9 ms·

The rent control laws in SF aren’t even as bad as HN comments would have you believe. Rent control doesn’t apply to new construction in SF. It also allows a re

by irq11 7y ago

The rent control laws in SF aren’t even as bad as HN comments would have you believe. Rent control doesn’t apply to new construction in SF. It also allows a regulated annual increase, and rent automatically jumps back up to market upon a number of different conditions - not the least of which is that the owner can push you out to renovate the building! HN commenters are usually just repeating stuff they heard somewhere, and have no idea what the laws actually say. Moreover, while there are indeed lots of publications on the theoretical impacts of rent control, few of those publications consider laws as they actually exist, or if they do, the scope of the impacts is rarely communicated when translated into HN talking points. Every study I’m aware of has shown, at worst, diffuse, long-term negative impacts to housing costs. Meanwhile, many of them do exactly what they set out to do: stabilize short-term prices for vulnerable populations. These laws are simply not the boogeymen that comments here make them seem.

refurb 7y ago
Rent control in SF really is that bad. Rent increase limits are 60% of CPI, so it can’t even match inflation. If your costs go up (utilities) or you want to do capital improvements, good luck getting the rent board to approve a pass through. Want to prevent other people than the tenant from moving into a 1 bedroom? Tough, can’t say no to that, it just has to be under 3 people. Want to move into your own house? Sure, just pay the tenant a few tens of thousands in “pay off”. SF rent control is absolutely onerous and definitely shrinks the pool of potential landlords and thus potential units.
- toastal 7y ago
  Why should I care about the woes of landlords as opposed to renters?
  - aaronblohowiak 7y ago
    Because shrinking the number of landlords shrinks the number of units available, raising rents, _hurting renters_.
    - falsedan 7y ago
      are these vanishing landlord eating their properties or just throwing them into the sea
      - macspoofing 7y ago
        No. They let population growth take care of that while they decide not to invest in rental properties. Your flippant argument can be flipped around too. If there is a housing shortage, by what mechanism does rent control conjure new housing units?
        falsedan 7y ago
        who the what now my point is, vanishing landlord or no, the units remain
        macspoofing 7y ago
        >my point is, vanishing landlord or no, the units remain Still wrong: 1) Apartments get converted to condos, or re-purposed because the property has value, but renting doesn't. 2) The population keeps growing meaning that your same number of units don't meet the needs. 3) Rental supply also drops as people opt not to move and sit on their rent-controlled apartments, limiting the supply for those looking. This is why rent-control has the effect of making housing worse, even if the rental supply is maintained.
        falsedan 7y ago
        > Still wrong: ah, ok, they eat them. thanks for clearing that up
        macspoofing 7y ago
        You do realize there is a second, third, and even a fourth line (and more) after this first line.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    Because landlords start being unable to afford repairs, and you get a bunch of decrepit buildings falling apart all over the city (with all the dangers that implies, not just to occupants, but to nearby buildings as well). It happened in my home town, and it wasn't pretty. Landlords are not social security. It's probably better for the city to forcefully buy them out and create a new management model of the buildings than to impose strangling limits on prices.
    - Jweb_Guru 7y ago
      Rents are growing insanely fast in SF compare to anything else. The idea that landlords can't afford to make repairs because they aren't extracting maximum rent from the property is completely ludicrous on the face of it. Do you actually believe these arguments?
      - icebraining 7y ago
        Are you talking about all rents, or controlled ones? The post above wrote that rent control rules in SF limit increases to "60% of CPI, so it can’t even match inflation". If that's false, then my post doesn't apply, sure.
        Jweb_Guru 7y ago
        Rent is far above its CPI-inflated average right now, so saying that rent increases must match inflation makes no sense. The time to do that would've been long ago. But in any case I'm pretty sure rent increases are capped at much higher than inflation.
      - lotsofpulp 7y ago
        One possible scenario is if a landlord purchased property at a price factoring in assuming certain increases in rent, then they’re constrained by the debt payments.
        Jweb_Guru 7y ago
  - cm2187 7y ago
    Because if it is uneconomical to rent out, there are few units available to rent and the few that are are super expensive. And the property won't be maintained properly. These unintended consequences ultimately hit tenants. In Paris there is a similar impact of bad regulation. It has become so hard to expel a tenant that has stopped paying that landlords will demand extraordinary guaranties: bank credit lines, guaranties from relatives, sometimes even medical exam, etc and will be super picky. I knew of a foreign investment banker, high salary, not allowed to get in financial dispute because of his profession, who just couldn't find a place to rent in Paris because he couldn't provide some of those.
  - jjav 7y ago
    Because it is hurting the would-be renter group even more? I personally know two people who are renting rent-controlled apartments in SF and don't live in them. Their lives have moved elsewhere and they don't need the place anymore. One uses it as a weekend getaway and the other one visits rarely. Thanks to rent control their rent is so cheap that it's worth hanging on to it even though they don't live there. So these two units are off the rental market effectively forever, sitting empty most of the time.
  - vixen99 7y ago
    Because landlords supply housing and renters don't.
  - mruts 7y ago
    Why should I care about the woes of you opposed to me? Why should I care about the woes of the poor opposed to the rich?
  - macspoofing 7y ago
    Ok. Then care about the tenants. Do you have one shred of evidence that rent control, broadly, helps tenants? Because every economist I ever heard on this topic, left or right, argues rent control is bad for tenants.
    - dfilppi 7y ago
      Rent control is good for politicians getting elected. No point in analyzing farther than that.
  - lr4444lr 7y ago
    Because the result is that small landlords who can't deal with the fixed costs hassles simply sell out and consolidate into larger ones with more clout with politicians to weaken renter rights and legal resources to fight pesky tenants whom they simply don't want, or create shared blacklist databases like has been done in New York. If you're going to gird up for class warfare, realize that tenants are probably going to lose as long as zoning restricts your options
    - amyjess 7y ago
      My experience has always been that dealing with a large PMC like IMT or Greystar is far preferable to dealing with some guy who's renting his property out.
  - 34679 7y ago
    Wow, I literally belly laughed. If a renter can't find a landlord to rent from, then what? "Why should I care about the woes of water treatment plants as opposed to water drinkers?" Do you want drinkable water, or not?
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Unless you have the capital to build your own house or apartment, you need landlords to put up their own capital to do that. It’s not like landlords are just assigned houses for free from the government to then lord over renter peons.
- thatfrenchguy 7y ago
  ... But Prop 13 guarentees every landlord in the state that they won’t have to pay their share, and they get it even on >1980 construction, unlike rent control. It seems fair to me that if you’re going to protect landlords (and companies !) you need to protect tenants as well.
- ryan_lane 7y ago
  A lot of what you're saying in here is blatantly incorrect or misleading. Water is frequently covered in utilities, but other utilities generally are not. Leases are very specific on the number of people in a unit for rent controlled apartments and is one the few things a tenant can be evicted for. The board frequently approves pass throughs. Increases tend to be higher than inflation. If you lease out your house and you want to take back ownership, yeah, you need to pay out the tenant and that's completely fair. You're upending another family's lives, and they may not be able to afford to stay. You're paying them moving costs and covering a period of time of adjustment for them. If you think this is unfair, you have poor morals. Also, for good measure: fuck the landlords.
  - refurb 7y ago
    You need to do more research. The rent increase law is 60% of CPI. Look it up. SF introduced a new law a couple years ago that additional people can live in a unit even if they are not on the lease. They only instituted caps on how many. Google search it. Plenty of apartments have not only water, but also heating included in the rent. If that goes up drastically, the rent board will likely tell the landlord “tough”. And I’m not against buying out tenants. I am against them having to pay $100,000 or more. ---- Sources: This amount is based on 60% of the increase in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers in the Bay Area, which was 4.4% as posted in November 2018 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.[1] Legislation that went into effect November 9, 2015 allows tenants covered under rent control to add occupants, if reasonable, despite restrictions in the rental agreement. [1]https://sfrb.org/sites/default/files/Document/Form/571%20Allowable%20Annual%20Increases%2019-20.pdf https://sfrb.org/sites/default/files/Document/Form/571%20All... [2]https://www.sftu.org/roommates/ https://www.sftu.org/roommates/
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - irq11 7y ago
      You need to exaggerate less. The maximum rent increase rate is 60% of the trailing twelve months CPI in the bay area. But landlords’ costs do not scale with the CPI. Mortgage rates are fixed (if a landlord has a mortgage at all), taxes are independent of CPI, and principal+interest+taxes are the vast majority of a landlord’s expenses. Maintenance is typically a small fraction of that number. Landlords are not obligated to pay your heat or water under rent control. Mine certainly never did. The roommate law changes you mention are not rent control, but tenant protections applicable to all rentals in SF. The 2015 change brought rent controlled units up to par, because landlords were evicting people for doing things like getting married or switching roommates (horrors!) Basically: preventing predatory landlords from being scumbags. I’m going to go with the GP on this and say that if you think people should have their rent hiked for getting married or changing roommates or having a kid, you have poor morals. In essence, you don’t like being told what you can do, you have a theory that it hurts the housing market, and you’re inventing reasons to justify your theory of reality.
bobcostas55 7y ago
>Rent control doesn’t apply to new construction in SF. Conveniently, SF doesn't allow new construction either.

by irq11 7y ago

refurb 7y ago

Rent control in SF really is that bad. Rent increase limits are 60% of CPI, so it can’t even match inflation. If your costs go up (utilities) or you want to do capital improvements, good luck getting the rent board to approve a pass through. Want to prevent other people than the tenant from moving into a 1 bedroom? Tough, can’t say no to that, it just has to be under 3 people. Want to move into your own house? Sure, just pay the tenant a few tens of thousands in “pay off”. SF rent control is absolutely onerous and definitely shrinks the pool of potential landlords and thus potential units.

toastal 7y ago
Why should I care about the woes of landlords as opposed to renters?
- aaronblohowiak 7y ago
  Because shrinking the number of landlords shrinks the number of units available, raising rents, _hurting renters_.
  - falsedan 7y ago
    are these vanishing landlord eating their properties or just throwing them into the sea
    - macspoofing 7y ago
      No. They let population growth take care of that while they decide not to invest in rental properties. Your flippant argument can be flipped around too. If there is a housing shortage, by what mechanism does rent control conjure new housing units?
      - falsedan 7y ago
        who the what now my point is, vanishing landlord or no, the units remain
        macspoofing 7y ago
        >my point is, vanishing landlord or no, the units remain Still wrong: 1) Apartments get converted to condos, or re-purposed because the property has value, but renting doesn't. 2) The population keeps growing meaning that your same number of units don't meet the needs. 3) Rental supply also drops as people opt not to move and sit on their rent-controlled apartments, limiting the supply for those looking. This is why rent-control has the effect of making housing worse, even if the rental supply is maintained.
        falsedan 7y ago
        > Still wrong: ah, ok, they eat them. thanks for clearing that up
        macspoofing 7y ago
        You do realize there is a second, third, and even a fourth line (and more) after this first line.
- icebraining 7y ago
  Because landlords start being unable to afford repairs, and you get a bunch of decrepit buildings falling apart all over the city (with all the dangers that implies, not just to occupants, but to nearby buildings as well). It happened in my home town, and it wasn't pretty. Landlords are not social security. It's probably better for the city to forcefully buy them out and create a new management model of the buildings than to impose strangling limits on prices.
  - Jweb_Guru 7y ago
    Rents are growing insanely fast in SF compare to anything else. The idea that landlords can't afford to make repairs because they aren't extracting maximum rent from the property is completely ludicrous on the face of it. Do you actually believe these arguments?
    - icebraining 7y ago
      Are you talking about all rents, or controlled ones? The post above wrote that rent control rules in SF limit increases to "60% of CPI, so it can’t even match inflation". If that's false, then my post doesn't apply, sure.
      - Jweb_Guru 7y ago
        Rent is far above its CPI-inflated average right now, so saying that rent increases must match inflation makes no sense. The time to do that would've been long ago. But in any case I'm pretty sure rent increases are capped at much higher than inflation.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      One possible scenario is if a landlord purchased property at a price factoring in assuming certain increases in rent, then they’re constrained by the debt payments.
      - Jweb_Guru 7y ago
- cm2187 7y ago
  Because if it is uneconomical to rent out, there are few units available to rent and the few that are are super expensive. And the property won't be maintained properly. These unintended consequences ultimately hit tenants. In Paris there is a similar impact of bad regulation. It has become so hard to expel a tenant that has stopped paying that landlords will demand extraordinary guaranties: bank credit lines, guaranties from relatives, sometimes even medical exam, etc and will be super picky. I knew of a foreign investment banker, high salary, not allowed to get in financial dispute because of his profession, who just couldn't find a place to rent in Paris because he couldn't provide some of those.
- jjav 7y ago
  Because it is hurting the would-be renter group even more? I personally know two people who are renting rent-controlled apartments in SF and don't live in them. Their lives have moved elsewhere and they don't need the place anymore. One uses it as a weekend getaway and the other one visits rarely. Thanks to rent control their rent is so cheap that it's worth hanging on to it even though they don't live there. So these two units are off the rental market effectively forever, sitting empty most of the time.
- vixen99 7y ago
  Because landlords supply housing and renters don't.
- mruts 7y ago
  Why should I care about the woes of you opposed to me? Why should I care about the woes of the poor opposed to the rich?
- macspoofing 7y ago
  Ok. Then care about the tenants. Do you have one shred of evidence that rent control, broadly, helps tenants? Because every economist I ever heard on this topic, left or right, argues rent control is bad for tenants.
  - dfilppi 7y ago
    Rent control is good for politicians getting elected. No point in analyzing farther than that.
- lr4444lr 7y ago
  Because the result is that small landlords who can't deal with the fixed costs hassles simply sell out and consolidate into larger ones with more clout with politicians to weaken renter rights and legal resources to fight pesky tenants whom they simply don't want, or create shared blacklist databases like has been done in New York. If you're going to gird up for class warfare, realize that tenants are probably going to lose as long as zoning restricts your options
  - amyjess 7y ago
    My experience has always been that dealing with a large PMC like IMT or Greystar is far preferable to dealing with some guy who's renting his property out.
- 34679 7y ago
  Wow, I literally belly laughed. If a renter can't find a landlord to rent from, then what? "Why should I care about the woes of water treatment plants as opposed to water drinkers?" Do you want drinkable water, or not?
- rayiner 7y ago
  Unless you have the capital to build your own house or apartment, you need landlords to put up their own capital to do that. It’s not like landlords are just assigned houses for free from the government to then lord over renter peons.
thatfrenchguy 7y ago
... But Prop 13 guarentees every landlord in the state that they won’t have to pay their share, and they get it even on >1980 construction, unlike rent control. It seems fair to me that if you’re going to protect landlords (and companies !) you need to protect tenants as well.
ryan_lane 7y ago
A lot of what you're saying in here is blatantly incorrect or misleading. Water is frequently covered in utilities, but other utilities generally are not. Leases are very specific on the number of people in a unit for rent controlled apartments and is one the few things a tenant can be evicted for. The board frequently approves pass throughs. Increases tend to be higher than inflation. If you lease out your house and you want to take back ownership, yeah, you need to pay out the tenant and that's completely fair. You're upending another family's lives, and they may not be able to afford to stay. You're paying them moving costs and covering a period of time of adjustment for them. If you think this is unfair, you have poor morals. Also, for good measure: fuck the landlords.
- refurb 7y ago
  You need to do more research. The rent increase law is 60% of CPI. Look it up. SF introduced a new law a couple years ago that additional people can live in a unit even if they are not on the lease. They only instituted caps on how many. Google search it. Plenty of apartments have not only water, but also heating included in the rent. If that goes up drastically, the rent board will likely tell the landlord “tough”. And I’m not against buying out tenants. I am against them having to pay $100,000 or more. ---- Sources: This amount is based on 60% of the increase in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers in the Bay Area, which was 4.4% as posted in November 2018 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.[1] Legislation that went into effect November 9, 2015 allows tenants covered under rent control to add occupants, if reasonable, despite restrictions in the rental agreement. [1]https://sfrb.org/sites/default/files/Document/Form/571%20Allowable%20Annual%20Increases%2019-20.pdf https://sfrb.org/sites/default/files/Document/Form/571%20All... [2]https://www.sftu.org/roommates/ https://www.sftu.org/roommates/
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - irq11 7y ago
    You need to exaggerate less. The maximum rent increase rate is 60% of the trailing twelve months CPI in the bay area. But landlords’ costs do not scale with the CPI. Mortgage rates are fixed (if a landlord has a mortgage at all), taxes are independent of CPI, and principal+interest+taxes are the vast majority of a landlord’s expenses. Maintenance is typically a small fraction of that number. Landlords are not obligated to pay your heat or water under rent control. Mine certainly never did. The roommate law changes you mention are not rent control, but tenant protections applicable to all rentals in SF. The 2015 change brought rent controlled units up to par, because landlords were evicting people for doing things like getting married or switching roommates (horrors!) Basically: preventing predatory landlords from being scumbags. I’m going to go with the GP on this and say that if you think people should have their rent hiked for getting married or changing roommates or having a kid, you have poor morals. In essence, you don’t like being told what you can do, you have a theory that it hurts the housing market, and you’re inventing reasons to justify your theory of reality.

bobcostas55 7y ago

>Rent control doesn’t apply to new construction in SF. Conveniently, SF doesn't allow new construction either.