4 ms·

Rent control doesn't work in the long run. Sweden has had rent control since the 1940's, and as a result the rental housing market is completely dysfunctional

Rent control doesn't work in the long run. Sweden has had rent control since the 1940's, and as a result the rental housing market is completely dysfunctional by international standards. In Stockholm, demand for central inner city apartments is way, way, way higher than supply. The rationing method used is a queue administered by the city, and the queue time for the most sought-after areas is on average 17 years. Even the most remote areas have a queue-time of at least a year. SEVENTEEN YEARS. GOOD LUCK, COMRADE. This means that if you want to move to Stockholm from outside the city or outside the country, you will not get a rental apartment, unless you rent one second-hand or third-hand, unless you buy a rental apartment under the table, unless you have "contacts", or unless you buy a condo on the perfectly functional condo market. Since there's a functioning market for condos, but a dysfunctional market for rental complexes, the ROI on building a condo complex is decent, but the ROI on building a rental complex is abysmal. You're better off setting your pile of money on fire than invest in building rental apartments. No private for-profit company will voluntarily build new rental apartments. So the only actors left that could do that is the city itself. However, the city government changes politically every four years, and even if there's a left-wing majority, there is absolutely no budget to increase supply meaningfully. In addition, there's political and economical pressure to convert the city's housing stock to condos. Current renters love it, because it means they can realize the value of their rental into cold hard cash, and the city council loves it because they get a temporary cash infusion. It's zero-sum for the housing stock, and the long-term effects are shit, because the rental supply diminishes, making the queues worse. The net result is that it is incredibly hard for companies to attract outside talent, because finding a place to live if you don't already live in Stockholm, is incredibly hard. If you're a transient worker or simply doesn't want to buy an apartment, and if you don't have a decade of accumulated queue time, you have to rent from the much more expensive second-hand weird market, which means that companies have to pay you much more than they would have to pay a local for the same job. Compare this with SF, or any other large city with a functional housing market, where every company has to pay their employees a wage that covers the housing market rate, which means that there's no difference between local workers and outside workers, and it means that the city has a much easier time attracting new people who want to come there and live there. Because anyone can live there, if they just show up with enough cash to pay the market rate. Yes, market rates means you get a host of problems, gentrification most of them, but that's a positive problem compared to all the horrible problems that rent control bring.

sgift 8y ago
> SEVENTEEN YEARS. GOOD LUCK, COMRADE. You fail to show how that's worse than the version in other places. All you have is an "appeal to anti-communism"(1). Not having to fear that you loose your living space because some investor decided to price you out of it seems valuable and something that should be weighted against the hardships of being able to rent something easily in Stockholm. (1) Is there a fallacy name for that? I think there should be, it's one of the most popular fallacies here in any financial discussion.
- henrikschroder 8y ago
  I explicitly talked about how the job market is affected. If your only real options are to buy or to queue for a decade, that requires you to commit to a long-term plan if you want to move to Stockholm for work. This means you can't grab quick opportunities, you can't move to Stockholm on a whim to try your luck, so local companies and the local economy suffers. Fewer people move to Stockholm than who otherwise would, which means the city misses out on potential growth. It's an inefficient allocation of the work force on a national level. There might be some social good to artificially restricting the growth of your most important economical urban centers, but I highly doubt it. The supposed benefit of rent control is that attractive inner-city apartments are cheap. Sure. But since rents are based on utility value instead of location or attractiveness or market value, this means that unattractive apartments two hours from the inner city cost as much to rent as comparable ones in the inner city. It's impossible to save money by renting in a less attractive area. Normal cities have some sort of parity between cost-to-own and cost-to-rent, regardless of area. In Stockholm instead, this parity changes dramatically depending on your distance from the inner city! Another second-order effect from rent control is that having an attractive rental apartment in Stockholm suddenly has value. This makes people reluctant to let go of an apartment once they have it, which makes them reluctant to move away to pursue other opportunities elsewhere, even if that would be the better choice. Still, if you have one, you can rent it out on the second-hand rental market, so now you've created a class of rentiers, the people that have gone through the Soviet bread-queue can now cash in on that scarcity. But I thought rent control was about fairness?
- henrikschroder 8y ago

sgift 8y ago

> SEVENTEEN YEARS. GOOD LUCK, COMRADE. You fail to show how that's worse than the version in other places. All you have is an "appeal to anti-communism"(1). Not having to fear that you loose your living space because some investor decided to price you out of it seems valuable and something that should be weighted against the hardships of being able to rent something easily in Stockholm. (1) Is there a fallacy name for that? I think there should be, it's one of the most popular fallacies here in any financial discussion.

henrikschroder 8y ago
I explicitly talked about how the job market is affected. If your only real options are to buy or to queue for a decade, that requires you to commit to a long-term plan if you want to move to Stockholm for work. This means you can't grab quick opportunities, you can't move to Stockholm on a whim to try your luck, so local companies and the local economy suffers. Fewer people move to Stockholm than who otherwise would, which means the city misses out on potential growth. It's an inefficient allocation of the work force on a national level. There might be some social good to artificially restricting the growth of your most important economical urban centers, but I highly doubt it. The supposed benefit of rent control is that attractive inner-city apartments are cheap. Sure. But since rents are based on utility value instead of location or attractiveness or market value, this means that unattractive apartments two hours from the inner city cost as much to rent as comparable ones in the inner city. It's impossible to save money by renting in a less attractive area. Normal cities have some sort of parity between cost-to-own and cost-to-rent, regardless of area. In Stockholm instead, this parity changes dramatically depending on your distance from the inner city! Another second-order effect from rent control is that having an attractive rental apartment in Stockholm suddenly has value. This makes people reluctant to let go of an apartment once they have it, which makes them reluctant to move away to pursue other opportunities elsewhere, even if that would be the better choice. Still, if you have one, you can rent it out on the second-hand rental market, so now you've created a class of rentiers, the people that have gone through the Soviet bread-queue can now cash in on that scarcity. But I thought rent control was about fairness?
henrikschroder 8y ago