[Hermitian909]

Among other problems rent control has this really nasty side effect of stopping that community action that would help control housing prices, Seattle is a good illustration of this.

When rent started increasing in Seattle all renters were immediately effected and so that segment of the population mobilized and applied pressure to do the one thing that keeps housing prices down in a free market: Increase supply. Lots of people were forced out but after over a decade of non-stop, fevered construction prices are finally starting to get under control.

In San Francisco a large portion of the rental market is insulated from rent prices until it's time to move. At that point if you're priced out, you tend to leave. Some people try to tough it out and fight but that rarely lasts more than a year or two. This staggering of resistance to increased rents into smaller chunks of the renting population makes political change almost impossible as no small chunk has a chance against the more consistently committed land owners.

[coliveira]

That's incorrect: Seattle is building new apartments but only those who make large salaries can rent them. The population that used to pay reasonable prices for rentals now cannot afford the prices and are either leaving the city or in extreme cases living in the streets. In this respect Seattle is now closer to San Francisco than what you imagine.

[imtringued]

You are asking the wrong questions. The only thing that matters is whether the population of Seattle increases and it does indeed grow more quickly than in San Francisco. San Francisco only sees some population growth because of a high influx of international migrants. The Americans are moving away to Seattle and other cheaper cities.

The biggest injustice in the US is that thanks to globalization jobs are now concentrated in few major cities. But people cannot move where the jobs are because of opposition to new housing. Those cities are basically taking "jobs" hostage by pretending to care about the character of their neighborhood.

As long as more construction is allowed and matches the number of new jobs then it simply doesn't matter how much some magical number called "rent" increases because the jobs that can pay for the market rate housing are already there but what's missing is housing capacity.

Also all I can find about Seattle migration outflow is that there was a big dip in Q1 2018 but in Q2 there was a net inflow again. [0]

[0] https://www.redfin.com/blog/q4-redfin-migration-report-seatt...

[coliveira]

You clearly don't know what the situation of Seattle is. The influx of people to Seattle is to work on high tech companies. These people make enough money to pay for the increasing costs of rent. The locals (Americans, by the way) are forced to leave the city because they can't afford to live here anymore. The poorer ones that have no prospect of finding jobs in another city become homeless. That's the perverse reality.

[seanmcdirmid]

New apartments rent for more than older apartments, forcing them downmarket. So ya, new developments are priced higher, but enough of it has come online in the last year or two that down pressure is being applied to the rental market (though perhaps not enough?). At least rents aren’t rising as fast as they were.

[Hermitian909]

I'm aware that most of the new housing is luxury apartments, but rents are finally dropping. I think the reality of the past 30 years is simply that prices were increasing faster than we could build for a long time and we had to play catch up.