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Housing prices don't just rise on their own - there are various economic factors that affect the price. Rent control, which hamfistedly enforces price caps without addressing or even acknowledging the underlying reasons for the high prices, is pretty much guaranteed to screw up the market in some way. SF is a perfect example - housing is too drat expensive there, but that's mainly because idiotic zoning policies and other bad decisions have resulted in an acute housing shortage for that high-demand area. Rent control would just ensure that instead of there being "no affordable apartments" there would be "no available apartments", because the high prices were just a symptom of a deeper problem that rent control didn't fix. Rent control can work as a temporary fix to keep things affordable until the deeper problem is fixed, but it's instead usually used as a crutch to hide the symptoms of the problem so that it can more easily be ignored.
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Oct 16, 2014 15:00
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 05:04 |
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Polish Avenger posted:I agree with the economists, but I'm starting to wonder how practical their argument is. It usually leads to a noisy, less clear solution that makes quite a few assumptions. Perhaps it's something that is not politically feasible in the foreseeable future. In the end one doesn't end up with a clear alternative to the Poli's "Fix the symptom" and assuming THAT even has enough support, it wins by default. Maybe it is more productive to figure out how to minimize the externalities of policies that by design create distortion, although that itself can also be problematic (your fixes for side effects have side effects). It depends a lot on how severe the cause of the problem is, what the symptoms are, and so forth. Things like wages and poverty go down to the very roots of capitalism; high housing prices, on the other hand, are often a result of deliberate market manipulation, either by financial companies or by local government. The latter is far less problematic to fix than the former. loquacius posted:I am by no means an expert in this area, but from what I've heard rent controls in San Francisco have led to landlords just evicting people when they wanted to raise the rent instead of pricing them out the old-fashioned way. This is typically illegal and tightly regulated - you can't evict someone to get out of rent control and then promptly rent it again. What you've probably heard about is landlords evicting people because they're "taking the unit off the market", and them quietly listing their new room on sharing sites like Airbnb, justifying it by claiming that they're just "house-sharing a private room for money" rather than "renting it out as a rental property". It's just an attempt to piggyback on the sharing economy's love of redefining terms to avoid legal regulations on the service they're selling.
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Oct 16, 2014 17:13
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