[vonkow]

I grew up in Cambridge. When rent control went away, the rent skyrocketed and a large swath of the lower/middle class was forced to move to the suburbs.

It sucks, because only 2 or 3 towns in MA had rent control, but developers scared city councils across the state into voting to ban the practice.

[driverdan]

> It sucks

Why does it suck? The market should be allowed to work.

[glibgil]

They already told you. "a large swath of the lower/middle class was forced to move to the suburbs". Read.

[nemo]

Whether it sucks depends on whether you care more about humanity or markets.

[deepsun]

I'd better to care about markets -- counter-intuitively, humanity will be better then. I've grew up in USSR, and I know what I'm talking about. The rent control smells so communist to me.

[nemo]

There are good reasons to care about markets, though it needs to be recognized that markets serve humanity.

If you go to the Marxist extreme of a centrally planned economy people aren't taken into account.

If you go to the extreme of a completely unregulated free market economy people aren't taken into account.

The happy medium is a free market that's regulated to prevent coercive and abusive practices. The US had a much stronger overall economy and greater general prosperity when it followed that model. The neoliberal extremist policies that have been been adopted since the 80s have been a series of unfolding tragedies for the poor and middle class in the US.

Rent controls don't appear in a vacuum, they are a response to the unfolding human tragedies of rentier exploitation that harm actual people. They may not be optimally implemented in SF, but to label them Communist is extremist.

The neoliberal shock-treatment approach in Russia was a human disaster as well, and the horrors in Chile, parts of the EU, and elsewhere show why extremism that cares more about ideology than humanity is a vice. It doesn't matter if the ideologues are Marxists or Capitalists, ideologues always promote policies that are bad for humanity, since they care more about ideological purity than practicality or humanity.

[s73v3r]

Why? Why is the market considered the be-all, end-all of desirable outcomes?

Quite frankly, I consider "the market" forcing people out of areas they've lived in for most of their lives to be a far worse outcome.

[aetherson]

I genuinely don't understand all of the native bias in these discussions. Like, if Joe lives in town A, and Frank lives in town B, and both would like to live in town A, and Joe and Frank are otherwise utterly equivalent people, lots of people seem to regard it as totally natural that Joe should have primacy over Frank.

I don't. I don't really know why anyone would. Like, ideally in a perfect world both Joe and Frank would be able to live where they want, but given that land is a persistently scarce resource, what's the basis for privileging Joe over Frank? And what is the magnitude of the privilege that we should regard as a natural right? Surely not infinite.

[zem]

because there's a high cost to moving - you lose the connections and communities that you've built up over time. the basis of these laws is that frank having more money than joe should not give him the leverage to force joe to pay that cost.

[s73v3r]

Why should Frank have primacy over Joe? Joe was there first. Should it simply be because Frank has more money? That's a pretty terrible way to decide these things. I mean, at what point do we say that Frank deserves Joe's other things simply because he has more money?

Basically, you're just making a "Might makes right" argument, but substituting wealth for physical might.

[sokoloff]

Why should the owner of the building have to lease the unit to Joe at a lower cost than he could rent it to Frank? (Joe and Frank are otherwise equivalent as stipulated by GP.)

Do I have to sell my labor to my current employer cheaper than a prospective new employer? Do I have to sell my used car cheaper to someone who once rode in it than I could to another buyer? Why then should landlords be subject to those restrictions?

[eszed]

Because housing instability creates social harm. Tech salaries would (probably!) keep pace with the demand for non-rent controlled San Francisco housing, but teachers, cops, firefighters -- let alone retirees -- incomes won't likewise scale. Folks like that will be rapidly priced out of living anywhere for longer than the length of a minimal-term lease.

A stable community is a thing not much valued by (young and transient) tech workers, though I would argue that even they derive some benefit from living near folks who make less money than they do.

Rent control doesn't create utopia -- and this article describes some of its acknowledged problems -- but neither would abolishing it be free of consequence.

Like most things in life, it's a trade-off. Don't overlook one side of the exchange.