The other crazy part of the framing is that while sure, apartment rents are down slightly from all-time highs, they're still up over 20% in just two years.

Even as someone with a decent amount of my net-worth wrapped up in real-estate, a real-estate crash can't come soon enough. Housing ourselves is eating far too much of the average person's budget, and I hope this small dip in rents is a harbinger of much bigger drops to come.

clicks don't come from accurate descriptions.

I would imagine that an editor chooses headlines based on their readership, would they not?

My judgement may be off here, but is a WSJ reader more likely to be a landlord or a tenant?

Definitely landlord. WSJ has also been pushing the "no one wants to work anymore", "quiet quitting", "WFH workers are unproductive/cheating" etc. narrative pretty hard. They (and their readership) have been center-right for a long time now.

I bet the paying ones are landlords. WSJ costs hundreds per year and they're stingy with discounts.

Apple News is one way to get it cheap, but you've gotta use that reader.

I just wait for the good articles to show up on HN and hit the archive link. No wonder they aren't tailoring headlines to my interests.

Lots of wall street people rent. Renting is actually a good experience if you're rich and nothing is for sale in Manhattan anyway so there's not much of a choice.

I think Barron's is probably more targeted to people that actually work on Wall Street. I suspect Manhattan finance people make up <1% of the people that subscribe to WSJ.

Yup. The main attraction of buying/owning vs renting is reduction of risk/uncertainty. If you're rich (>double-digit million net worth) and not stupid (hold your entire net worth in crypto coins), you don't have to care about uncertainly. With 10M net worth, you can get a few 10k from just interests or dividends, so you can rent something pretty nice anywhere in the world on a whim.

Also because of tax reasons I guess. But that demographic does not care very much about lowering rents.

It's a bit surprising for the WSJ to include obviously clickbait words in their headlines.

Goes both ways I reckon. A lot of folks rent.

Ok, we've uncrushed the market in the title above.

It's exactly what they want. They got you to react to their crappy headline.

Of all the low-effort ChatGPT grifts, I'd love to see one that de-sensationalized headlines. A headline should be the shortest possible summary of the rest of the article.

“Housing rents continue to obey supply and demand” isn’t that interesting.

Good advice in general, but there's additional information coded in the words chosen. It shouldn't be a surprise that the Wall Street Journal would see falling rents as a "crush" given it's readership probably leans more towards landlord than tenant.

Yea, I do see that coded language, I just guess I’m a bit tired of picking apart language instead of discussing content. I’m not surprised at the headline for the same reason as you: “given its readership probably means more towards landlord than tenant.”