Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mrverify 1835 days ago
Its worse than that. As a tenant, you cannot have people who are not on the lease stay long term without them going through a background check. This means that you may end up increasing the homelessness of relatives with temporary financial issues and also isolating potential mates with financial issues from living with their significant others until married, forcing the better financially equipped mate to take a hit to their credit/rent risk and lose the ability to rent in a better area. Also, you are severely limited in the things you can do at leased residences. Garden? Maybe not if its in the lease.
2 comments
alert0 1835 days ago
Rent control makes landlords very hesitant to add new people to a lease. Otherwise the unit can just be passed from friend to friend and never get back to market.
link
fb13 1835 days ago
> Otherwise the unit can just be passed from friend to friend and never get back to market.

I'm not sure how this is unfair. Considering the way capital gains are taxed after the sale it seems like the grandfathered-in rent controls are just a lever at the opposite end of the spectrum. But of course, we don't want to give any levers to the poors so it has to go.

link
digitaltrees 1835 days ago
We can want to support the poor and also recognize that prior attempts have unintended consequences or are ineffective. In this case rent control seems to reduce housing stock. The solution may be building more units so regulation should focus on that.
link
fb13 1835 days ago
It needs to be significantly easier to buy a first house than a second house. Getting a first mortgage is "easy" until you factor in the "mortgage insurance" scam. Rent seeking should not be such an appealing option to make money. The result is a bunch of scummy landlords, essentially utilizing the poors to "keep down" the other poors through rent exploitation. Basically the "upper middle" class is the gatekeeper preventing lower classes from having social mobility by maximizing rent exploitation. It's a great system because it prevents the real upper classes from having to get their hands dirty.
link