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>pay for keeping the working class viable with the overall economic gains made by lifting rent controls The economic gains from lifting rent control are going
by thatcat 11y ago
>pay for keeping the working class viable with the overall economic gains made by lifting rent controls
The economic gains from lifting rent control are going to go to slumlords, not just get dispersed to everyone. Also, housing isn't an elastic supply market. when rent goes up it doesn't necessarily mean the quantity of housing will increase as a result since housing is often limited by zoning, drainage, and many other things than profitability of rentals. Also when you consider the destabilizing effect of people having to move every few years due to rental price fluctuation, it's not really a clear cut benefit to "bribe current residents to lift rent control" if that were even an option.
>we should hand out the who-benefits stuff without making society worse off as a whole, simply because the locals who happen to live in an area are able to hold overall policy hostage
but this is how democratic communities work... local communities decide what is 'making society worse' where they live; as they should, since it obviously effects them the most.
- ThrustVectoring 11y ago>local communities decide what is 'making society worse' where they live; as they should, since it obviously effects them the most. Local optimization is not the best strategy, even according to the those doing the local optimizations. Both participants in a Prisoner's Dilemma are better off if they hand their decision-making over to a third party, conditional on the other person also doing so. The Bay Area as a whole wants affordable housing, they just don't want to make the Bay as a whole better off by making unfair sacrifices in their neighborhood. It's a classic coordination problem, caused in large part because decision-making is too local compared to the regional benefits of housing construction.