8 ms·

Can somebody explain why Affordable Rent exists? Living in San Francisco, or New York, or London is not a human right. Note: I'm not trolling, I'm a left lean

by 21 8y ago

Can somebody explain why Affordable Rent exists? Living in San Francisco, or New York, or London is not a human right. Note: I'm not trolling, I'm a left leaning person which favours basic income and national health insurance, I just don't understand why living in a mega-expensive city should be subventioned by the state. If you can't afford a Ferrari, you buy a Toyota. Why not move to a less expensive place?

ng12 8y ago
I don't think anyone is arguing it's a human right. I think the argument is about displacement. Affordable Housing usually goes to people who have lived in an area for a long time and now can no longer afford it.
- joejerryronnie 8y ago
  Interesting that some people argue affordable housing is good because it allows people to stay in their homes but Prop 13 is bad because it . . . allows people to stay in their homes.
  - denverkarma 8y ago
    Prop 13 is just a phenomenal transfer of wealth from the young and working class to the old and wealthy. Don’t kid yourself that it was ever about anything else.
    - ng12 8y ago
      What happens if you sell under Prop 13? Does the tax man come calling then?
      - boulos 8y ago
        The price resets for the new owner. Under Prop 13, the assessed value is X when you buy it and can only be increased by up to ~2% per year even if your home went up in value by much more. This chains together over long periods of time, so that if you bought a place 20 years ago you are now paying property tax on at most X * 1.02^20. If the new owner paid you 5X for the home, they now pay property tax against that value moving forward.
        ng12 8y ago
        It seems to me that the seller should pay a hefty tax on that 5x value. Why should you get rich on appreciation that you didn't pay taxes on? I get the feeling the answer is more about greed and less about helping people stay in their homes.
    - joejerryronnie 8y ago
      Do you feel the same way about social security?
navytank 8y ago
You can't fill a city entirely with bankers, tech workers, and other professionals. What about teachers? Police? Those in the restaurant industry? I don't think anyone is claiming that everyone should have a "human right" to live in SF. But when looking at the city as a systems problem, creating a sustainable system may require these kinds of measures to allow the right mix of people to live in the city.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  It's sort of like when the subject of human rights gets brought in the discussion of taxation. There are pragmatic concerns being brought up here for social order. Arguing about rights distracts from practical needs to ensure the public good.
- jbob2000 8y ago
  Affordable Rent policies block the free market from increasing wages in the city. Instead of paying workers more, we've asked landlords to make up the difference between a living wage and a poverty one.
  - setpatchaddress 8y ago
    is this sarcasm? If not, do you have a reference? The usual argument is that sf needs more housing supply to meet demand, period, let alone affordable housing. Edit: see zkms, below.
    - losteric 8y ago
      I think they're referring to rent controlled apartment... not sure why they think landlords "make up the difference", the landlord simply charges other renters more. I'm not aware of any studies, but it does seem logical from a system perspective... The relatively fixed supply of rent-controlled apartments is a random cost-of-living subsidy for low-income workers. Those that "win" can accept lower wages, while the "losers" are forced to compete despite higher cost-of-living (commute or rent). The latter group will get a little more, but not as much as if there was no rent-control. On the employment side, employers may hold jobs open longer hoping for a rent-controlled applicant that will accept lower wages. Ideally we would have no rent-controlled apartments or enough for everyone that needs it, but anywhere in between is a distorted market that hurts consumers and employees. Eliminating rent control would be my preference, it seems more efficient than subsidizing everyone that needs it (as individuals can choose how to spend their higher wages, whereas rent subsidies always go to rent).
jarym 8y ago
I agree with you but there is still a problem to be solved: a LOT of essential public services are provided by people that have salaries far lower than required for rents in a particular area. Teachers, nurses, police officers, etc.
- seibelj 8y ago
  Sure, but wouldn’t a city have to increase salaries to allow someone to be a nurse or teacher in an expensive area? Similarly, one can be a nurse or teacher in a lower cost of living place. No one forces you to teach in SF.
  - bradknowles 8y ago
    No one forces you to have kids, either. No kids, no need for teachers or any kind of education system.
    - seibelj 8y ago
      Unrelated to my comment? Are there a lack of teachers in SF?
  - txsh 8y ago
    No. They wouldn’t. They’d just allow the quality of government services to degrade. Example: every city the United States. It’s like saying “traffic is good because it forces to government to build more roads.” No, it does not.
- jstanley 8y ago
  If those people start being forced to move out, you'll quickly find that salaries will rise to compensate. Supply and demand is very simple. Keeping rents artificially cheap is just a backdoor way of keeping salaries artificially low.
crdoconnor 8y ago
TIL there are people who equate wanting to stay in the city they grew up in as an equivalent level of entitlement to owning a Ferrari. ...and they consider themselves "left leaning"
- throwaway080383 8y ago
  I want to be a software engineer making FANG $, but live in the tiny Midwestern town I grew up in. It is unethical for society to not provide this for me.
  - crdoconnor 8y ago
    Nobody said anything about guaranteeing "FANG" jobs, just a reasonably priced place to live to people who grew up in SF.
    - throwaway080383 8y ago
      Sorry I wasn't totally clear. I currently have a FANG job, but I am forced to live in a high COL locale to maintain it. Living anywhere near my hometown is simply not an option; I doubt there is a single employed software engineer in a 30 mile radius, and certainly not at the same level of comp. So, if I want to be a well paid software engineer, I can't live in Iowa. If I want to live in Iowa, I can't be a well paid software engineer. If you want to live in the Bay, don't be a teacher. If you want to be a teacher, don't live in the Bay. If enough folks follow that rationale, Bay Area teachers will get paid more.
btian 8y ago
Because people (in a democracy) decided that it's not in public's interest to have low paid service providers e.g., teachers, cooks, gov workers, to commute many hours a day. These affordable places are "Toyotas". They're not million dollar apartments with doorman and valet. It's okay to disagree, and these are not human rights in the sense that it's written into the constitution, or in UN conventions. Not everything governments do are related to human rights.
- tripletao 8y ago
  Admittedly not a doorman or a valet, but this one's got a "concierge": https://housing.sfgov.org/listings/a0W0P00000GRYOoUAP https://housing.sfgov.org/listings/a0W0P00000GRYOoUAP http://thecivicsf.com/ http://thecivicsf.com/ Apartment #205, income-restricted to between $3258 and $3800/month for a single person, $1303/month. The market units are roughly 3x, though the interior finishes are often nicer. I'm guessing around $700k for a similar condo? It's a kind of genius. If everyone getting screwed by the SF housing market united, then they could vote for land use changes that would solve the problem. Like, if SF abolished all zoning tomorrow, then a lot of terrible things would happen; but do you really doubt that housing prices would go down? We'd have problems, but not the one big central crushing problem that we have now. Affordable housing policies divide those people, according to stuff like: faith in government vs. market solutions personal eligibility vs. ineligibility for the units preference between a bad apartment vs. a lottery for a great one That splits the landowners' natural enemies into warring factions, as we see here.
zkms 8y ago
> Can somebody explain why Affordable Rent exists? Because in large US cities, housing is artificially scarce (and thus pathologically expensive). This artificial scarcity is enforced by zoning laws; which prohibit SROs, rooming houses, and apartments with small floor areas, medium/high-rise apartments, non-family roommates, short-term rentals, buildings above a certain height; whilst requiring stuff like parking, solar panels on the roof, and minimum lot/room/floor areas (that have no justification in genuine safety concerns -- these are all regulations that mandate a certain level of aesthetic/luxury qualities). The people who have a financial interest in maintaining these zoning laws (which prohibit/delay/obstruct construction of any kind of dense/tall/small/inexpensive housing, of the kind that exist without any problem in actual proper, non-US cities) are single-family homeowners who are making serious money off this artificial scarcity situation. In this system, subsidised housing (which is generally inaccessible without decade-long waitlists, and meeting extremely narrow criteria (such as having proof of income that's in a narrow range between "low enough to qualify" but also "high enough to be twice the subsidised rent")) has a role as a safety valve to prevent enough coordination that could pose risk to this artificial-scarcity regime. This is not idle theorising -- it worked exactly like that to kill SB827 (a CA state law that would have preempted height limits encoded in local zoning law in areas very close to a subway/train/bus station); where "advocates" for subsidised housing concern-trolled the thing to death with concerns about "displacement".
- flog 8y ago
  Isn't this every city, everywhere?
txsh 8y ago
What if your family lives there? What if you’re divorced and your children live there? What if you don’t want to move your children away from their school and friends? What if jobs in your profession aren’t available elsewhere? What if you’re receiving medical treatment there that’s not available elsewhere? What if you’re contractually obligated to be there? There are a million reasons why someone might not be able to simply move to a new city. Nobody has a right to live in a particular building or neighborhood. But there should be somewhere for them to live within a city no matter what their income is. A city shouldn’t be allowed to ban classes of people.
- denverkarma 8y ago
  It’s the government dictating who can live where and do what via egregious over regulation that bans people from the city. If they’d cut the red tape and let housing be built the economy would normalize toward construction cost over time.
  - txsh 8y ago
    Naive, ECON 101 thinking. The free market doesn’t work like this. Read some network theory, son.
ggm 8y ago
What kind of society do you want to live in? Do you want walled gardens of luxe, and a ghetto outside for the cleaners?
evgen 8y ago
Living in these places is definitely not a human right. But then again, neither is it necessary for us to allow you to live there either even if you can buy the most palatial home in the city. It cuts both ways.
denverkarma 8y ago
Because the left thinks that the fix for housing shortage caused by governmental regulation starving the market of housing is for the government to intervene further and subsidize the thing they made unobtainable.
- EliRivers 8y ago
  Speaking as someone who routinely votes for the most extreme crazy left-wing loon on the ballot in local elections (disappointing choice this time - only one, the "Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition" party candidate), I'd much rather they did it by forcing the building of a lot more houses, but that seems less palatable to the rich than subsidies.
allengeorge 8y ago
In Toronto highly-trained cops are leaving because salaries in the exurbs are comparable and afford a higher standard of living (because you’re not forking as much over for housing). This is a loss for the city because training is expensive. This movement is being repeated across professions.
- pg_bot 8y ago
  This is completely rational behavior, if Toronto wants to keep its police officers they should offer a higher wage.
  - falcolas 8y ago
    Which means they need more money, which means a tax hike. The tax hike is voted upon by the city citizens, and denied. Instead, the citizens become more likely to complain about the lack of responsiveness of police, and use it to justify their choices to not pay more taxes for those "lazy police." Cops, teachers, janitors - these are poor candidates for "market forces".
    - pg_bot 8y ago
      So the citizens move, the city shrinks, housing becomes more affordable and they don't need to raise salaries as the cost of living is lower. It's all an equilibrium, you can't just see one side while ignoring the other. All of those occupations are defined by market forces claiming they aren't is economic ignorance.
jdavis703 8y ago
Ideally the free market would take care of this. But homeowners have been able to hijack the market through rent seeking behaviours that tightly regulate housing. It's very hard to break the market dominance of land owners. Until someone can develop a palletable political solution to do so affordable housing will have to be government mandated or provided. Further there will always be a segment of the population who can't afford to house themselves (note this is much smaller than those who can't afford housing due to the dysfunctional market). As a society we should be looking out for people who need extra help. Edit: I'm getting downvoted on this. That's fine, but can someone explain what I said wrong?
- DrScump 8y ago
  can someone explain what I said wrong? For one thing, you are assigning powers to "homeowners" that they do not have. Homeowners don't control zoning or other policy; politicians, and the bureaucrats they appoint, do. They could make noise at a council or planning commission meeting, but so can anyone else.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
falcolas 8y ago
How much more are you, as a hypothetical citizen of these cities, willing to pay in taxes to pay for the higher costs of living for your cops, fire fighters, and teachers. How much more are you willing to pay at the grocery store to hire the checkers and stockers. At a restaurant for the cooks, waiters and waitresses, and cleaning staff? For your taxi, your delivery men, your trash men, your utilities, plumbing, construction, road work, and so forth. Affordable rent helps to keep your costs, as a hypothetical citizen, low as well.
cam_l 8y ago
Another take on it, rent is like farming. If you pull too much out of the system, the soil gets degraded and the salinity rises, poisoning the crops. Affordable rent is a way (albeit deeply flawed) of trying to maintain the health of the system. A better way would be to cap profits on property through taxes. Make it too expensive to strip the system of its nutrients.. to continue with the mixed metaphor.

by 21 8y ago

ng12 8y ago

I don't think anyone is arguing it's a human right. I think the argument is about displacement. Affordable Housing usually goes to people who have lived in an area for a long time and now can no longer afford it.

joejerryronnie 8y ago
Interesting that some people argue affordable housing is good because it allows people to stay in their homes but Prop 13 is bad because it . . . allows people to stay in their homes.
- denverkarma 8y ago
  Prop 13 is just a phenomenal transfer of wealth from the young and working class to the old and wealthy. Don’t kid yourself that it was ever about anything else.
  - ng12 8y ago
    What happens if you sell under Prop 13? Does the tax man come calling then?
    - boulos 8y ago
      The price resets for the new owner. Under Prop 13, the assessed value is X when you buy it and can only be increased by up to ~2% per year even if your home went up in value by much more. This chains together over long periods of time, so that if you bought a place 20 years ago you are now paying property tax on at most X * 1.02^20. If the new owner paid you 5X for the home, they now pay property tax against that value moving forward.
      - ng12 8y ago
        It seems to me that the seller should pay a hefty tax on that 5x value. Why should you get rich on appreciation that you didn't pay taxes on? I get the feeling the answer is more about greed and less about helping people stay in their homes.
  - joejerryronnie 8y ago
    Do you feel the same way about social security?

navytank 8y ago

You can't fill a city entirely with bankers, tech workers, and other professionals. What about teachers? Police? Those in the restaurant industry? I don't think anyone is claiming that everyone should have a "human right" to live in SF. But when looking at the city as a systems problem, creating a sustainable system may require these kinds of measures to allow the right mix of people to live in the city.

Apocryphon 8y ago
It's sort of like when the subject of human rights gets brought in the discussion of taxation. There are pragmatic concerns being brought up here for social order. Arguing about rights distracts from practical needs to ensure the public good.
jbob2000 8y ago
Affordable Rent policies block the free market from increasing wages in the city. Instead of paying workers more, we've asked landlords to make up the difference between a living wage and a poverty one.
- setpatchaddress 8y ago
  is this sarcasm? If not, do you have a reference? The usual argument is that sf needs more housing supply to meet demand, period, let alone affordable housing. Edit: see zkms, below.
  - losteric 8y ago
    I think they're referring to rent controlled apartment... not sure why they think landlords "make up the difference", the landlord simply charges other renters more. I'm not aware of any studies, but it does seem logical from a system perspective... The relatively fixed supply of rent-controlled apartments is a random cost-of-living subsidy for low-income workers. Those that "win" can accept lower wages, while the "losers" are forced to compete despite higher cost-of-living (commute or rent). The latter group will get a little more, but not as much as if there was no rent-control. On the employment side, employers may hold jobs open longer hoping for a rent-controlled applicant that will accept lower wages. Ideally we would have no rent-controlled apartments or enough for everyone that needs it, but anywhere in between is a distorted market that hurts consumers and employees. Eliminating rent control would be my preference, it seems more efficient than subsidizing everyone that needs it (as individuals can choose how to spend their higher wages, whereas rent subsidies always go to rent).

jarym 8y ago

I agree with you but there is still a problem to be solved: a LOT of essential public services are provided by people that have salaries far lower than required for rents in a particular area. Teachers, nurses, police officers, etc.

seibelj 8y ago
Sure, but wouldn’t a city have to increase salaries to allow someone to be a nurse or teacher in an expensive area? Similarly, one can be a nurse or teacher in a lower cost of living place. No one forces you to teach in SF.
- bradknowles 8y ago
  No one forces you to have kids, either. No kids, no need for teachers or any kind of education system.
  - seibelj 8y ago
    Unrelated to my comment? Are there a lack of teachers in SF?
- txsh 8y ago
  No. They wouldn’t. They’d just allow the quality of government services to degrade. Example: every city the United States. It’s like saying “traffic is good because it forces to government to build more roads.” No, it does not.
jstanley 8y ago
If those people start being forced to move out, you'll quickly find that salaries will rise to compensate. Supply and demand is very simple. Keeping rents artificially cheap is just a backdoor way of keeping salaries artificially low.

crdoconnor 8y ago

TIL there are people who equate wanting to stay in the city they grew up in as an equivalent level of entitlement to owning a Ferrari. ...and they consider themselves "left leaning"

throwaway080383 8y ago
I want to be a software engineer making FANG $, but live in the tiny Midwestern town I grew up in. It is unethical for society to not provide this for me.
- crdoconnor 8y ago
  Nobody said anything about guaranteeing "FANG" jobs, just a reasonably priced place to live to people who grew up in SF.
  - throwaway080383 8y ago
    Sorry I wasn't totally clear. I currently have a FANG job, but I am forced to live in a high COL locale to maintain it. Living anywhere near my hometown is simply not an option; I doubt there is a single employed software engineer in a 30 mile radius, and certainly not at the same level of comp. So, if I want to be a well paid software engineer, I can't live in Iowa. If I want to live in Iowa, I can't be a well paid software engineer. If you want to live in the Bay, don't be a teacher. If you want to be a teacher, don't live in the Bay. If enough folks follow that rationale, Bay Area teachers will get paid more.

btian 8y ago

Because people (in a democracy) decided that it's not in public's interest to have low paid service providers e.g., teachers, cooks, gov workers, to commute many hours a day. These affordable places are "Toyotas". They're not million dollar apartments with doorman and valet. It's okay to disagree, and these are not human rights in the sense that it's written into the constitution, or in UN conventions. Not everything governments do are related to human rights.

tripletao 8y ago
Admittedly not a doorman or a valet, but this one's got a "concierge": https://housing.sfgov.org/listings/a0W0P00000GRYOoUAP https://housing.sfgov.org/listings/a0W0P00000GRYOoUAP http://thecivicsf.com/ http://thecivicsf.com/ Apartment #205, income-restricted to between $3258 and $3800/month for a single person, $1303/month. The market units are roughly 3x, though the interior finishes are often nicer. I'm guessing around $700k for a similar condo? It's a kind of genius. If everyone getting screwed by the SF housing market united, then they could vote for land use changes that would solve the problem. Like, if SF abolished all zoning tomorrow, then a lot of terrible things would happen; but do you really doubt that housing prices would go down? We'd have problems, but not the one big central crushing problem that we have now. Affordable housing policies divide those people, according to stuff like: faith in government vs. market solutions personal eligibility vs. ineligibility for the units preference between a bad apartment vs. a lottery for a great one That splits the landowners' natural enemies into warring factions, as we see here.

zkms 8y ago

> Can somebody explain why Affordable Rent exists? Because in large US cities, housing is artificially scarce (and thus pathologically expensive). This artificial scarcity is enforced by zoning laws; which prohibit SROs, rooming houses, and apartments with small floor areas, medium/high-rise apartments, non-family roommates, short-term rentals, buildings above a certain height; whilst requiring stuff like parking, solar panels on the roof, and minimum lot/room/floor areas (that have no justification in genuine safety concerns -- these are all regulations that mandate a certain level of aesthetic/luxury qualities). The people who have a financial interest in maintaining these zoning laws (which prohibit/delay/obstruct construction of any kind of dense/tall/small/inexpensive housing, of the kind that exist without any problem in actual proper, non-US cities) are single-family homeowners who are making serious money off this artificial scarcity situation. In this system, subsidised housing (which is generally inaccessible without decade-long waitlists, and meeting extremely narrow criteria (such as having proof of income that's in a narrow range between "low enough to qualify" but also "high enough to be twice the subsidised rent")) has a role as a safety valve to prevent enough coordination that could pose risk to this artificial-scarcity regime. This is not idle theorising -- it worked exactly like that to kill SB827 (a CA state law that would have preempted height limits encoded in local zoning law in areas very close to a subway/train/bus station); where "advocates" for subsidised housing concern-trolled the thing to death with concerns about "displacement".

flog 8y ago
Isn't this every city, everywhere?

txsh 8y ago

What if your family lives there? What if you’re divorced and your children live there? What if you don’t want to move your children away from their school and friends? What if jobs in your profession aren’t available elsewhere? What if you’re receiving medical treatment there that’s not available elsewhere? What if you’re contractually obligated to be there? There are a million reasons why someone might not be able to simply move to a new city. Nobody has a right to live in a particular building or neighborhood. But there should be somewhere for them to live within a city no matter what their income is. A city shouldn’t be allowed to ban classes of people.

denverkarma 8y ago
It’s the government dictating who can live where and do what via egregious over regulation that bans people from the city. If they’d cut the red tape and let housing be built the economy would normalize toward construction cost over time.
- txsh 8y ago
  Naive, ECON 101 thinking. The free market doesn’t work like this. Read some network theory, son.

ggm 8y ago

What kind of society do you want to live in? Do you want walled gardens of luxe, and a ghetto outside for the cleaners?

evgen 8y ago

Living in these places is definitely not a human right. But then again, neither is it necessary for us to allow you to live there either even if you can buy the most palatial home in the city. It cuts both ways.

denverkarma 8y ago

Because the left thinks that the fix for housing shortage caused by governmental regulation starving the market of housing is for the government to intervene further and subsidize the thing they made unobtainable.

EliRivers 8y ago
Speaking as someone who routinely votes for the most extreme crazy left-wing loon on the ballot in local elections (disappointing choice this time - only one, the "Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition" party candidate), I'd much rather they did it by forcing the building of a lot more houses, but that seems less palatable to the rich than subsidies.

allengeorge 8y ago

In Toronto highly-trained cops are leaving because salaries in the exurbs are comparable and afford a higher standard of living (because you’re not forking as much over for housing). This is a loss for the city because training is expensive. This movement is being repeated across professions.

pg_bot 8y ago
This is completely rational behavior, if Toronto wants to keep its police officers they should offer a higher wage.
- falcolas 8y ago
  Which means they need more money, which means a tax hike. The tax hike is voted upon by the city citizens, and denied. Instead, the citizens become more likely to complain about the lack of responsiveness of police, and use it to justify their choices to not pay more taxes for those "lazy police." Cops, teachers, janitors - these are poor candidates for "market forces".
  - pg_bot 8y ago
    So the citizens move, the city shrinks, housing becomes more affordable and they don't need to raise salaries as the cost of living is lower. It's all an equilibrium, you can't just see one side while ignoring the other. All of those occupations are defined by market forces claiming they aren't is economic ignorance.

jdavis703 8y ago

Ideally the free market would take care of this. But homeowners have been able to hijack the market through rent seeking behaviours that tightly regulate housing. It's very hard to break the market dominance of land owners. Until someone can develop a palletable political solution to do so affordable housing will have to be government mandated or provided. Further there will always be a segment of the population who can't afford to house themselves (note this is much smaller than those who can't afford housing due to the dysfunctional market). As a society we should be looking out for people who need extra help. Edit: I'm getting downvoted on this. That's fine, but can someone explain what I said wrong?

DrScump 8y ago
can someone explain what I said wrong? For one thing, you are assigning powers to "homeowners" that they do not have. Homeowners don't control zoning or other policy; politicians, and the bureaucrats they appoint, do. They could make noise at a council or planning commission meeting, but so can anyone else.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

falcolas 8y ago

How much more are you, as a hypothetical citizen of these cities, willing to pay in taxes to pay for the higher costs of living for your cops, fire fighters, and teachers. How much more are you willing to pay at the grocery store to hire the checkers and stockers. At a restaurant for the cooks, waiters and waitresses, and cleaning staff? For your taxi, your delivery men, your trash men, your utilities, plumbing, construction, road work, and so forth. Affordable rent helps to keep your costs, as a hypothetical citizen, low as well.

cam_l 8y ago

Another take on it, rent is like farming. If you pull too much out of the system, the soil gets degraded and the salinity rises, poisoning the crops. Affordable rent is a way (albeit deeply flawed) of trying to maintain the health of the system. A better way would be to cap profits on property through taxes. Make it too expensive to strip the system of its nutrients.. to continue with the mixed metaphor.