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OwlBot 2000 posted: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. Good thing prices don't stay fixed in markets then. Someone will be able to afford to live in the new properties, even if it's just Mr. Moneybags. And Mr. Moneybags was presumably living somewhere before he moved into the new properties. And the place he just moved out of is now empty, and facing a housing market with a larger supply than there was before, so presumably its rent will go down... unless there's still a housing shortage, in which case, build more houses? I can think of two reasons why rent might be too high in a city: 1. Not enough places to live 2. People don't have enough money to pay it (and landlords would rather shut down than rent out at an affordable price for some reason). If (1) is the case then rent control will be counterproductive. If it's (2) then there's some external factor causing the mismatch, and that's what needs to be addressed. But how many cities are there with both a large population who can't afford housing and a large amount of vacant apartments? I don't think that's common in the first world. In the long run a landlord would always prefer that *someone*'s renting out an apartment, even if they pay the rent by collecting cans.
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Oct 17, 2014 15:12
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Surely most people with multiple properties are renting them out, though? I know some of the ultra-rich will keep an empty condo in New York that they only use two weeks out of the year but I can't imagine they make up a substantial chunk of the housing market. But even if they did I'm not sure how rent controls would help with that? I'm imagining a city where, say, 10% of the housing is owned by absentee jet-setters, but there's still a large market of poor people who want to rent and can't. That's still a problem of too little supply that could just be fixed by letting developers build a bunch more houses. The jet-setters will still have a finite demand for new luxury condos, even in this dystopia where they've bought up 10% of the city and left it vacant for some reason, and once that demand is satisfied developers will build less-profitable housing for poor people. Or you could just use taxes and regulations to disincentivize people from buying houses and then not living in them. I think some cities already do this? That would increase the housing supply at the expense of the ultra-rich, which seems fine by me.
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Oct 17, 2014 15:51
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Lyesh posted:It is that simple though. It's not going to happen, but that doesn't make it complicated, just unlikely. I know this is getting into derail territory but... what are you picturing here? Just take, say, all of the profits made by American companies ($1.8trillion in Q2 2014 according to Google) and distribute it to the bottom 50% of the world or something? Do you actually think something like that could work? Even if you assume there's no transaction costs and no corruption the result would be economically ruinous, and not just for Americans.
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Oct 17, 2014 19:31
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Lyesh posted:Eradicating World poverty is probably outside the US's power, but we could be trying literally thousands of times harder than we are to do so. Seven trillion dollars per year or whatever could pay for a whole lot of third-world infrastructure and feed a loving LOT of starving people. Well I definitely agree we should be doing more to address poverty, I just think povery is mostly not about lack of money (as weird as that looks when it's typed out). Social and health factors play a bigger role in homelessness than lack of money. In developing countries, governance problems, violence, and social divisions are bigger problems. Merely building a bridge won't help that much if it's built with foreign labour and if there's no local capacity (or will) to maintain it.
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Oct 17, 2014 20:39
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icantfindaname posted:I don't really see what's wrong with a simple public subsidy of rent, IE if you can't pay the market rate the government will make up the difference. Pretty sure this is how we do it in Canada. I think in practice it's an enormously complex, dehumanizing system that can only be navigated with the help of a case worker, like most of our welfare programs. But at least it's a good idea in theory, unlike rent control.
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Oct 17, 2014 22:09
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OwlBot 2000 posted:So what's different about Germany that makes rent control work quite well there? What makes you think it's working well in Germany? edit to sound less snarky: Germany's had a very strong economy for the last couple decades, mostly fueled by some pretty unfair exploitation of its neighbours in the eurozone. Booming economies can have lots of economically "inefficient" policies and get away with them while the good times last. See: all the stupid poo poo that oil-rich countries spend money on. The US has had massive agricultural subsidies in place for decades, but not many academics would say that's good policy. So since I don't know much about Germany it's hard to judge their policies in a vacuum. Guy DeBorgore fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Oct 18, 2014 |
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Oct 17, 2014 23:59
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So if we filter out all the unprovoked insults from Peven Stan's posts, what's left?Peven Stan posted:Lisbon's rent control is pretty awesome and long time residents pay like 30 euros a month for rent in a hot area. -it will hurt labour mobility, but not that much, because "rent is only one factor." Presumably, given point (1), Peven Stan sees this as a downside, and would prefer a moat-and-drawbridge based solution which can keep everyone out. quote:It also gives the city a distressed and authentically shabby look. Rent control reduces the incentive to maintain buildings in good working order, which is a good thing, because crumbling ruins are in vogue. If we add it all up, the evidence is clear: Peven Stan only lives in Portugal because he couldn't afford an apartment in Gormenghast.
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Oct 18, 2014 18:34
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EB Nulshit posted:Yes. ... how does nobody see the incredibly obvious problem with this idea? If you constructed a shitload of condos when there's no demand for them, you end up with a shitload of vacant buildings, at a loss of shitloads of money. Either your shiny new condos go unoccupied, or they suck people away from existing neighborhoods. Either way, you've wasted enormous amounts of brick and mortar in your attempt to subsidize housing, when instead you could have just... subsidized housing. For example, let's say an entire city government goes insane and actually does this: Nintendo Kid posted:When you're willing to build multiple 80 story apartment buildings, you can very quickly run out new people ready to move in, dude. Let's say you build an 80 story tower in the style of the mid-century NYC middle class co-ops, like Penn South - you can fairly easy get yourself 27 bedrooms across multiple size apartments per floor, which assuming you're housing married couples per each master bedroom and a kid per each other bedroom, should leave you with about 50 people per floor in a third-manhattan-block building with plenty surrounding open space and a shared play area with the building next to it on the block. Subtract a floor maintenence/skylobby stuff halfway up and use the ground floor for retail/light offices, each of these towers holds 4000 people or so, more if you're willing to build them out a bit more, have higher bedroom counts and lose a little green space at the ground level. So housing for 400 000 people gets "dropped" into the middle of a city. Presumably it's not going on new development land on the city's periphery because then you're back at the problem of nobody wanting to live there, so you're knocking down something to build your apartments. Presumably you're not knocking down existing apartments because then what would be the point? So by process of elimination you're bulldozing your city's commercial district to put houses there. Let's ignore the fact that this would ruin the local economy, because some people here just hate the E-word. Instead, maybe we can just focus on the fact that the commercial district will have to relocate somewhere, and assuming they can't flee the city, they're probably just going to move to the suburbs, which are experiencing a mass exodus as 400 000 people move away into the inner city. The best case scenario is that you've spent incredible amounts of money in order to force businesses and residents to switch places, at a net loss to all of them.
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Oct 21, 2014 13:20
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