[archagon]

Do you own your own house? Are you rich?

I’ve known acquaintances who got de facto evicted without warning just because their landlord decided to make a few extra bucks. Were that to happen to me, I would not be able to rent in my current city at all due to the recent influx of wealthy tech workers. (Read: extremely high rents with ridiculous income requirements.) Fortunately, my city has robust tenant protections and rent control, so I don’t have to live my life in fear of ending up on the curb. Some people see that as a bad thing; I guess they think I should save up a few million dollars to buy a condo or abandon my community and move to the boonies.

This would be less of an issue with more housing stock, but that takes decades to build. As a city resident inconveniently living in the present, that does not help me much.

Obviously, I’d never vote for a politician who would make it easier for a landlord to evict me arbitrarily. And I’d eagerly vote for the same protections for any other renter.

[itake]

I think you’re leaving details out of your story. If the landlord wants to make a few bucks, then they keep their good tenants (lowers vacancy rate, keeps repairs low, etc).

Kicking out good tenants cost landlords money.

[archagon]

It’s pretty simple. There’s a tech boom or similar, a bunch of rich workers move in, rents go up. Landlord spikes rent by 30% to take advantage. You can see this happening in r/sanfrancisco today, for non-rent-controlled units.

[itake]

Sf is kinda a mess. Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave (locking up more housing, reducing supply, forcing everyone else to pay more), thus continue to discourage rent controlled tenants from moving since moving means even higher prices.

The property tax situation in SF is a mess.

SF also requires a lot of expensive regulations (earthquake proofing, renovation permits, rising California insurance costs, etc).

Also… the unfortunate reality is there is only so much space and the capital markets determine who gets to live where. If you’re not able to keep up in a city, then there are better places for you.

[craftkiller]

> Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave

They have exactly as much freedom to leave as they would without rent control. They _choose_ to stay because rent control has made it advantageous to stay. The way you phrased it implies you're suggesting this is a bad thing for renters but that is strictly a positive. Without rent control they'd have zero affordable options, with rent control they have 1 affordable option. Woe to the inhabitants of rent controlled apartments with their golden handcuffs.

[itake]

Rent control drives up rent prices for everyone.

So yes, if you have rent control in a city, it would create an environment with zero affordable options.

[inigyou]

Obviously it does not drive up the rent price of the person who is paying less rent. That's the whole point. The residents of SF have voted to prevent you from taking their apartments, so if you don't want to bid very competitively for an already empty apartment, you'll just have to take an apartment somewhere else.

[majormajor]

> Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave (locking up more housing, reducing supply, forcing everyone else to pay more), thus continue to discourage rent controlled tenants from moving since moving means even higher prices.

This is disingenuous. In the absence of rent control (or prop 13 for property owners) you famously get a situation where tenants ALSO can't afford to leave... but have to anyway.

Why should anyone be forced to leave just because someone richer wants to move in?

You don't have to support someone being unable to evict people who don't pay to believe that there should be limits on how much landlords (or the state, in the case of prop 13) should be able to force current residents to leave just to make a quick buck.

[itake]

> Why should anyone be forced to leave just because someone richer wants to move in?

This triggers my other frustration: empty nesters. They continue to live in great 3-4 bedroom homes that are amazing to raise a family in (near job centers, plenty of bedrooms, tight community, near good schools). This forces people like myself to spend 85+ minutes in a car (away from my family, friends etc) everyday while I drive past all these amazing empty homes.

Yes, if you’re not using the space efficiently, GTFO and let people have the space! Let dad have more time with his kids. Let the tech bro that created 10m jobs and have more time with his wife and kid. Let people burn less fossil fuels to get to work.

Rent-controlled/prop13 grandma needs to find another place to live for the next generation.

Someone living alone in a rent controlled unit paying below market rates is much “richer” than a family of 4 paying 5x more cramped into a 2 bedroom apartment.

[inigyou]

Maybe you could offer a trade. Swap your home for theirs and pay them some rent for it.

[nradov]

It sounds like you're living in a badly governed city. Have you considered voting for politicians with an abundance agenda? Or moving to a city with more intelligent housing policies such as Dallas?

[majormajor]

NIMBYism and single-family zoning are alive and thriving in Dallas; what Dallas has is this thing called a huge-fucking-flat-prairie all around it that means Frisco, Addison, etc, have been able to add to the low-density car-centric sprawl and help keep prices down some.

(But even then, plenty of Dallas residents have been upset in the past decade by what happens to rental prices when a bunch of higher-income folks move to town!)

One wonders why the people who don't want to have to leave a city like San Fransisco just cause some other people have more money than them and want to raise their rents out of their reach are the ones who should move to Texas. Why shouldn't the would-be newcomers just be the ones go to all those cookie-cutter new developments?

If you jumped back in time 20 years ago and were able to ensure that YCombinator, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, and other high-paper-valuation companies, and they all had imported their from-out-of-town high-income-or-equity-leveraging employees to McKinney, Texas, not much materially would prevent those companies from still doing what they did. But people who already lived in SF or on the peninsula but didn't own much land there would have a materially better standard of living due to their costs not running away from their existing incomes. And the Texas burbs happily would've built a shit-ton of houses and apartments for the startup workers, because of the aforementioned giant quantities of near-empty land. Greenfield businesses for greenfield real-estate. Much better fit than force-transforming cities.

[sp527]

> I guess they think I should save up a few million dollars to buy a condo or abandon my community and move to the boonies.

If you can't afford to live in your city, what distinguishes you from the people in the boonies? Why should they be relegated to the boonies while you successfully game the system?

[archagon]

I can afford to live in my city. I’m living in it right now! The nice thing is that I don’t get pushed out by arbitrary economic fluctuations completely out of my control.

[ekelsen]

If only we could all get free protection from economic forces we don't control.

That kind of insurance is usually pretty expensive. Why should you get it for free?

[archagon]

One, we vote for it, and there's far more renters out there than owners.

Two, there are many "free protections" in our society that we take for granted. Should fire departments be privatized? Police?

Protections against unforeseen events are part and parcel of living in a humane, civilized society, and there's good reason for housing security to be one of those foundational protections.

Three, your entire framing is kind of bananas. Rent control is neither insurance nor expensive, but a cap on landlord profits. If anything, it's unbounded profiteering of basic necessities that's actually "expensive."

[inigyou]

Why shouldn't everyone get everything for free that can be provided for free? Forcing other people to pay a cost because you paid a cost is just sour grapes.

[jandrewrogers]

It can’t be provide for free, that’s the point. Mitigating risks has costs that you are ignoring. Those costs aren’t cheap and someone has to pay for them.

[ekelsen]

Except it's not free. It's free to you but not others.

[majormajor]

> If only we could all get free protection from economic forces we don't control.

> That kind of insurance is usually pretty expensive. Why should you get it for free?

Protecting its constituents from the whims of out-of-town money seems like an excellent purpose for a local government. Especially if some of that money wants to move in so badly that it can be very profitably taxed!

Why shouldn't local government try to serve its constituents like that?

[inigyou]

Because I'm rich, and I want to live in SF dagnabbit, and how dare the (checks notes) existing residents of SF vote to block me from taking one of their apartments that I obviously deserve to live in more than they do because I'm rich?

[sp527]

By that logic, we should let the Ohlone tribes underbid all existing residents. They too are just rich assholes who simply displaced those who were there before them.

[sp527]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but your comment suggested you'd be unable to afford market rent.

[archagon]

I can afford to live in my city because my landlord isn’t able to tack an extra $2000 to my rent due to the sudden influx of AI bros.

[sp527]

Pity the boonyman who was afforded no such luxury

[inigyou]

Are AI bros infesting the boonies now