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Across the US, cities are becoming more crowded and more expensive. Low wages and gentrification are forcing many poor people to move out of neighborhoods their families have lived in for generations as housing costs rise. The proposed responses are varied, from tax breaks and subsidies for developers (a traditionally right-wing idea) to rent-control and construction of more public housing (from the left.) One of these proposals, rent control, is more controversial: many economists claim that it will distort housing markets, remove the incentive to develop and result in even LESS housing for the poor. Others contend that this is simply a bias of neoliberal economists against regulation, and that rent control works well if implemented in the right tome and place. What do you think, D&D? Is rent control a viable option for making life affordable for people getting priced out of their neighborhoods? Germany's Angela Merkel, known for her economic orthodoxy, is currently working to implement rent controls, and it will be a ballot issue in many cities (except in Colorado and other states where it is unconstitutional). OwlBot 2000 fucked around with this message at 08:52 on Oct 16, 2014 |
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Oct 16, 2014 08:49
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A few things that may be getting missed: 1.) rent control isn't just about housing supply, but creating stable neighborhoods for people to live and grow in. 2.) the supply of housing may or may not increase when rent control is lifted, but what about the supply of affordable housing? If units are selling for higher than whatever the rent control cap was set to, then rent control was actually doing its job where the market didn't and still won't. 3.) building high-end complexes (often city-subsidized) results in a large expenditure but also a large long-term profit for property developers, but it doesn't necessarily lower housing prices for other, cheaper apartments. OwlBot 2000 fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Oct 17, 2014 |
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Oct 17, 2014 14:18
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New York, London and SF have lots of apartment spaces owned by people who live elsewhere and rarely visit. It's often an investment vehicle or status symbol more than it is housing in "global cities".
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Oct 17, 2014 15:25
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So what's different about Germany that makes rent control work quite well there?
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Oct 17, 2014 23:56
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Best Friends posted:Huh, every place that proponents say rent control works actually has very high average rents. Weird. Huh, every place where proponents say food stamps work actually has very high poverty rates. Weird.
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Oct 18, 2014 23:11
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Best Friends posted:No, there are food assistance programs in a number of countries with low poverty rates. If anything the correlation is negative. Look at neighborhoods with the highest rates of food stamp usage, and tell me whether those are poor or rich neighborhoods.
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Oct 19, 2014 00:36
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You're just being deliberately obtuse now. Edit: oh I should have quoted you, you changed it around.
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Oct 19, 2014 00:44
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"Huh, every place that proponents say rent control works actually has very high average rents. Weird." You don't discredit rent control by saying, "hey, these cities are still really expensive" any more than you discredit food stamps by saying, "the neighborhoods where people use food stamps are still very poor". If you want to make the case that food stamps don't work, you'd need to show that people using them wouldn't be even poorer without them. If you want to show rent control doesn't work you need to do more than say Germany and SF are still expensive, you must show that they wouldn't be even more expensive without rent control. You may in fact be able to do so, but saying "a city where people are trying to control rents is still expensive" is facile reasoning. No poo poo, you don't use rent control in inexpensive cities. I'm not saying your conclusion is necessarily wrong, just that your argument is terrible.
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Oct 19, 2014 00:57
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Best Friends posted:There are many studies on rent control, and holding Germany up as any sort of success story is insane because the housing situation in Germany is in fact, bad. And the question is bad compared to what? Bad compared to other countries with different urban geographies, or bad compared to how Germany would be without rent control? The second question is the only relevant one, and you probably can find the answer to that. Again, I'm not disagreeing with your conclusions (I'm still exploring the topic), but I do think your line of reasoning is really poor.
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Oct 19, 2014 01:03
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Typo posted:It's stuff like this why it's so difficult to take D&D leftists seriously. I'm actually not arguing for rent control right now, just against some bad arguments in opposition to it. The record of what happens when you remove rent controls is pretty mixed, as you can see in Boston 1993-present: higher rents for low wage people, more homelessness, increased construction of complexes (but many for high-end renters), and better maintenance, showing that both sides have a point. People have made good arguments against rent control in this thread, but "look at what my econ textbook says" is not one of them. And as far as socialism, I wouldn't be talking about rent control at all but mass construction of modern, responsive, state of the art public housing as happened in Sweden in the 60s and 70s. That's my preference, by far. Rent control is a really blunt, often misapplied tool for not letting neighborhoods get torn apart by market fluctuations.
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Oct 19, 2014 02:24
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Scandinavian public housing was really world-class up until the 80s and 90s when the SAP lost power and neoliberal housing policies were implemented.
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Oct 19, 2014 02:45
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I'll ask a bit in the UK megathread about Thatcher's impact on council houses, "right to buy", making council housing something exclusively for the poorest of the poor rather than 1/3 of the population, etc. to answer your question, Typo.
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Oct 19, 2014 02:56
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It's not anti-intellectual to oppose a specific strand of thought that happens to be just plain wrong (to a disastrous degree) about many, many things and is about 50 years behind behaviorial psychology in its understanding of how humans behave. If you think they're at all progressive, look at the austerity policies pushed by the World Bank and IMF, their blind adherence to free trade orthodoxy when the historical record doesn't remotely support it, their reliance upon marginal utilty, equilibrium, methodological individualism, etc. This doesn't mean that there isn't great research being done (even by neoclassicals), it's just that we need to acknowledge that economics is inherently political and that the framing used by undergrad textbooks tends to support a rather right-wing view. OwlBot 2000 fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Oct 19, 2014 |
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Oct 19, 2014 04:59
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Sorry that the mainstream of the macroeconomics has been completely discredited by the crisis and is flailing around trying to find minor gotcha's with Piketty. I'm not treating all economists as the same, but the worthwhile economists like Steve Keen and Ha Joon Chang are pretty far from typical.
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Oct 19, 2014 05:28
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Peven Stan posted:Economics is actually p bad and economists basically are 24/7 paid shills for capitalism You joke, but They also throw around $500k at random grad students doing work they like and make multi-million dollar donations to multiple schools , which I'm sure doesn't allow them to influence anyone or anything. Of course most academic economists are honest people and will have nothing to do with these people if they can help it. OwlBot 2000 fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Oct 19, 2014 |
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Oct 19, 2014 05:34
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Best Friends posted:There are also studies and stuff. People have looked into this. If you were actually exploring this topic instead of going rah rah for team crazy you would have found this out. Did I ever disagree with any of that? I simply suggested you should post the actual studies and data instead of a poll of economists. The first one is science, the second thing is a weak appeal to (significantly diminished) authority.
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Oct 19, 2014 05:40
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Typo posted:Again, people for the first 2-3 pages of this thread has posted real arguments of why rent control is bad. And I didn't object to any of those good posts, did I?
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Oct 19, 2014 06:07
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Typo posted:You guys realize this is literally the exact same argument right-wing climate change deniers use against academia acknowledgement of climate change as a real phenomenon right? No, right wingers cannot in fact point to a group of immensely wealthy people who have a financial interest in promoting the ideas of climate change and socialized medicine, who have actually funded fraudulent research (Heartland Institute) and influenced hiring decisions at public universities. quote:Remember, only academic studies validating my worldview is valid. I have not rejected or disparaged any academic studies that people have posted in this thread. In fact I suggested that Best Friends post one himself instead of doing what he's doing, so I'm not sure what you're getting at.
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Oct 19, 2014 06:50
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Yes, they're not uncommon. Please examine the context of my post: I thought Peven was joking around about a big conspiracy of economists, and I basically said, "funnily enough some people are actually trying to do that now at a few universities". That's a fairly modest and well supported claim, and nothing like alleging that the bulk of mainstream of academic economists have been paid off for decades.
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Oct 19, 2014 07:12
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LemonDrizzle posted:Also, Owlbot, since you approvingly cited Steve Keen as a 'good' economist (shortly after dismissing Krugman as some kind of neoliberal shill!), you may be interested in this exchange from his blog: Fairly close to my own position, actually (as I hinted at in a previous post). To be more explicit, I think rent control is a half-measure that doesn't provide any real control over the housing situation. Sure, you can by definition create more affordable housing if you simply force the prices of current unaffordable units below that level, and it can stabilize some neighborhoods, but in the long term it's too weak a policy: landlords can decide not to maintain the property, developers can move to cities without rent control, etc. As I mentioned, I'd far prefer massive investment in modern public housing system with aesthetics and amenities that would appeal to a wide section of society. Krugman's not nearly as bad as he used to be (not praising sweatshops or sounding like a slightly smarter Thomas Friedman) and I have a few of his books. Krugman's no Mankiw. OwlBot 2000 fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Oct 19, 2014 |
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Oct 19, 2014 14:19
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Once again I think Sweden's program in the 60s and 70s is useful. If the problem is too few apartment units, build more units. It doesn't need to be for low wage people, just construct large apartment complexes as good or better than privately developed ones and rent them for slightly below market rates. It doesn't have to be profitable, any more than police departments, healthcare or the military needs to turn a profit. You can set rates in such a way that they will apply some downward pressure to private sector rents but not drive them out of business immediately. If people are still too poor to pay for rent, raise wages. OwlBot 2000 fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Oct 19, 2014 |
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Oct 19, 2014 16:52
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lurker1981, I asked a bit about the public housing situation in Britain over in the UKMT, and one of the main problems they pointed out was the shift from public housing being for everyone to it being charity for the poorest of the poor. Warehousing thousands of poor people in areas of the city farther away from jobs is a great way to end up with very violent, run-down and hopeless housing projects. And, once everyone who lives in those apartments is a low-income or unemployed minority, it becomes very easy for politicians to slash funding without any real opposition.
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Oct 19, 2014 17:01
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computer parts posted:Because when you rebuild you have to tear down, which means that people are displaced. And when you tear down, some times you don't ever rebuild and people are kept stranded for years despite promises of the right to return (Chicago, also.) Zoning is also an important issue that should be discussed in this thread. There are lots of stories of developers seeing "unprofitable" neighborhoods, then dropping in Targets and other stores right in the middle with the express purpose of pricing out the people currently living there, so that they can buy the properties up, gentrify it and start building more expensive complexes for higher-income people. Voila, a neighborhood that made landlords and property developers very little money has become highly profitable. OwlBot 2000 fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Oct 19, 2014 |
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Oct 19, 2014 17:07
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Peven Stan posted:Stop treating rent control like an econ 101 textbook example. I'm not sure I agree with your overall point (care to explain further?) but obviously the people living in rent controlled apartments typically vote to continue it, and people who don't live in them are more likely to vote against it. In Mass. for example, rent control was repealed by a 51%-49% vote, but people living in the apartments voted in favor of it by a comfortable margin. So of course it depends on what you're trying to achieve: if you want people to not get priced out of their homes and keep neighborhoods intact it works [which is why it has again become a political issue in rapidly gentrifying high-tech cities], if you want to make sure there's plenty of affordable housing it doesn't usually work in the long term. OwlBot 2000 fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Oct 19, 2014 |
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Oct 19, 2014 17:18
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In another fifty years I'd be cool with turning the interior of the country that's not used for farmland into a big wilderness preserve. Just let it return to grasslands and forests.
OwlBot 2000 fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Oct 19, 2014 |
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Oct 19, 2014 18:21
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computer parts posted:That's what most of it already is (farm + ranch land anyway). I mean something more drastic, full ecosystem recovery with the planting of trees, native grasses and reintroducing megafauna.
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Oct 19, 2014 18:38
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I know. I mentioned native grasses to acknowledge that, in fact, much of the continental United States was a prairie ecosystem.
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Oct 19, 2014 21:33
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There are positive environmental impacts (even on a global scale) to be gained by reforestation and wetlands restoration. The former has significant effects for climate change mitigation, the latter has a role to play in reducing the damage done by hurricanes, and ecosystem restoration in New York allowed the state to save $6-8 billion dollars in water filtration. You are also assuming there is a) no inherent value in nature, which is another discussion; b) no psychosocial value to the humans who get to experience wilderness. This, again, is something to be considered in the long term if a large portion of the United States interior is indeed abandoned.
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Oct 19, 2014 23:20
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Typo is a good poster and I like him or her.
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Oct 19, 2014 23:27
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Of course you can take a more interventionist or hands-off approach depending upon what the relevant ecological experts think. Parts of the Scottish highlands are currently undergoing reforestation and beaver and wildcats and wolves are either being reintroduced or are scheduled for reintroduction. Short answer, it depends.
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Oct 20, 2014 00:06
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-Troika- posted:Who's land is all this mythical new housing going to be built on? Who gets their house torn down because J. Public Fuckwit down at City Hall decided that your neighbourhood has to go for "affordable housing"? Who cares?
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Oct 21, 2014 06:25
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-Troika- posted:"tear down poor people's houses to build poor people's apartments" - Owlbot 2000, D&D 2014 Uh I think they're not gonna be houses in most places, just apartment complexes that take up a lot of surface area but aren't very tall. If it is decided that the city is unaffordable and there's an urgent need for housing, and you have a fair plan to remunerate whoever is temporarily relocated, then it doesn't particularly matter which individual is or isn't in the group. Also, the buildings getting torn down aren't for poor people (that's the point, remember? They're getting pushed to the edges) and the new housing units won't just be for poor people. Also nobody's "neighborhood has to go", there's no need for histrionics. on the left posted:Cool, a volunteer. Sure why not. OwlBot 2000 fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Oct 21, 2014 |
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Oct 21, 2014 06:51
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In a parallel universe -troika- is asking, "who gets their shack torn down to build some drat interstate highway or subway system? I don't care if it's more efficient and would help hundreds of thousands of people"
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Oct 21, 2014 06:57
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Fangz posted:So your proposal is to use mass eminent domain to seize properties, apparently arbitrarily, in city centres. I'm sure this would work out well...... Who said arbitrarily? You would try to spread them out over the city, work with the public transportation system, and try to achieve a good mix of income levels for new residents.
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Oct 21, 2014 14:20
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