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> More apartments built are the only thing to make housing more affordable for normal people What? No! Rent control is among other something that can lower the

> More apartments built are the only thing to make housing more affordable for normal people What? No! Rent control is among other something that can lower the rent for normal people. I know SF has rent control, but currently it only applies as long as you don’t move.

bastawhiz 6y ago
Rent control stops rent from going up, but how does it make rent go down?
- tehjoker 6y ago
  Public housing would.
  - Kalium 6y ago
    California requires winning a plebiscite to build public housing. This is not optional. When it does manage to build public housing, SF spends approximately a million dollars a unit to do so. That's purely to get a habitable unit. It includes none of the maintenance costs, which will increase over time, or the social services required to make public housing work as intended. With that in mind, giving literally 100% of San Francisco's budget to building public housing could produce 12,000 units. That would mean shutting down Zuckerberg General Hospital, street cleaning, street repaving, SFO, schools, and anything else SF does. Incidentally, the Supes only actually get to control about $3.5bn of that. So now we're reduced to 3,500 units a year... in a city where population growth averages 11,000 people a year. And we still haven't talked about social services, maintenance, or how allocation of what will never be enough public housing units will work. I think these numbers lay clear that public housing is unlikely to solve SF's housing woes. Don't hesitate to ask if anything is unclear!
    - KptMarchewa 6y ago
      Zuckerberg hospital? What a fucking hubris.
      - Kalium 6y ago
        The hospital administrators insisted. He made what was clearly a mistake in letting them use his name after giving $70 million to the hospital his wife did her residency at. Benioff Hospital would be unaffected, but only because it's in no way run by SF.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      >With that in mind, giving literally 100% of San Francisco's budget to building public housing could produce 12,000 units. That would mean shutting down Zuckerberg General Hospital, street cleaning, street repaving, SFO, schools, and anything else SF does. You are skipping over the part where the government can change the relevant laws that make public housing expensive. Public housing also doesn't have to be built by the government directly so if private construction firms can do it cheaper the government can let them build the housing.
      - Kalium 6y ago
        I believe that that's such a good idea that SF already agrees with you, has for years, and put it into practice long ago. The people who labor on public housing construction projects in SF are rarely city employees directly and generally employees of construction companies. The items that make this expensive have to do with the standards that must be met, zoning and approval processes, and so on. These are things that a private construction firm, under contract with SF, does not find easier or cheaper. Personally, I like the idea of SF maybe getting in the way of housing construction a bit less. But I also understand that voters seem to like the system as it is. Plus, only some of these laws are readily changed by SF - the plebiscite for public housing law is a state prop from the 70s. Many of the other requirements are also propositions at either state or local levels. As you say, it's completely true that the government can change the relevant laws. It's just perhaps more subtle than that, as there are multiple levels of government involved and some of the relevant laws are quite challenging to change.
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      So because developers managed to kneecap an effective policy by putting all kinds of expensive and difficult requirements on it, you think it's bad?
      - Kalium 6y ago
        I'm honestly not sure what effective policy kneecapped by developers you're talking about. Can you help me understand? I don't think any of the things I mentioned were set up or advanced by developers to kneecap effective policies, but I'd love to learn more! If anything, I would naively expect most of the relevant policies here to be things property developers would be quite strongly against. Perhaps you can enlighten me with critical factors I've overlooked?
  - syshum 6y ago
    Yes the world needs more Housing Projects, those worked out very well in the past
    - epistasis 6y ago
      To paraphrase, poorly, the story of Color of Law by Richard Rothstein: The housing projects in the US were implemented in extremely racist ways: segregation, then don't maintain the public housing at all. Public housing for white people in the 1930s was great, then with the red scare, the government decided that subsidizing home ownership would prevent the spread of socialism in the US. It was quite effective, but access to cheap home loans and cheap new developments was racially segregated: only new developments that would be largely white would get the FHA-subsidizided home loans. This is the well-documented "red lining." This led to the economic segregation where the housing projects were only for Black people, were in areas without access to good schools or jobs. It's no wonder the housing projects failed, because they were largely doomed to failure.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    Public housing only makes rents go down on market-based properties when it can offer serious competition to those market-based properties, which means lots of new public housing. (Something that I fully support, and something that is actively being worked on by some groups in California, just not any of the supposed "tenant" groups that never support new housing.) Even in Red Vienna or Singapore, there are still market-rate housing! And the only way they keep the market rate housing low is by having enough housing. Singapore, in particluar, is really good at building tons of public housing. And their policies would horrify all the preservationist fake-progressives in SF, because they just build build build, and do it at heights greater than three stories. And Vienna's public housing would similarly horrify the fake progressives in SF that stop all new housing. Public housing is great, but if you're looking to see it happen in SF, look to the Mods, not the Progs.
Vaslo 6y ago
Maybe we should let government set pricing for everything then if rent control is so good.
- runarberg 6y ago
  No, not everything, but control a market that is out of control for a lot of people resulting in them not being able to afford a place to stay? Sure
kenneth 6y ago
Missed economics class? It's basic supply and demand. Rent control doesn't do anything to make housing affordable for people trying to get an apartment in the city, all it does is make it near impossible to find an affordable unit (because people who are under rent control are unwilling to move), and push up the price of non controlled units.
- inetknght 6y ago
  This argument thread about high or low rent misses the mark. Rent doesn't make housing affordable at all. Ownership does.
hedora 6y ago
Rent control increases market rates for rent by constricting available supply. It can decrease your rent if you never move, but that decreases the liquidity of the market, and traps you in a crappy small apartment for longer than you’d live in it otherwise.
fennecfoxen 6y ago
Rent control as implemented can only make housing just-as-expensive, and rent control cannot make housing affordable for normal people. Put a plain 2BR in the Mission at, idk, $1500 a month (which Google tells me is a bit over the US median), and you'll have to hold a lottery to figure out which of the ten thousand families trying to get it, actually get it. Maybe you don't always have a lottery, maybe the big winners are people who were in the right place at the right time as an accident of history. Either way these people are anything but normal. The normal people are the tens of thousands who can't get an apartment at that price. In the end it fails for the same reason that you can't "solve" poverty by running a state lottery and seeing a "normal" person win. And even if we don't have a problem with this as inherently inequitable, it's just ... such tiny, tiny, small-scale thinking.
- runarberg 6y ago
  I’m not thinking small. I wonder if a confluence of several efforts would come together and make a real impact. E.g. make it illegal to charge more then x for an apartment evaluated at y. Make it illegal to raise the rent more the x over inflation (also between tenants). Make it illegal buy housing with the intention to sell for profit. County could buy housing with set rent to drive down the market rate. Make it illegal to own a house that stays empty more then x months. EDIT: I know it might seem unfair if you are a landlord or in the housing speculative market. But heck, you’ve had your chance to play a fair game, and seriously screwed us over. You’ve proven your self unworthy as a player in a fair market to a point that you shouldn’t be allowed to play it.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    No this won't work. As I said just let the government provide housing for a reasonable price directly. Private landlords can still make money by undercutting the government but they can't charge more because getting your housing from the government will always be cheaper.
lock-free 6y ago
Is this sarcastic? Rent control drives up rent. It doesn't make housing cheaper, it's just NIMBYism that renters get to participate in
- runarberg 6y ago
  What? rent control drives up rent like minimum wage drives wages down. There is some serious dissonance to the real world here.
  - lock-free 6y ago
    The freakonomics podcast had a decent episode about this. They frequently host liberal economic ideas as well, so don't assume the opinions come from some landowner backed think tank. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/rent-control/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/rent-control/ In the real world, places with rent control are the most expensive and have gotten more expensive. It does not help housing prices.
manfredo 6y ago
Rent control ultimately increases the cost of housing by suppressing supply. Price controls don't work. And how is rent control supposed to follow tenants? They just show up to a unit costing $3,000/mo and say "my rent control rate is $800/mo, so you need to rent to me at that price." No sane developer would ever build in SF if that is the case, thus exacerbating point #1.
epistasis 6y ago
I support rent control fully, but it does nothing to lower rents. It keeps them the same, at best. It's a way to protect current tenants, which is good, and we should support, as an "ownership-lite" model of residency. But it's only one, very small, tool in the arsenal to make cities work for the people. It must be accompanied by robust protections to new people as well. The flaw with rent control in isolation is that it assumes that people never move, are never born, and never die, and that cities never change. In order for rent control to be a useful tenant protection, it must be accompanied by robust rebuilding when more people need to live in the city.
- runarberg 6y ago
  I’m not talking about rent control as it is currently done in San Francisco. We need more. Like you say, rent control should also apply when a new tenant moves in. A landlord should not be allowed to raise the rent arbitrarily when a new tenant moves in. Also rent control should not be the only measure. The county should also buy up housing and rent for cheaper to drive the market rate down, price gauging should be illegal (for everyone, not just foreign investors). etc.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    You're still missing the most important component for affordability: more housing. Not simply conversion of existing market-sold housing to price controlled, but more. Lets say that everything gets converted to rent-controlled in an area. A child becomes 18, graduates from high school, and wants to stay close to their family to maintain their emotional connections. If everything is rent-controlled, but not enough housing is built, they have to be on some sort of waitlist or lottery to stay in the area. This will push out so many people. The only solution is to make enough housing for the people that want to live in an area. Without that, we are rationing it by price, by lottery, or by waitlist, and all of those will destroy the emotional connections that both you and I want to maintain.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    >The county should also buy up housing and rent for cheaper to drive the market rate down Almost, buying up housing is fine if the government changes zoning and upzones existing properties. It is better to go one tiny step further and make the government guarantee housing for a fixed price because then it is truly forced to fix the problem. Once you have done this important step the government has many options. It can either fix the demand side or the supply side. The supply side is easy to fix by changing zoning laws to encourage taller residential buildings and then by actually building them. The demand side can be fixed by changing the tax law so that commercial property is no longer the only source of property tax income. This lead to an imbalance of commercial vs residential property which then lead to lots of workers without housing which then lead to a race for apartments driving up prices.
imtringued 6y ago
If you want the government to implement an upper bound for housing prices then you must introduce a housing guarantee at a fixed price. The government will be forced to build housing directly and if it cannot do so it can just change the relevant law that prevents it from doing so and then build the housing or reform the law so that there is no imbalance in regards to commercial and residential property which creates an endless supply of jobs but not enough housing for the new workers.

bastawhiz 6y ago

Rent control stops rent from going up, but how does it make rent go down?

tehjoker 6y ago
Public housing would.
- Kalium 6y ago
  California requires winning a plebiscite to build public housing. This is not optional. When it does manage to build public housing, SF spends approximately a million dollars a unit to do so. That's purely to get a habitable unit. It includes none of the maintenance costs, which will increase over time, or the social services required to make public housing work as intended. With that in mind, giving literally 100% of San Francisco's budget to building public housing could produce 12,000 units. That would mean shutting down Zuckerberg General Hospital, street cleaning, street repaving, SFO, schools, and anything else SF does. Incidentally, the Supes only actually get to control about $3.5bn of that. So now we're reduced to 3,500 units a year... in a city where population growth averages 11,000 people a year. And we still haven't talked about social services, maintenance, or how allocation of what will never be enough public housing units will work. I think these numbers lay clear that public housing is unlikely to solve SF's housing woes. Don't hesitate to ask if anything is unclear!
  - KptMarchewa 6y ago
    Zuckerberg hospital? What a fucking hubris.
    - Kalium 6y ago
      The hospital administrators insisted. He made what was clearly a mistake in letting them use his name after giving $70 million to the hospital his wife did her residency at. Benioff Hospital would be unaffected, but only because it's in no way run by SF.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    >With that in mind, giving literally 100% of San Francisco's budget to building public housing could produce 12,000 units. That would mean shutting down Zuckerberg General Hospital, street cleaning, street repaving, SFO, schools, and anything else SF does. You are skipping over the part where the government can change the relevant laws that make public housing expensive. Public housing also doesn't have to be built by the government directly so if private construction firms can do it cheaper the government can let them build the housing.
    - Kalium 6y ago
      I believe that that's such a good idea that SF already agrees with you, has for years, and put it into practice long ago. The people who labor on public housing construction projects in SF are rarely city employees directly and generally employees of construction companies. The items that make this expensive have to do with the standards that must be met, zoning and approval processes, and so on. These are things that a private construction firm, under contract with SF, does not find easier or cheaper. Personally, I like the idea of SF maybe getting in the way of housing construction a bit less. But I also understand that voters seem to like the system as it is. Plus, only some of these laws are readily changed by SF - the plebiscite for public housing law is a state prop from the 70s. Many of the other requirements are also propositions at either state or local levels. As you say, it's completely true that the government can change the relevant laws. It's just perhaps more subtle than that, as there are multiple levels of government involved and some of the relevant laws are quite challenging to change.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    So because developers managed to kneecap an effective policy by putting all kinds of expensive and difficult requirements on it, you think it's bad?
    - Kalium 6y ago
      I'm honestly not sure what effective policy kneecapped by developers you're talking about. Can you help me understand? I don't think any of the things I mentioned were set up or advanced by developers to kneecap effective policies, but I'd love to learn more! If anything, I would naively expect most of the relevant policies here to be things property developers would be quite strongly against. Perhaps you can enlighten me with critical factors I've overlooked?
- syshum 6y ago
  Yes the world needs more Housing Projects, those worked out very well in the past
  - epistasis 6y ago
    To paraphrase, poorly, the story of Color of Law by Richard Rothstein: The housing projects in the US were implemented in extremely racist ways: segregation, then don't maintain the public housing at all. Public housing for white people in the 1930s was great, then with the red scare, the government decided that subsidizing home ownership would prevent the spread of socialism in the US. It was quite effective, but access to cheap home loans and cheap new developments was racially segregated: only new developments that would be largely white would get the FHA-subsidizided home loans. This is the well-documented "red lining." This led to the economic segregation where the housing projects were only for Black people, were in areas without access to good schools or jobs. It's no wonder the housing projects failed, because they were largely doomed to failure.
- epistasis 6y ago
  Public housing only makes rents go down on market-based properties when it can offer serious competition to those market-based properties, which means lots of new public housing. (Something that I fully support, and something that is actively being worked on by some groups in California, just not any of the supposed "tenant" groups that never support new housing.) Even in Red Vienna or Singapore, there are still market-rate housing! And the only way they keep the market rate housing low is by having enough housing. Singapore, in particluar, is really good at building tons of public housing. And their policies would horrify all the preservationist fake-progressives in SF, because they just build build build, and do it at heights greater than three stories. And Vienna's public housing would similarly horrify the fake progressives in SF that stop all new housing. Public housing is great, but if you're looking to see it happen in SF, look to the Mods, not the Progs.

Vaslo 6y ago

Maybe we should let government set pricing for everything then if rent control is so good.

runarberg 6y ago
No, not everything, but control a market that is out of control for a lot of people resulting in them not being able to afford a place to stay? Sure

kenneth 6y ago

Missed economics class? It's basic supply and demand. Rent control doesn't do anything to make housing affordable for people trying to get an apartment in the city, all it does is make it near impossible to find an affordable unit (because people who are under rent control are unwilling to move), and push up the price of non controlled units.

inetknght 6y ago
This argument thread about high or low rent misses the mark. Rent doesn't make housing affordable at all. Ownership does.

hedora 6y ago

Rent control increases market rates for rent by constricting available supply. It can decrease your rent if you never move, but that decreases the liquidity of the market, and traps you in a crappy small apartment for longer than you’d live in it otherwise.

fennecfoxen 6y ago

Rent control as implemented can only make housing just-as-expensive, and rent control cannot make housing affordable for normal people. Put a plain 2BR in the Mission at, idk, $1500 a month (which Google tells me is a bit over the US median), and you'll have to hold a lottery to figure out which of the ten thousand families trying to get it, actually get it. Maybe you don't always have a lottery, maybe the big winners are people who were in the right place at the right time as an accident of history. Either way these people are anything but normal. The normal people are the tens of thousands who can't get an apartment at that price. In the end it fails for the same reason that you can't "solve" poverty by running a state lottery and seeing a "normal" person win. And even if we don't have a problem with this as inherently inequitable, it's just ... such tiny, tiny, small-scale thinking.

runarberg 6y ago
I’m not thinking small. I wonder if a confluence of several efforts would come together and make a real impact. E.g. make it illegal to charge more then x for an apartment evaluated at y. Make it illegal to raise the rent more the x over inflation (also between tenants). Make it illegal buy housing with the intention to sell for profit. County could buy housing with set rent to drive down the market rate. Make it illegal to own a house that stays empty more then x months. EDIT: I know it might seem unfair if you are a landlord or in the housing speculative market. But heck, you’ve had your chance to play a fair game, and seriously screwed us over. You’ve proven your self unworthy as a player in a fair market to a point that you shouldn’t be allowed to play it.
- imtringued 6y ago
  No this won't work. As I said just let the government provide housing for a reasonable price directly. Private landlords can still make money by undercutting the government but they can't charge more because getting your housing from the government will always be cheaper.

lock-free 6y ago

Is this sarcastic? Rent control drives up rent. It doesn't make housing cheaper, it's just NIMBYism that renters get to participate in

runarberg 6y ago
What? rent control drives up rent like minimum wage drives wages down. There is some serious dissonance to the real world here.
- lock-free 6y ago
  The freakonomics podcast had a decent episode about this. They frequently host liberal economic ideas as well, so don't assume the opinions come from some landowner backed think tank. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/rent-control/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/rent-control/ In the real world, places with rent control are the most expensive and have gotten more expensive. It does not help housing prices.

manfredo 6y ago

Rent control ultimately increases the cost of housing by suppressing supply. Price controls don't work. And how is rent control supposed to follow tenants? They just show up to a unit costing $3,000/mo and say "my rent control rate is $800/mo, so you need to rent to me at that price." No sane developer would ever build in SF if that is the case, thus exacerbating point #1.

epistasis 6y ago

I support rent control fully, but it does nothing to lower rents. It keeps them the same, at best. It's a way to protect current tenants, which is good, and we should support, as an "ownership-lite" model of residency. But it's only one, very small, tool in the arsenal to make cities work for the people. It must be accompanied by robust protections to new people as well. The flaw with rent control in isolation is that it assumes that people never move, are never born, and never die, and that cities never change. In order for rent control to be a useful tenant protection, it must be accompanied by robust rebuilding when more people need to live in the city.

runarberg 6y ago
I’m not talking about rent control as it is currently done in San Francisco. We need more. Like you say, rent control should also apply when a new tenant moves in. A landlord should not be allowed to raise the rent arbitrarily when a new tenant moves in. Also rent control should not be the only measure. The county should also buy up housing and rent for cheaper to drive the market rate down, price gauging should be illegal (for everyone, not just foreign investors). etc.
- epistasis 6y ago
  You're still missing the most important component for affordability: more housing. Not simply conversion of existing market-sold housing to price controlled, but more. Lets say that everything gets converted to rent-controlled in an area. A child becomes 18, graduates from high school, and wants to stay close to their family to maintain their emotional connections. If everything is rent-controlled, but not enough housing is built, they have to be on some sort of waitlist or lottery to stay in the area. This will push out so many people. The only solution is to make enough housing for the people that want to live in an area. Without that, we are rationing it by price, by lottery, or by waitlist, and all of those will destroy the emotional connections that both you and I want to maintain.
- imtringued 6y ago
  >The county should also buy up housing and rent for cheaper to drive the market rate down Almost, buying up housing is fine if the government changes zoning and upzones existing properties. It is better to go one tiny step further and make the government guarantee housing for a fixed price because then it is truly forced to fix the problem. Once you have done this important step the government has many options. It can either fix the demand side or the supply side. The supply side is easy to fix by changing zoning laws to encourage taller residential buildings and then by actually building them. The demand side can be fixed by changing the tax law so that commercial property is no longer the only source of property tax income. This lead to an imbalance of commercial vs residential property which then lead to lots of workers without housing which then lead to a race for apartments driving up prices.

imtringued 6y ago

If you want the government to implement an upper bound for housing prices then you must introduce a housing guarantee at a fixed price. The government will be forced to build housing directly and if it cannot do so it can just change the relevant law that prevents it from doing so and then build the housing or reform the law so that there is no imbalance in regards to commercial and residential property which creates an endless supply of jobs but not enough housing for the new workers.