[spoonie]

Those landlords should go out of business in a free market. Not properly accounting for maintenance costs is a business failure, not the tenant’s fault. If property prices are higher than rents that’s a market failure, not a cost to be passed onto tenants.

[briandear]

So a landlord should be subject to the free market, but tenants shouldn’t be? Tenants should be protected from rent increases, but property owners shouldn’t be protected against cost increases? That isn’t the free market.

[jdavis703]

One way to look at this is, land owners are generally wealthier than renters. According to the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances landowners are 44 times wealthier. It makes sense that the government protects people who are less able to deal with financial instability.

[roenxi]

It makes sense, but it is also a bad idea. If someone can't afford the cost of living, they should relocate to somewhere else where they can.

Western civilisation has had phenomenal results with the principle that when there isn't enough of something then the owner of that thing gets to decide who goes without. Housing is not so special that it deserves an exemption. Squeezing landlords is one of several ways to lock a housing shortage in for the long term. It has been established that letting people make big profits doing something is a great way to get more of the something - and that applies to renting out houses too. The only role for the government in making sure it is easy to build more houses and that everyone sticks to what they signed when it comes to contracts.

[spoonie]

I agree, except that housing right now isn’t a free market precisely because of zoning rules that artificially limit what can be built and where. Until existing land owners lose the right to rig the market, markets should be rigged in favour of tenants who have less power.

Where it’s easy to build new housing supply I’m in favour of looser rent control or removing rent control because it’ll be redundant.

[spoonie]

Yup it’s a combination of protecting those who are less powerful and I would argue a way to avoid perverse incentives. If a landlord can arbitrarily raise rent, they have no incentive to perform ongoing (inexpensive maintenance). They can wait until the problems become critical and much more expensive and then pass those costs onto the tenant. With rent control the landlord knows they have to control costs and has more incentive to perform the cheaper preventative maintenance.

[deburo]

It's a nice theory, but also a very well tested one. Just read an article on bloomberg about the policy being a wash in San Francisco, with some concerns that it may have had some other effects they weren't able to measure.

It's akin to the minimum wage; why are people so bent on capping prices? Why not work on the underlying problems instead, ie what's causing those prices?