[88913527]

Because if housing gets too expensive in some area, you'd leave and that'd open up supply. By locking in the price, future changes in demand are irrelevant to you -- but place great pressure on newcomers to your area.

It's economically inefficient for Grandma to continue living in Palo Alto in a $4 million home when that land could instead have a multi-family housing complex to support the demand for workers in the region. It'd be the same story for someone who's in rent-controlled housing for $400/mo but the equivalent market rate is $3500. It's inefficient.

If we're saying rent control has externalities, we need to acknowledge that any scheme that fixes your housing cost has the same effect.

[cebert]

If mortgage holders are viewed as property owners who borrowed capital to fund their investment, how would it he fair for their mortgage rate to increase with cost of living?

[vinyl7]

Housing shouldn't be an investment

[kelnos]

Agreed, but I don't think that really addresses the parent's point. Remove "investment" from their statement, and it's still a perfectly valid question.

[jjav]

> It's economically inefficient for Grandma to continue living in Palo Alto in a $4 million home

Not everything is about economic efficiency and maximizing investments.

For most people a house is not an investment to be maximized, it is home. Particularly for someone elderdly who has lived there most of their life.

[djbebs]

Then why the complaints about high housing prices?

You cant pick and chose what to be outraged about when its those very policies causing the problem

[quacked]

Beep boop beep grandma is economically inefficient she must be replaced with more productive economic units boop beep newcomers are more important than existing citizens

Get back in the Faraday cage, drone!

[kelnos]

Please don't do this here; there's a much less inflammatory way to say what you're saying.

I agree that efficiency of use should not be the driving factor around property use and ownership.

I don't think newcomers should be considered more important than incumbents, but currently the pendulum has swung way too far in the other direction; often newcomers just cannot enter many housing markets, and that's not fair or healthy either. There's nothing inherently "right" about being lucky to be born at a particular time and in the right place and right financial situation to buy housing in a region that just happens to become highly desirable decades later.

[throwaway24433]

> that just happens to become highly desirable decades later

Why should people be forced to give up their homes just because someone else desires them?

By this logic, if newcomers seize granny’s house they should expect to immediately be forced out by the next group who has desire.

There is no coherent argument about fairness or luck here.

The only argument here is a new group of relatively rich people looking for a way to seize desirable properties for themselves without.

Why should a tech-bro who just sits at a keyboard all day be able to force out granny and grandpa who worked as a secretary and an auto-mechanic? Does the tech-bro ‘deserve’ it more?

If they succeed in forcing granny out it will be at least as unfair as it was before.

[88913527]

If granny doesn't leave, it's disingenuous to suggest nobody isn't getting kicked out. It will be someone who has to play by market-rate rules; probably a lower middle class family paying market-rate rent that gets squeezed too far. That's one or two less firemen or teachers or chefs or postal workers in the area.

Why should some people have to give up their homes, but not others, is the more interesting question to ask. If nobody should ever have to give up their living arrangement due to exogenous factors (like a trillion dollar industry popping up in your backyard-- which, to be fair, isn't what happens to most neighborhoods), then we should be doubling down Prop 13 and rent control.