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by ralusek 1906 days ago
That just turns the city into a firt-come-first-serve lottery, in addition to all sorts of perverse incentives/disincentives for landlords and tenants alike, rather than a place where the people who are most willing/able to pay to live there are the ones that do. Rent control is one of the worst solutions to any problem.
1 comments
majormajor 1906 days ago
> That just turns the city into a firt-come-first-serve lottery

That's how property ownership works, after all. Extending the same benefits to renters has a lot of obvious appeal even if it does nothing to fix overall price increase trends.

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ralusek 1906 days ago
No it's not. If I walk into SF with 2 million dollars, there are more than a few people who would give up their 1 million dollar house for that amount of money. My desire and means to live there would just have to exceed their own.

If someone is in a rent-controlled situation, they were simply lucky to get there first, and there is no mechanism in place for anybody else to rotate into that position.

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kar5pt 1906 days ago
Yeah, property _ownership_ not property renting. They work differently for a reason. When housing prices rise, owners are incentivized to sell. When rents rise on rent controlled buildings, renters are incentived to stay put, even if they don't need the space. This incentivizes building owners to not maintain the buildings since they know renters won't leave anyway.

There's tons of ways to make housing affordable without resorting to policies that have been rejected almost unanimously by economists.

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