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Edgar Allen Ho posted:limit rent and the property owners start leasing properties at rates the non-turbo-rich can actually afford, and building taller apartments with affordable single units instead of deluxe luxury units at two stories each sprawling across what limited ground space is available.
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Dec 9, 2019 04:12
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I don't think it's a coincidence that housing in Japan is considered disposable and starts losing value the moment it's built, like a car. Not that Tokyo is cheap, but it's a whole lot cheaper than you'd imagine considering it's Tokyo.
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Dec 9, 2019 04:16
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Has there ever been an example of price controls working? Sure, so long as it's a public good or other market failure situation. E.g., toll roads, the NHS, firefighters, anything paid for by taxes. Any network reliant good (power, cable television, water, roads) is effectively a monopoly anyway (whoever owns said network controlling the monopoly) so it's cheaper and more efficient to set a price by law than to let the monopolist free ride on the network. edit: basically yes price controls are bad in free markets but many markets aren't "free", and a price control is an appropriate remedy for an un-free market. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 12:03 on Dec 9, 2019 |
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Dec 9, 2019 04:37
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Terrible Opinions posted:Except due to its high price property is considered an investment not a good. There is supply far far in excess of any demand but people would rather sit on it than sell or rent it for less than they could theoretically get in the future. As a result without rent control the supply actually gets smaller as properties are renovated and taken off the market in favor of theoretical higher rents for "luxury" revamps. All arguments against rent control assume the market is efficient and that economic actors are rational. Both of which are pretty obviously not true. I'm not going to go into detail since this is getting dangerously political but you are confusing a few issues here and making statements that are contrary to the vast majority of empirical and theoretical work on the issue. I can't resist pointing out however that practically by definition rental units are a market good, so it's hard understand your argument on that point. In fact one common criticism of rent control is that by limiting returns on rent, rent control pressures people who own and build homes to turn rental units into "investment" or saleable properties, because profit is often not limited on housing sales the way it is on income from rental units. This incentive may help exacerbate the supply shortages that occur in many markets (and which are routinely quantified by agencies like the California Department of Housing). There are many, many, good arguments you can make in favor of government intervention in housing markets and policies which reduce the price people pay for rent. "Rent control actually increases the supply of housing" is an argument I have never, ever seen in any literature on the subject.
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Dec 9, 2019 04:54
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You keep talking like there is a lack of supply when there demonstrably isn't. Just people refusing to sell or rent for reasonable prices.
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Dec 9, 2019 05:11
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Terrible Opinions posted:You keep talking like there is a lack of supply when there demonstrably isn't. Just people refusing to sell or rent for reasonable prices. again this is getting rather far off the topic of ancient history but if you really want I can pm you the research that has been done by California Department of Housing describing the lack of supply (estimated in 2015 as a shortfall of as many as 110,000 new units per year) and much, much more detail on the subject if you want. Fundamentally though "people refusing to sell or rent" housing IS a supply shortage. The issue is how do you get them to supply more, or if that is not possible or desirable, how else will you provide those units without resort to the market?
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Dec 9, 2019 05:29
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A new way people in the US have discovered to make money is to buy up trailer parks and triple the rent. Sounds like something Crassius would do.
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Dec 9, 2019 05:48
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Squalid posted:again this is getting rather far off the topic of ancient history but if you really want I can pm you the research that has been done by California Department of Housing describing the lack of supply (estimated in 2015 as a shortfall of as many as 110,000 new units per year) and much, much more detail on the subject if you want. Fundamentally though "people refusing to sell or rent" housing IS a supply shortage. The issue is how do you get them to supply more, or if that is not possible or desirable, how else will you provide those units without resort to the market? You petition the Emperor to build some out of his benevolence ofc
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Dec 9, 2019 05:53
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:You petition the Emperor to build some out of his benevolence ofc If America was really Rome Donald Trump probably would have spent of of 2015 building new highrise apartments and football stadiums just so he could put his name on them presumably the plan would to make Mexico pay for it
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Dec 9, 2019 06:45
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It's definitely the case that the free markets start getting squirrelly when you try to introduce price controls. Profit-maximizing independent actors will often try to find a way around all of those measures, since the whole reason most people become landlords maintaining expensive buildings is to get returns on investment. It's not great, but then maybe you don't want free market independent ownership of high-density housing by the point where you're intervening on that level. I guess that's where Georgism comes from. To bring things back to a historical perspective, I read once that after the black plague, some lords tried to introduce pay ceilings despite the greatly reduced labor pool, leading landowners to try to bargain with various non-monetary incentives. What was it like when medieval landowners went out trying to recruit?
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Dec 9, 2019 07:09
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Squalid posted:If America was really Rome Donald Trump probably would have spent of of 2015 building new highrise apartments and football stadiums just so he could put his name on them If America was Rome we would have invaded Persia months ago.
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Dec 9, 2019 07:28
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Jack2142 posted:If America was Rome we would have invaded Persia months ago. someone tell trump he's got to personally lead the troops in a sack ctesiphon to win re-election
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Dec 9, 2019 07:47
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SlothfulCobra posted:To bring things back to a historical perspective, I read once that after the black plague, some lords tried to introduce pay ceilings despite the greatly reduced labor pool, leading landowners to try to bargain with various non-monetary incentives. What was it like when medieval landowners went out trying to recruit? I don't know the mechanisms of recruitment but they could have offered choice access to various manorial resources. "Expectations and pay are the same as your current area but I'll let you run your pigs in that forest that's sprouting up in the old village, plus you can coppice it to your heart's content" would have been an effective pay rise.
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Dec 9, 2019 09:10
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I'm the guy living in a shithole in Veii glaring at the guy who thinks the Constantinople housing department knows poo poo about our situation
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Dec 9, 2019 10:36
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serves you right for not being born a roman. (The more things change..)
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Dec 9, 2019 11:56
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Tias posted:serves you right for not being born a roman. I like how there hasn't been any Lucania or Lucanians for thousands of years but millions of people every day in 2019 reference their sausage in ordinary speech. Must have been some drat good sausage.
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Dec 9, 2019 16:51
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Mr. Fix It posted:someone tell trump he's got to personally lead the troops in a sack ctesiphon to win re-election Getting gold poured down your throat and your skull turned into a wine goblet to own the libs
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Dec 9, 2019 21:38
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It's a hell of a way to kill somebody, but I don't wanna be the guy who has to figure out how to burn away the entire skull in a contained environment to recover the metal.
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Dec 9, 2019 22:23
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SlothfulCobra posted:It's a hell of a way to kill somebody, but I don't wanna be the guy who has to figure out how to burn away the entire skull in a contained environment to recover the metal. It's easy. You just burn the skull.
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Dec 9, 2019 22:26
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SlothfulCobra posted:It's a hell of a way to kill somebody, but I don't wanna be the guy who has to figure out how to burn away the entire skull in a contained environment to recover the metal. Wouldn't you just heat it in a dish? Gold melts easily, and all the head bits will float on top and you can just scrape it off. poo poo I think you could even boil the flesh off first if you wanted. Roman answer: just leach the gold out with Mercury!
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Dec 9, 2019 22:34
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Parade the gilded Trump skull down Broadway and win the love of the masses, imo You'll recover the lost gold easily enough in time.
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Dec 9, 2019 23:05
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B+but what about Trump's clients? 
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Dec 9, 2019 23:20
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SlothfulCobra posted:It's a hell of a way to kill somebody, but I don't wanna be the guy who has to figure out how to burn away the entire skull in a contained environment to recover the metal. I wonder if part of the point is you don't bother . 'I can afford to chuck away this much gold'.
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Dec 9, 2019 23:42
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SimonCat posted:A new way people in the US have discovered to make money is to buy up trailer parks and triple the rent. Well, he'd set them on fire first so he could buy them up more cheaply.
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Dec 10, 2019 00:03
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Real estate defies simple models for supply and demand because of how leveraged everyone is. Real estate economics are much more about capital valuation and debt service than an intersecting supply and demand curve that works for widgets. If you don't understand how your landlord's bank values the property you will never understand the landlord's decisions. This is why so much urban housing in the US is infamously vacant, because if it was ever actually priced to rent the owner would be underwater. If price controls on urban housing went up a lot of real estate investors would be under the ax, but on the other hand the units exist and are sitting empty. But on the third, mutant hand, developers would be skittish about building units in a city that just lopped off some corporate heads to get at their housing units. Probably the solution is mixed income housing developments with some level of government subsidy, which everyone has known for some time is a good solution to neighborhood redevelopment but doesn't make beaucoup bucks for business or government revenues. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Dec 10, 2019 |
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Dec 10, 2019 00:39
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Real estate is one of those rent seeking (aha) behaviors of capitalism that is generally regarded as unearned and detrimental, even in most classically liberal ways of looking at the world. Enter Georgism. The theory is more or less as follows: Basically your supply (at least, square footage in places people want to live) is static, taxes on that is one of the few generally 'efficient' taxes that fall on the supply side, and so tends to be generally progressive and not regressive. Rent control is in a lot of ways just a weird way of getting at that, by way of taxing housing stock, so maaaaybe not efficient, but indirectly you're it's hitting at land, which is a static supply. You're 'taxing' land owners and redistributing to renters. Look at it not from the perspective of 'do I build a building or not' but rather 'I own a plot of land of x acres.' If rent controls roll in, maybe you off load that land but some schmuck is going to end up holding it. And said schmuck will want to maximize profits. Absent price controls, they'll build to profit maximization, e.g. nice housing which is generally less dense. With price controls, the incentive to build is still there. Some schmuck has to be holding the land, and they will want it to be profitable. Therefore, profit maximization is the densely pack the acre with units that'll pull in whatever rent the price controls allow. Now, this isn't going to hold in a rural area or a city with a shrinking population, but in a Los Angeles or a NYC the squeeze is on the supply of square feet in key areas, not actually structures. the JJ fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Dec 10, 2019 |
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Dec 10, 2019 01:13
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Proud Georgists represent But yeah, the monopoly / network profit effect I spoke about above is just a general kind of rent seeking, where land rent is a specific kind. You can characterize all real estate rental as monopolistic because each parcel is definitionally unique.
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Dec 10, 2019 01:19
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Proud Georgists represent Does that mean, under this theory, that all non-commidities are definitionally unique, and therefore a monopoly (economically, not necessarily legally)?
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Dec 10, 2019 01:45
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There's non-commodities that we can make more or less of but there isn't and never will be any more Manhattan. Hell, there isn't even any more Bronx.
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Dec 10, 2019 01:48
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It's basically a situation where the main buyers, owners, and builders of housing are not the users of that housing, so while you're shuffling around developers and banks it's hard to get a good deal for tenants. Even with the single-family housing that the bulk of US policy has been dedicated to is almost entirely reliant on the disposition of banks, since most humans can't actually afford housing prices. All the expectations of banks and developers can easily get unmoored from the frustrating middle step of human consumers, and it's much more comfortable to sell to speculating investors instead of humans. Mobile homes are a weird workaround to try to let humans by their homes directly without middlemen, but now many of them aren't actually mobile and it turns into a weird different kind of renting from whoever owns the plot they're stuck on. Weirdly, landlords not giving a single gently caress about their tenants can also be a kind of saving grace, since the lack of human connection prevents things like he patron system or feudalism from forming. Although discrimination of potential tenants can help perpetuate modern inequities, like blocking the social mobility of minorities. Everything's a lot weirder since the days of just evaluating plots of land in terms of the potential for growing crops and the grand scheme was to just get a good farm going so you could be financially secure. This is what I imagine retiring legionaries dreamed of. Ynglaur posted:Does that mean, under this theory, that all non-commidities are definitionally unique, and therefore a monopoly (economically, not necessarily legally)? That's one of the ways that georgism has been eclipsed and forgotten by various other socialist/communist/anarchist ideologies and movements that are more versatile than just focusing on landownership. If you want to learn the basic principles of Georgism, literally just play Monopoly. It is a game created as Georgist propaganda about how private land ownership sucks and destroys everybody but one in the end. I don't know if anybody's written up a version of the original Georgist alternative rules (intended to demonstrate a better way for society to live) that work with modern boards though.
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Dec 10, 2019 01:54
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I think there are print and play versions of the original Landlord's Game.
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Dec 10, 2019 02:02
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there's one glaring issue with this framing and its that you haven't mentioned opportunity cost. Of course real estate investors want to maximize profit -- but if they can get 5% return plugging their money into an index fund or 1% return off building rental units they'll skip the hassle of being a landlord and put their money into stocks. what i don't get is if you're the kind of person who believes housing shouldn't be left to the vagaries of the market, why are you wasting your time on market based solutions like price controls? It doesn't make sense from any kind of theoretical perspective. Arglebargle III's point about the limitations of simple models is good but it basically applies to every complex economic issue as well as real estate. Say we have a city, with traits a and b. According to consensus theory, a causes b. We also know from empirical analysis of dozens or hundreds of cities, a is strongly correlated with b. We then send researchers out into the field to ask the people responsible for b what's going on, and they all say it's because of a. Can we now say that in this city, a is the cause of b? No. Because b can also be caused by x, y, and z. The people we interviewed on the ground might be self interested liars or just lack perspective to understand the issue. And while the theory might be basically correct the magnitude of effect in this case might be so small as to make it practically irrelevant. In the real world it's almost always impossible to entirely untangle causation for complex multivariate problems. Especially given that we rarely have the data necessary to make strong inference. The best we can do is identify general trends and describe best practices given what we know.
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Dec 10, 2019 02:03
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I remember one of the things I learned in college was that cities only relatively recently became "population-positive", which I think meant in terms of more people being born than dying in cities as opposed to cities relying on drawing population from the countryside (who often would escape back out to the country as they age). I'm not sure where my old notes or textbook would be, so I'm hoping somebody in the thread knows what I'm talking about to expand on it. What I'm not sure of is what time scale that's over, like whether things were different in the city-dominated ancient world before cities went into a long dormancy before reemerging as dominant in the modern era. Edgar Allen Ho posted:There's non-commodities that we can make more or less of but there isn't and never will be any more Manhattan. Hell, there isn't even any more Bronx. Technically the whole point of fretting about housing density is that there can be. If you build up, all of a sudden you get facilities that can support that much more people. Even more literally, you have some examples of building New York out by dumping debris into the river and ocean to create more land, but that can only happen by either expensive government programs or by letting developers do it and letting them try turning a profit doing it.
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Dec 10, 2019 02:26
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Why complicate things? Just execute the landlords and be done with it.
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Dec 10, 2019 02:43
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FreudianSlippers posted:Why complicate things? That was Marx’s problem with Georgism too
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Dec 10, 2019 03:08
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Squalid posted:there's one glaring issue with this framing and its that you haven't mentioned opportunity cost. Of course real estate investors want to maximize profit -- but if they can get 5% return plugging their money into an index fund or 1% return off building rental units they'll skip the hassle of being a landlord and put their money into stocks. Long answer re: opportunity costs. SOMEONE ends up holding the land. If person a fucks off to the market because they can't build luxury condos, they have to sell it to person b. Seeking to profit, b either finds some other schmuck and so one. But at some point person n ends up with the land. In essence, taxes on inelastic goods are 'market efficient.' Rent control is an indirect way to get there, but often easier than trying to price out 'pure' land value. Short answer: FreudianSlippers posted:Why complicate things? And, you know, good public housing. https://twitter.com/fetzert/status/1203630790703288320?s=20
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Dec 10, 2019 04:10
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the JJ posted:Long answer re: opportunity costs. i really don't follow. I don't understand how you can conflate land with housing units since land can be used for many purposes besides rental units. I don't understand your story about shifting chains of custody or how it changes incentives for investment. I don't understand why you would think this kind of taxation is "easier" than property taxes, which are common place around the world and generally supported by economists. Although I do at least understand why someone would prefer to repeat hollow slogans and focus on cheap power fantasies rather than economics, dismal a subject as it is, and I regret my unwillingness to back down on this point.
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Dec 10, 2019 05:10
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Squalid posted:i really don't follow. I don't understand how you can conflate land with housing units since land can be used for many purposes besides rental units. I don't understand your story about shifting chains of custody or how it changes incentives for investment. I don't understand why you would think this kind of taxation is "easier" than property taxes, which are common place around the world and generally supported by economists. Although I do at least understand why someone would prefer to repeat hollow slogans and focus on cheap power fantasies rather than economics, dismal a subject as it is, and I regret my unwillingness to back down on this point. i admit i missed the hollow slogans and cheap power fantasies, please point them out for me in between being a jerk about modern economics in the ancient history thread
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Dec 10, 2019 05:21
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You forget the option of just squatting on an empty plot and biding time until a developer-friendly government comes to power. Or, simply neglecting the property while extracting whatever rent is possible. Then there's the San Francisco option, which is to wriggle around the law until you get permission to demolish a rent controlled property and replace with something not. Rent control is an awkward and very non-comprehensive solution to a housing shortage and you shouldn't pretend it's anything greater than it is. The term also describes some seriously different sets of policies and laws, you don't really want NYC's rent control because it's a horrible frankenstein creation, while Montreal's works much better. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Dec 10, 2019 |
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Dec 10, 2019 05:25
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Senior Dog posted:i admit i missed the hollow slogans and cheap power fantasies, please point them out for me in between being a jerk about modern economics in the ancient history thread this might surprise you but killing landlords will not actually put a roof over anyone's head, although undoubtedly its a more interesting subject than modern economics.
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Dec 10, 2019 05:38
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