to Zillow — above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth.
> The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market.
Austin had a rent and house price explosion in 2021-2022 when a lot of people moved in at the same time, rents had been falling in 2023-2025 from the peak but did not fall to the level of 2020, they are picking up again in 2026.
Can you explain more? What happened in Detroit in the mid 2010s, how did itreverse course after that?
It happened over a longer period obviously, and what happened is the US adopted a failed industrial policy that saw our core manufacturing base shipped to China for the benefit of Wall Street and the financial sector.
Globalization wasn't a loss for all of America - the benefit of shipping manufacturing overseas was that the resulting imports were cheaper than producing domestically. After all if they weren't, people would've preferred to buy domestic. So it was a net win for the consumer via cheaper goods, but came at the expense of Detroit, Pittsburgh and other "rust belt" cities & communities.
We're still grappling with the consequences. We should've invested in transitioning those workers to comparable or better jobs but the ball got completely dropped on that.
If your purchasing power is cut in half because you lost your manufacturing job and had to replace it with running a cash register, but the cost of toys also dropped in half (but not things like food and housing, which doubled in price), are you actually better off?
No.
Average Americans are poorer now than they were before they could buy everything at Walmart. As long as housing continues to be a "Line must go up" investment, Americans will continue to become poorer as more and more of their income has to be directed to housing.
The price didn't even fall that much. One look at Temu and friends should disabuse you of the notion that we are actually getting things for "Cheap". Usually it just means product quality was drastically reduced thanks to millions spent on "value engineering", so that your new products don't last long enough to put you out of business.
Sure is great that GE can now reliably predict the lifespan of parts in their washing machines so they never make the mistake of gasp overspeccing a component so it lasts a lifetime!
It wasn’t a net win for the consumer. The consumer is now much worse off than before and our country is weaker.
It was just a mistake to allow ourselves to be ruled by the financial sector.
I thought that as well. But the benefits of cheaper goods when manufacturing is shift elsewhere comes at the cost if the future innovations that follow manufacturing. American businesses forget that happening to the British when we took over manufacturing for England. Now China and Mexico have innovations we lack because their engineering has access to the assembly lines and see where innovations need to happen.
Detroit was the hub of the auto industry. Outsourcing and foreign competition hollowed out the central city (which deliberately didn't have public transit) and left gigantic abandoned houses and skyscrapers throughout.
There has been massive public investment and popular support to cause a revival of sorts in the city and is a success story.
Go look at some photos from like 2010-2014.
This happened throughout North Carolina where I live when textiles and furniture manufacturing was off shored. I assure you it wasn’t over building that caused the same outcome. It’s almost like the is an alternate explanation that is the common thread. What could it be?
Such short term issues from massive economic collapse suggests building more housing works.
How was the work outsourced around that timeframe? Do they no longer have an auto-industry at all in Detroit, or is it just greatly reduced?
Detroit was pretty much the place where cars were designed and manufactured in the US at one point in time. The highest producing factories, the engineering, the management, most of it happened practically inside the city. Over time these auto manufacturers opened plants on lower cost of living places, spreading out across the Midwest while a lot of the engineering and management still took place in Detroit.
People often point to foreign competition for the downfall of urban Detroit but the writing was on the wall and decay starting well before foreign imports made a big splash. Between 1945 and 1957, GM, Ford, and Chrysler built 25 brand-new auto plants in the Detroit metro area. Not a single one was built inside the city limits. They weren't building these factories overseas (yet), they were building them in cheaper parts of the US. Detroit lost hundreds of thousands of well-paying factory jobs well before Volkswagen and Toyota started selling things in real numbers in the 1960s.