8 ms·

> A lot like London without rent control then, but if rent control were implemented it would be the primary culprit for what's happening anyway? I’m not sure w

> A lot like London without rent control then, but if rent control were implemented it would be the primary culprit for what's happening anyway? I’m not sure what you’re trying to suggest about hypothetical rent control in London, but it should be clear that London was geographically exhausted long ago and they’ve been debating architectural preservation and building height control ever since. You can’t simply buy a property in London, knock it down, and build a 50-story skyscraper. Using it for your case study on rent control doesn’t make any sense. > Seems to me it's the landlords that really "suffer". This is the fantasy: Stick it to those evil developers and landlords, amirite? The fallacy is assuming that you get the exact same apartment under rent control, but cheaper. You don’t. The truth is that being a rent-controlled landlord is easy mode. You have very little competition, by law, and the waiting list to get into your apartment can be years or decades long. As a result, you don’t have to compete on anything. Who’s going to turn your apartment down when it’s their only shot at housing and no one’s building new construction to compete at artificially depressed prices? Now you don’t have to worry about installing good appliances or even nice carpet. The air condition doesn’t work well? Too bad, as long as it meets regulations (if any) then that’s good enough. Why would you if your tenants aren’t choosing based on competition? The tenants suffer, too. And you’re still ignoring all of the people locked out of the system by the ensuing decade-long wait lines, as is the case in this article.

pydry 5y ago
>I’m not sure what you’re trying to suggest about hypothetical rent control in London I'm stating that the extreme lack of supply ascribed to rent control also exists in similar cities without rent control. So maybe rent control's effect on supply is vastly overblown as you can see by looking at the large amount of house-building in NYC before 1974 in the graph above, which is when rent control laws started getting really watered down. >It should be clear that London was geographically exhausted long ago Thats kind of absurd. It only recently caught up to prewar population levels. Property prices skyrocketed way before that. >The truth is that being a rent-controlled landlord is easy mode. If they like it so much why do they try to trick/bully tenants into leaving or offer large sums of money to tenants to leave if that fails? >And you’re still ignoring all of the people locked out of the system by the ensuing decade-long wait Give leveraged landlords market rent in restricted supply environments like SF and the FIRST thing they will try to do is to inhibit further development with NIMBYism that might bring down their rents and damage their investment. Detractors of rent control tend to feign support for new residents but theyre perfectly happy for them to be priced out alongside the long term residents of the city. More social housing fixes the underlying supply issue. Higher property taxes fixes the underlying supply issue. Wanting to kill rent control before or instead of fixing these things means being concerned with profit, not people. Rent control is a band aid while that happens to keep long term (especially elderly/vulnerable) renters housed. And landlords loathe it.
- rguillebert 5y ago
  > So maybe rent control's effect on supply is vastly overblown. Just because rent control negatively affects supply doesn't mean bad supply is only caused by rent control. I live in London too and I'm baffled by the lack of tall buildings in pretty central parts of the city. The real solution is more supply. > Rent control is a band aid while that happens to keep long term (especially elderly/vulnerable) renters housed. At the expense of people who don't currently live in London but could, such as immigrants or people from poorer parts of the country finding a good paying job here.
  - pydry 5y ago
    >At the expense of people who don't currently live in London but could, such as immigrants or people from poorer parts of the country finding a good paying job here. Kicking grandma out of her rented apartment and on to the street isn't going to suddenly mean that Romanian cleaners won't be living 7 to a house in zone 5. This housing crisis was deliberately engineered in London as a result of the 1980s war between Thatcher and local government. Council housing was privatized as a result (& some of those gains were capitalized by existing residents through right-to-buy). Councils were starved of tax funding through the UK's comically low council tax rates. This meant that not only was owning property a much better deal but also that councils lacked the funds to increase the supply of housing. Hence prices taking off like a rocket. There's your supply issue. Rent control would be a drop in the bucket compared to that.
    - rguillebert 5y ago
      > Kicking grandma out of her rented apartment If she's retired, she can move somewhere cheaper so someone who actually needs to live there for their job can move in. The rest of what you've written is completely unsubstantiated.
      - around_here 5y ago
        Ah yes, the classic “you’re useless now grandma, the fuck on outta here” line. I bet you’re a real gem in the family. A landlord is to housing what a scalper is to tickets (or for the nerds, graphics cards). Only one of them leaves you fucking homeless.
stuaxo 5y ago
> it should be clear that London was geographically exhausted long ago It's clear that there are over 30,000 empty homes in London, while most flats built are way out of the range of ordinary families. Many people are locked out of the system now, we have "affordable housing" that you need to earning about £80k to buy, the current system is utterly failing.
- Wolfenstein98k 5y ago
  Why are there over 30k empty homes, if they command so much money from tenants? Who can afford to keep homes empty at such great expense, and for what purpose? Sounds like a step is missing...
- gruez 5y ago
  >It's clear that there are over 30,000 empty homes in London So? According to wikipedia london has anywhere between 10.0 million and 14.3 million people (depending on whether you're counting "urban" or "metro"). 30,000 empty homes translates to 80k people[1]. As egregious as that might sound, is a drop in the bucket relative to the overall population. The 30k number also fails to differentiate between long term emptiness (eg. billionaires hoarding houses) and short term emptiness (eg. units undergoing renovation, units looking for a new tenant). The latter is necessary for a functioning rental market, otherwise it's impossible for people to move into/around the city because all the housing units are locked up. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/295548/average-household-size-in-the-uk-by-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/295548/average-household...
mmarq 5y ago
> Now you don’t have to worry about installing good appliances or even nice carpet. The air condition doesn’t work well? Too bad, as long as it meets regulations (if any) then that’s good enough. Why would you if your tenants aren’t choosing based on competition? The tenants suffer, too. I'm totally against rent control, but London's rogue landlords and its very low quality housing are world famous and people coming from all over the world spend the first 6 month adapting to crazy stuff like carpet, old carpet, 10 year old carpet, fucking carpet, windowless toilets, wooden walls, decaying electrical systems, holes in the walls, carpet (I can't get my head around the idea of having carpet in a flat), etc... and carpet (unless they are in the top 5% of the income distribution and can afford to pay 2-3K£ per month in rent). Air conditioning and half-decent insulation are for the top 1%. Said that, I don't think London's problem is lack of rent control, but rather it is lack of development of the rest of the country and the government artificially inflating the housing market.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  You have forgotten carpeted stairs, and worst, carpeted bathrooms.
  - davrosthedalek 5y ago
    Carpeted kitchens.
  - vagrantJin 5y ago
    My skin crawled at the thought.
WalterBright 5y ago
> Stick it to those evil developers and landlords, amirite? Seattle so far has not imposed rent control, but they've done everything else they can to create benefits for renters at the expense of landlords. And so the smaller landlords exit the business, and the larger ones raise rent to cover these new "free" goodies. One of the freebies is the city will provide a free lawyer to any tenant with a dispute with the landlord, but the landlord gets to pay for his own lawyer.
- 8note 5y ago
  The landlord would have been paying for their own lawyer regardless.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Yes, but by reducing the lawyer cost for the tenant to $0, the tenant is far more likely to initiate legal action, even for frivolous cases. The tenant can regularly use that as a threat.
- vkou 5y ago
  I would think that the blame for rising rents in Seattle might be more realistic to put on 600,000 people, many of them earning hundreds of thousands of dollars moving into the metro area over the past decade. With a firehose of money sloshing around, of course rents are going to rise. You can be damn sure that I'm going to outbid any of the locals for my apartment. Rent is barely a blip on my budget.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I've read in the letters section of the Seattle Times many, many letters from landlords who are exiting the business in Seattle due to the extra uncompensated costs heaped on them by the city.
    - vkou 5y ago
      When a landlord 'exits the business', do they also load the apartment they are letting into a helicopter, and take it out of the city? The housing inventory doesn't change, regardless of whether landlords are 'exiting'. Like any conscious class, they are just complaining because they, like the rest of us, want more money.

pydry 5y ago

>I’m not sure what you’re trying to suggest about hypothetical rent control in London I'm stating that the extreme lack of supply ascribed to rent control also exists in similar cities without rent control. So maybe rent control's effect on supply is vastly overblown as you can see by looking at the large amount of house-building in NYC before 1974 in the graph above, which is when rent control laws started getting really watered down. >It should be clear that London was geographically exhausted long ago Thats kind of absurd. It only recently caught up to prewar population levels. Property prices skyrocketed way before that. >The truth is that being a rent-controlled landlord is easy mode. If they like it so much why do they try to trick/bully tenants into leaving or offer large sums of money to tenants to leave if that fails? >And you’re still ignoring all of the people locked out of the system by the ensuing decade-long wait Give leveraged landlords market rent in restricted supply environments like SF and the FIRST thing they will try to do is to inhibit further development with NIMBYism that might bring down their rents and damage their investment. Detractors of rent control tend to feign support for new residents but theyre perfectly happy for them to be priced out alongside the long term residents of the city. More social housing fixes the underlying supply issue. Higher property taxes fixes the underlying supply issue. Wanting to kill rent control before or instead of fixing these things means being concerned with profit, not people. Rent control is a band aid while that happens to keep long term (especially elderly/vulnerable) renters housed. And landlords loathe it.

rguillebert 5y ago
> So maybe rent control's effect on supply is vastly overblown. Just because rent control negatively affects supply doesn't mean bad supply is only caused by rent control. I live in London too and I'm baffled by the lack of tall buildings in pretty central parts of the city. The real solution is more supply. > Rent control is a band aid while that happens to keep long term (especially elderly/vulnerable) renters housed. At the expense of people who don't currently live in London but could, such as immigrants or people from poorer parts of the country finding a good paying job here.
- pydry 5y ago
  >At the expense of people who don't currently live in London but could, such as immigrants or people from poorer parts of the country finding a good paying job here. Kicking grandma out of her rented apartment and on to the street isn't going to suddenly mean that Romanian cleaners won't be living 7 to a house in zone 5. This housing crisis was deliberately engineered in London as a result of the 1980s war between Thatcher and local government. Council housing was privatized as a result (& some of those gains were capitalized by existing residents through right-to-buy). Councils were starved of tax funding through the UK's comically low council tax rates. This meant that not only was owning property a much better deal but also that councils lacked the funds to increase the supply of housing. Hence prices taking off like a rocket. There's your supply issue. Rent control would be a drop in the bucket compared to that.
  - rguillebert 5y ago
    > Kicking grandma out of her rented apartment If she's retired, she can move somewhere cheaper so someone who actually needs to live there for their job can move in. The rest of what you've written is completely unsubstantiated.
    - around_here 5y ago
      Ah yes, the classic “you’re useless now grandma, the fuck on outta here” line. I bet you’re a real gem in the family. A landlord is to housing what a scalper is to tickets (or for the nerds, graphics cards). Only one of them leaves you fucking homeless.

stuaxo 5y ago

> it should be clear that London was geographically exhausted long ago It's clear that there are over 30,000 empty homes in London, while most flats built are way out of the range of ordinary families. Many people are locked out of the system now, we have "affordable housing" that you need to earning about £80k to buy, the current system is utterly failing.

Wolfenstein98k 5y ago
Why are there over 30k empty homes, if they command so much money from tenants? Who can afford to keep homes empty at such great expense, and for what purpose? Sounds like a step is missing...
gruez 5y ago
>It's clear that there are over 30,000 empty homes in London So? According to wikipedia london has anywhere between 10.0 million and 14.3 million people (depending on whether you're counting "urban" or "metro"). 30,000 empty homes translates to 80k people[1]. As egregious as that might sound, is a drop in the bucket relative to the overall population. The 30k number also fails to differentiate between long term emptiness (eg. billionaires hoarding houses) and short term emptiness (eg. units undergoing renovation, units looking for a new tenant). The latter is necessary for a functioning rental market, otherwise it's impossible for people to move into/around the city because all the housing units are locked up. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/295548/average-household-size-in-the-uk-by-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/295548/average-household...

mmarq 5y ago

> Now you don’t have to worry about installing good appliances or even nice carpet. The air condition doesn’t work well? Too bad, as long as it meets regulations (if any) then that’s good enough. Why would you if your tenants aren’t choosing based on competition? The tenants suffer, too. I'm totally against rent control, but London's rogue landlords and its very low quality housing are world famous and people coming from all over the world spend the first 6 month adapting to crazy stuff like carpet, old carpet, 10 year old carpet, fucking carpet, windowless toilets, wooden walls, decaying electrical systems, holes in the walls, carpet (I can't get my head around the idea of having carpet in a flat), etc... and carpet (unless they are in the top 5% of the income distribution and can afford to pay 2-3K£ per month in rent). Air conditioning and half-decent insulation are for the top 1%. Said that, I don't think London's problem is lack of rent control, but rather it is lack of development of the rest of the country and the government artificially inflating the housing market.

KptMarchewa 5y ago
You have forgotten carpeted stairs, and worst, carpeted bathrooms.
- davrosthedalek 5y ago
  Carpeted kitchens.
- vagrantJin 5y ago
  My skin crawled at the thought.

WalterBright 5y ago

> Stick it to those evil developers and landlords, amirite? Seattle so far has not imposed rent control, but they've done everything else they can to create benefits for renters at the expense of landlords. And so the smaller landlords exit the business, and the larger ones raise rent to cover these new "free" goodies. One of the freebies is the city will provide a free lawyer to any tenant with a dispute with the landlord, but the landlord gets to pay for his own lawyer.

8note 5y ago
The landlord would have been paying for their own lawyer regardless.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Yes, but by reducing the lawyer cost for the tenant to $0, the tenant is far more likely to initiate legal action, even for frivolous cases. The tenant can regularly use that as a threat.
vkou 5y ago
I would think that the blame for rising rents in Seattle might be more realistic to put on 600,000 people, many of them earning hundreds of thousands of dollars moving into the metro area over the past decade. With a firehose of money sloshing around, of course rents are going to rise. You can be damn sure that I'm going to outbid any of the locals for my apartment. Rent is barely a blip on my budget.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I've read in the letters section of the Seattle Times many, many letters from landlords who are exiting the business in Seattle due to the extra uncompensated costs heaped on them by the city.
  - vkou 5y ago
    When a landlord 'exits the business', do they also load the apartment they are letting into a helicopter, and take it out of the city? The housing inventory doesn't change, regardless of whether landlords are 'exiting'. Like any conscious class, they are just complaining because they, like the rest of us, want more money.