[jlhawn]

YIMBY organizers still get a lot of criticism from its early days where they would show up to support housing wherever it was being built, and in the mid-2010s that typically meant low-income, minority neighborhoods that were already experiencing a lot of displacement pressure. This gave them a bad reputation among equity organizations which supported alternatives like rent control and moratoriums on new construction. Some YIMBYs still think that policies like rent control are like a metaphorical wrench in the housing market machine which reduce the incentive to supply more housing but even more still realize that the machine is already full of wrenches like apartment bans, onerous parking requirements, and single-family-only zoning, excessively long discretionary review processes, etc [1].

The latest in the movement for new public housing in California is actually supported by YIMBY organizations [2]. AB 2053, The Social Housing Act is making its way through the state legislature right now. While just about every YIMBY organization supports it, it's opposed by NIMBY orgs like Livable California, the League of California Cities, and even the California Association of Realtors. Meanwhile, the orgs which have long talked about supporting social housing are taking either no position or support-if-amended stances on the bill because they don't like that the way it generates subsidy for below market housing is by building market-rate housing to cross-subsidize it. They strongly believe that any new market-rate housing causes displacement but don't want to be on the wrong side of history when this bill succeeds.

[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney/video/709917153557088183... [2] https://www.californiasocialhousing.org/

[zbrozek]

St. Paul enacted rent control and saw -80% permit application rates. Minneapolis (immediately adjacent) saw permit applications rise in the same time. It should be plainly obvious that reducing the utility of housing units reduces the demand to build them.

https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/in-first-months-s...

[jlhawn]

St. Paul's rent control does go pretty far. Personally, I think it's a mistake to have it apply to new construction. If you remember California Prop 21 from 2020, even that would have only allowed rent control on buildings which are at least 15 years old.

[zbrozek]

I see almost all of our housing problems as direct descendants of the original sin of making it too hard to build and use structures. Any form of rent control is another form of NIMBYism, just this time with a progressive coat of paint.

This article has a bunch of cringeworthy prose, but has some worthwhile graphs of data showing that price-fixing isn't the answer:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-02/berlin...

See also numerous Planet Money stories about rent control:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/05/700432258/the-...

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/31/1077086398/is-it-time-to-cont...

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/29/707908952/the-evidence-agains...

Note that even very-progressive Jerusalem Demsas was once against rent control and has only switched sides as a palliative measure because fixing the root cause of the problem is proving too difficult.

Freakonomics also did a show on the topic:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-rent-control-doesnt-wor...

[jlhawn]

In many California cities at least, you can connect all of the rent control measures in the late '70s to significant downzonings which occurred in the previous decade or so. I wonder if it could also be be considered a factor which contributed to the passage of proposition 13 in 1978.

https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/programs/housing/housing-supply/z...

edit: So I actually consider rent control to be a result of low housing production rather than the other way around. Associate Professor Shane Phillips from the Lewis Center (linked above) also considers rent control to be a very reasonable policy as long as there's plenty of realistic zoned capacity for more housing. Everyone is always arguing that if we build more then that would keep rents from rising so why not have rent control anyway then?

[zbrozek]

I don't follow. If you don't have a problem (in this case expensive housing) why would you need to do something about that problem (in this case rent control)? It's extra complexity serving no purpose. And that will inevitably come with enforcement issues, disputes, lawsuits, etc.

But yes, I think you're right that rent control is typically a political result of insufficient housing production. But it's a bad policy. Price fixing is never the answer to a supply problem, even if it's a popular one.

[colinmhayes]

> rent control and moratoriums on new construction.

Literally the worst way to make housing more equitable. All rent control does is give long term residents a handout at the expense of everyone else while increasing commute times due to being unable to move and lowering the quality of the housing stock.