[Hermitian909]

Opponents of gentrification, and supporters of rent control, are generally considering the well-being of current residents.

"blighted parts of the city" are often homes to people and the place where their communities are located. These people see themselves priced out of the place they've lived for years and are forced to start a new life elsewhere when the area they live in is gentrified. This is incredibly stressful and hugely disruptive to these people's lives and it's not unreasonable that they desire some protection for their way of life.

The recognition of this fact is also the source of rent control (whether rent control is the right mechanism to prevent these hardships is another conversation). Without societal protections landlords wield a huge amount of power over tenants, raising rent by exorbitant amounts is no different than eviction for most families. In a desire to protect their own communities and livelihoods many residents vote for such policies.

[whack]

> "Opponents of gentrification, and supporters of rent control, are generally considering the well-being of current residents."

And what about current residents who need to move? Suppose a disadvantaged woman decides to leave her abusive husband and is trying to find another place to move into. Is it fair that her well-being is completely neglected?

I'm all in favor of the intentions behind rent control, but the implementation is an atrocious way to achieving its goals. If the goal is to help the poor long-time residents of a city, then do that directly. Raise property taxes, impose a city-income-tax, and use the proceeds to offer assistance to means-tested long-time residents. This would be far better than what SF has currently.

[joe_the_user]

Suppose a disadvantaged woman decides to leave her abusive husband and is trying to find another place to move into.

Your hypothetical disadvantaged woman would have zero ability to pay $2000/month rent for a studio, however many of these might be available. She would likely find it hard to get an apartment in a rent-controlled situation - so the situation is effectively "hard versus impossible", a condition where "hard" is less harsh.

And I mean, I've lived off and on in the Bay Area under both these conditions over the last forty years and the impossible rents of course are the hardest for those of lesser means. Of frickin course.

[whack]

You've ignored my second paragraph which explains a far better way of helping those in need.

I'm all in favor of the intentions behind rent control, but the implementation is an atrocious way to achieving its goals. If the goal is to help the poor long-time residents of a city, then do that directly. Raise property taxes, impose a city-income-tax, and use the proceeds to offer assistance to means-tested long-time residents. This would be far better than what SF has currently.

[zethraeus]

Why are the studios $2000/month in this alternate universe where we don't have rent control?

[closeparen]

Because NIMBYism, height limits, and single family zoning over most of the landmass still exist, and have much stronger effects.

[joe_the_user]

They are in the present universe, where we don't have effective rent control.

And effective rent would require controlling evictions and controlling rents on vacant units (infringing further on sacred property rights, certainly).

Now, the most effective policy would involved rent control but with exemptions for new very high density units, incentivizing increases in the total housing stock for an urban area.

But we're here with weak rent control and tacit collusion of homeowners and builders, who talk about their property rights when convenient and use the state to keep their monopoly when convenient.

[beamatronic]

If one is disadvantaged, wouldn’t it be easier to move to a less competitive place, far from the dog-eat-dog daily life? Be part of a more “gentle” community for lack of a better word?

[dbasedweeb]

I think the question is who’s responsibility it is to protect the woman in your hypothetical. Is it the landlord? New tenants? Some people from Amazon looking to expand? The new cafe charging $5 for rainbow bagels? The state or federal government? The goals of most of those entities are agnostic about the woman, not against her or for her. Rent control basically says the landlord is responsible, your formulation says the government is responsible through increased taxation. I don’t know the answer, but I can understand that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to prioritize the woman.

At the end of the day, someone or a lot of someone’s need to take or share responsibility for the circumstances of the less foruntate, because the alternative is terrible for everyone.

[crdoconnor]

>I'm all in favor of the intentions behind rent control, but the implementation is an atrocious way to achieving its goals. If the goal is to help the poor long-time residents of a city, then do that directly.

Rent control is a hack, but it's a hack that largely works. It's not nearly as atrocious as the reputation profit hungry landlords have tried to give it.

Why not treat it exactly like any other kind of hack? Take it out, sure, but not a second before the real fix is in place.

>Raise property taxes

Yes. A lot. And do it first.

[chollida1]

> Rent control is a hack, but it's a hack that largely works. It's not nearly as atrocious as the reputation profit hungry landlords have tried to give it

Well I'm not sure what economics degree you have, but a Nobel winning one, says that most economists are in agreement and they disagree with you

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent...

> 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.'

So I guess the balls in your court. What evidence would you put forward to prove most economists wrong about rent control?

[pmoriarty]

From [1]:

"One major problem with this argument is the lack of a definition with rent control. Yes, the statistic of 93 percent of economists rejecting rent control is all fine, but what specific rent control are we speaking about? Here is the question he either refuses to answer or does not know much about.

"In the Economics Anti-Textbook by Rod Hills and Tonny Myatt, they do talk about the neoclassical idea of rent control, but give an alternative view as well. They write:

  But knowing the extent to which the ceiling rent is binding over
  time is very tricky. It’s complicated by the fact that we cannot
  observe the equilibrium rent. A second complication is that the type
  of rent control prevalent nowadays is very different from the type
  assumed in textbooks -- a rigid rent freeze.

"What Berezow is saying is that "first-generation rent control" is rejected by many economists. For those unaware, it is, as stated above, "a rigid rent freeze." However, "second-generation" rent control is more flexible as it can allow "automatic rent increases geared to increasing costs, excludes luxury high-rent buildings and new buildings, restricts conversions, decontrols between tenants, and provides incentives for landlords to maintain or improve quality.""

[1] - https://shadowproof.com/2013/11/11/why-is-alex-berezow-allow...

[closeparen]

It’s entirely possible for someone to understand that, and to be willing to trade the quantity and quality of housing for stability in the lives of existing residents.

[stale2002]

The problem with rent control is that it causes developers to build less.

This is certainly a problem that will happen in a purely competitive market.

But the SF housing market is NOT a competitive market. The bottleneck for developers to build more houses is the government that prevents them from doing so.

So i'd recommend focusing on getting rid of the other barriers to more housing before focusing on rent control.

Or in other words, rent control is indeed a bottleneck. But the thing with bottle necks is that only the smallest bottleneck matters.

Getting rid of the less bad bottleneck of rent control will do absolutely nothing unless the OTHER bottlenecks are addressed first.

[crdoconnor]

>The problem with rent control is that it causes developers to build less.

Yet New York's highest level of house building occurred under a period of very strict rent controls (50s).

The level to which rent control restricts building wildly exaggerated.

[crdoconnor]

>Well I'm not sure what economics degree you have

Could your appeal to authority be a little more obvious please?

>a Nobel winning one, says that most economists are in agreement and they disagree with you

The economist profession is badly captured by moneyed interests. This is partly why they are terrible at building predictive models (think about it: which one of them wasn't blindsided by the financial crisis?).

Often the more prestigious seeming the economist, the more captured they are.

With Paul Krugman specifically this level of capture was made embarrassingly obvious when he wrote a screed saying "what's wrong with the TPP? More trade is always good!" and then got schooled by his own comments section about what was actually in that trade deal (that had nothing to do with "more trade") and what was wrong with it:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/12/krugman-running-bran...

He obviously wasn't too stupid to understand it, which is why after enough negative exposure he retracted.

I doubt you'll find any Nobel prize winning physicists having to retract a similar "mistake" although I can think of one climate scientist who might.

>So I guess the balls in your court. What evidence would you put forward to prove most economists wrong about rent control?

New York's highest level of house building occurred under strict rent controls.

[pcwalton]

> It's not nearly as atrocious as the reputation profit hungry landlords have tried to give it.

Please don't tar all landlords with the same brush. I might well be a landlord in the future if I ever move out of the Bay Area, because I really like SF and would like to keep owning my (small, modest) condo even if I have to take a job elsewhere in the future. Right now, because of Costa-Hawkins, rent control won't affect me even in that scenario. But, suppose CH were repealed and the Progs decided to throw owners of those "luxury condos" everyone hates under the bus to score political points by implementing vacancy control. In that case, I'd have no choice but to sell, because I literally couldn't pay the mortgage if I couldn't charge market rent. (Actually, even market rent, right now, would not be enough to pay the mortgage--I would have to start low and raise the rent over time, or else I'd have to sell.)

For some of us, it isn't about profit. I'm happy to give up profit for a good tenant. It's about not having the bank foreclose on our property--which, needless to say, would in eviction for our tenants.

[mc32]

For clarification, landlords have an advantage when there is a boom, but a disadvantage when in a bust.