4 ms·

> I mean, we can keep doing this back and forth about where we agree on how things should work and I'll agree with you, but then I can tell you about how my fam

> I mean, we can keep doing this back and forth about where we agree on how things should work and I'll agree with you, but then I can tell you about how my family or I have been going to court with our landlord at least every other year since the late 80s We could keep doing this back and forth, and I'd encourage you to do so, because you're just proving mu original point: rent control and rent stabilization are terrible at serving their stated purpose of providing affordable rent for people of modest means.

wahern 8y ago
I think the debate about rent control has been sadly twisted and misdirected. I don't think rent control was ever originally about affordable rent. That's just the modern narrative. Affordability is an artifact that happens years later, and as you say it's inconsistent and haphazard. Rent control is about providing stability. I think 80%+ of home mortgages in the U.S. are fixed-rate. People pay a premium because stability in housing expenditure is extremely important to individuals, couples, and especially families. It provides an anchor point with which to organize their economic life, but mostly I think its human nature to prefer and need that stability. As a practical matter, though, there's no such thing as a 30-year, fixed-rate, residential lease. (Or more similar, a fixed-rate life estate as after paying off a mortgage nobody can kick you out.) It's possible but for historic reasons it's simply uncommon, and because such terms lack the ubiquity of the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, you'd doubtless be paying a huge premium. Ultimately, providing this stability to renters is a collective action problem. In order to the minimize the cost (and obviously there is a significant cost to property owners that should be fairly internalized by renters) you want a way to quickly channel a large segment of the market into using something like a fixed-rate perpetual lease. Ergo, rent control. Affordability for low-income renters (or any renter) is a different matter and it's a shame that we've conflated these things. But we live in exceptionally conservative times such that the only way to publicly justify any manner of government regulation--even in liberal cities--is to sell it as a way to improve the lot of the most impoverished. The working- and middle-class have been utterly relegated to the vicissitudes of private markets and we no longer even have a vocabulary to discuss public policies targeting the larger population.

wahern 8y ago

I think the debate about rent control has been sadly twisted and misdirected. I don't think rent control was ever originally about affordable rent. That's just the modern narrative. Affordability is an artifact that happens years later, and as you say it's inconsistent and haphazard. Rent control is about providing stability. I think 80%+ of home mortgages in the U.S. are fixed-rate. People pay a premium because stability in housing expenditure is extremely important to individuals, couples, and especially families. It provides an anchor point with which to organize their economic life, but mostly I think its human nature to prefer and need that stability. As a practical matter, though, there's no such thing as a 30-year, fixed-rate, residential lease. (Or more similar, a fixed-rate life estate as after paying off a mortgage nobody can kick you out.) It's possible but for historic reasons it's simply uncommon, and because such terms lack the ubiquity of the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, you'd doubtless be paying a huge premium. Ultimately, providing this stability to renters is a collective action problem. In order to the minimize the cost (and obviously there is a significant cost to property owners that should be fairly internalized by renters) you want a way to quickly channel a large segment of the market into using something like a fixed-rate perpetual lease. Ergo, rent control. Affordability for low-income renters (or any renter) is a different matter and it's a shame that we've conflated these things. But we live in exceptionally conservative times such that the only way to publicly justify any manner of government regulation--even in liberal cities--is to sell it as a way to improve the lot of the most impoverished. The working- and middle-class have been utterly relegated to the vicissitudes of private markets and we no longer even have a vocabulary to discuss public policies targeting the larger population.