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Rent control is believing that the solution to lack of housing is to make it less profitable to construct housing. Shockingly, it doesn't work. The best argument for it is displayed right here in this thread, as the only argument for it: "uh, if you don't truly BELIEVE then you are basically, like, Reagan, man."
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Oct 17, 2014 21:06
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say no to scurvy posted:Rent control is not supposed to help anyone get an apartment. Rent control is not supposed to increase the housing supply. Rent control is not supposed to solve demand. It does the opposite of those things because it is intended to do the opposite of those things. Oh okay, it sounds like a very good idea then.
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Oct 17, 2014 21:51
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Germany's home prices are like California home prices, everywhere. That's not something to aspire to.
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Oct 18, 2014 00:31
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Huh, every place that proponents say rent control works actually has very high average rents. Weird.
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Oct 18, 2014 20:03
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Amused to Death posted:There is a larger argument to be made though people have lived anywhere for a long time, but particularly in cities, tend to care about the general wellbeing of their neighborhoods more Do you have any evidence for that?
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Oct 18, 2014 20:09
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SedanChair posted:Could it be that suburban fuckholes and flyover country don't have high rents? Germany has suburbs and rural areas and they have very high rents in them too. It's completely normal in these suburbs and rural areas for middle class people with gainful employment to be living with their parents into their 30s, due to the very high housing costs. Holding Germany up as a housing policy success story demonstrates the ignorance and the pure "my team right team" essence of the pro-rent control arguments. Which, speaking of, I'm not really sure how raising costs on most people, including most poor people, so that a handful of lucky few can thrive (in disintegrating buildings), became associated with Team Left in the first place. Amused to Death posted:No but it's not exactly a new or radical position. It was a main point in The Death and Life of Great American Cities when arguments came up for public subsidies of housing and it's a mainstay of new urbanism thought. People who have lived in an area for a long time are going to have an emotional connection to said place, they're probably going to care more about the place assuming a desire to continue to keep living there over someone who has just moved there and only plans to be there for a year or 2 and there's going to be a better chance of longtime residents having developed personal connections with each other. Yeah it's not an absolute, there are plenty of people who have lived in a place for 15 years and don't really care about it and plenty of newcomers who are avid about the state of their community, but I think it's a pretty fair generalization. First, that seems like a provable, measurable assertion. But, second, elsewhere in this thread a rent control proponent correctly linked rent control with "charmingly" disintegrating buildings, which I do not believe are well regarded in urban planning circles, or by criminologists. Or architects - when the next major earthquake hits San Fransisco, the housing regulations impeding or disincentivising new construction, including rent control, will have a significant body count associated with them. Third, even if it is true that long time residents care more for their communities, rent control schemes create a situation where you have a whole lot of people resenting each other living right on top of each other, with a handful of long time residents paying very little, most long time residents pay more, and most new residents being rich enough to pay the extreme premium to afford what little new construction there is. I am skeptical that situation leads to positive, deep communities. Best Friends fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Oct 18, 2014 |
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Oct 18, 2014 22:07
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OwlBot 2000 posted:Huh, every place where proponents say food stamps work actually has very high poverty rates. Weird. No, there are food assistance programs in a number of countries with low poverty rates. If anything the correlation is negative.
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Oct 18, 2014 23:53
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OwlBot 2000 posted:Look at neighborhoods with the highest rates of food stamp usage, and tell me whether those are poor or rich neighborhoods. This is so loving stupid I don't even know where to start. There are many places that are expensive that don't have rent control. Best Friends fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Oct 19, 2014 |
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Oct 19, 2014 00:38
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OwlBot 2000 posted:You're just being deliberately obtuse now. Yes I missed it the first time because I assumed your point had at least some merit on some level, even if mistaken, then I realized that no you are basically just going "nuh uh," which is not surprising, because there literally are zero evidence based arguments for rent control from the standpoint of improving the lives most people affected.
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Oct 19, 2014 00:49
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OwlBot 2000 posted:"Huh, every place that proponents say rent control works actually has very high average rents. Weird." 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. For comparison, food stamps actually keep people from starving.
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Oct 19, 2014 00:58
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OwlBot 2000 posted: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. Obviously there is not a negative Germany we can compare, but there are many different countries. SedanChair noted that rent controlled cities are hard to compare to suburbs or rural areas. Germany has all three of those things, has had rent control laws and other similar adverse regulations for a very long time, and also has rents in the most rural areas that compare with Los Angeles. In rural America this is not the case. The economics of rent control are fairly unanimous. It's about as basic to economic theory as gravity is to physics. Here is liberal hero and author of a economics textbook Paul Krugman on the topic: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-affair.html quote:The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ''a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'' Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go -- and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable. Bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out -- what yesterday's article oddly described as ''free-market horror stories'' -- and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies? Predictable.
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Oct 19, 2014 01:07
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OwlBot 2000 posted:If you're going to quote polls of mainstream economists, let's find out what other opinions are popular: So now we're at "economics is a lie, you love Reagan!" Awesome. Also, none of those are at 93%. Rent control raising average costs of rent is pretty much exactly the equivalent of "gravity exists" so have fun arguing the contrary.
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Oct 19, 2014 01:39
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OwlBot 2000 posted: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. The Boston rental market has not stayed constant since 1993. Everything you cite is exactly what one would expect from a market showing increased demand. Edit: oh no that sounds just like what an Econ textbook would say. Let's then put our pants on our heads and blame bogeymen instead. Or maybe it's magic. Evil magic! Best Friends fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Oct 19, 2014 |
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Oct 19, 2014 03:11
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Disregarding an entire area of research into the very subject you are pretending to be open mindedly exploring would be funny enough, but treating economists of all people as monolithic on all things is what really takes it to the next level. Economists disagree about pretty much everything past the the intro textbook. Which is why them being united on the intro textbook stuff is so striking. Economics is the study of these very things and topics. You should look into it. It's interesting. "Actually I'm smarter than an entire field of study because, uh, the IMF. Now, someone please do some research into the same things this field of study is about" is like, peak D&D.
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Oct 19, 2014 05:23
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OwlBot 2000 posted: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. Rent control raises costs is like chapter 2 of the intro stuff, maybe chapter 1, it is completely uncontroversial. 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.
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Oct 19, 2014 05:37
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Look, I understand that most physicists believe gravity exists, but if you don't actually demonstrate it and teach me phys 101 here in this D&D thread, I'm just not going to believe it.
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Oct 19, 2014 05:42
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What you want is an econ course and that's great and you should take one.
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Oct 19, 2014 05:42
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Decreasing incentives for supply can in fact be boiled down to a supply and demand curve. If this was actually an extremely complex issue you would have a better case than "uh, actually, economics is a lie, and also, like Reagan, man." You would have examples, studies, and also economists, because economists love to argue over ambiguous data.
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Oct 19, 2014 05:45
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OwlBot 2000 posted: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. Best Friends posted:What you want is an econ course and that's great and you should take one.
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Oct 19, 2014 07:05
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