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A few days back there was an article here on HN on Amsterdam's plan to block people from renting out homes that where previously occupied by the owners of the b

A few days back there was an article here on HN on Amsterdam's plan to block people from renting out homes that where previously occupied by the owners of the building. I commented [0]: "Good [...] A city of renters is a soulless city; less people are long-term invested and no one really buys into the community they live in. ¨ And this article seems to agree with me on this point. One sentence in particular captures my thought: "The political economy problem now should be obvious: Why exactly would non-landowners press for improvements in their cities? The value of those improvements will be captured mainly by other parties." This article has given me more and better arguments to formulate my stance on this topic. Good post! [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19451013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19451013

abecedarius 8y ago
You're leaving out a central part of the argument: where housing supply is restricted, a rational renter knows that any improvement in quality of life just raises their rent in balance -- making it no actual improvement. This doesn't hold where housing responds to demand.
darksaints 8y ago
The thesis behind this editorial is in direct contradiction to your idea. The reason that people become apathetic is only tangentially related to ownership...it is actually about incidence: who benefits from improvements in public services? In a world where landowners successfully push for land scarcity, all benefits of public services go to landowners, regardless of whether or not they are residents, pushing non-landowner residents to apathy towards public service improvement. If you don't restrict land uses, allowing everybody to live in the city without being sucked dry by landowners' economic rents, then both renters and resident-owners will be pushing for public service improvements, while the institutional or non-resident owners will be the ones apathetic towards improvements. Renters don't make the city worse, concentrated economic benefits going solely to landowners does that.
usaar333 8y ago
> "The political economy problem now should be obvious: Why exactly would non-landowners press for improvements in their cities? The value of those improvements will be captured mainly by other parties." Because even renters want to live in a nice place?

abecedarius 8y ago

You're leaving out a central part of the argument: where housing supply is restricted, a rational renter knows that any improvement in quality of life just raises their rent in balance -- making it no actual improvement. This doesn't hold where housing responds to demand.

darksaints 8y ago

The thesis behind this editorial is in direct contradiction to your idea. The reason that people become apathetic is only tangentially related to ownership...it is actually about incidence: who benefits from improvements in public services? In a world where landowners successfully push for land scarcity, all benefits of public services go to landowners, regardless of whether or not they are residents, pushing non-landowner residents to apathy towards public service improvement. If you don't restrict land uses, allowing everybody to live in the city without being sucked dry by landowners' economic rents, then both renters and resident-owners will be pushing for public service improvements, while the institutional or non-resident owners will be the ones apathetic towards improvements. Renters don't make the city worse, concentrated economic benefits going solely to landowners does that.

usaar333 8y ago

> "The political economy problem now should be obvious: Why exactly would non-landowners press for improvements in their cities? The value of those improvements will be captured mainly by other parties." Because even renters want to live in a nice place?