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You can’t, though. The price you seek to rent the units for dictates your profit margins, which impacts the financing sought. If you’re taking out a 10% constru

You can’t, though. The price you seek to rent the units for dictates your profit margins, which impacts the financing sought. If you’re taking out a 10% construction loan and are building into your business plan $3,000 a month for your two bedroom, you can’t turn around and rent it out for $1,000 a month because city ordinances say so after the fact. That’s why rent control needs to happen now, and then a public finance corporation needs to be established to provide financing to build new units if the market won’t. It’s not rocket science, it’s just not politically expedient, so it’s not talked about.

OrwellianChild 3y ago
I sympathize with the desire for a utopian government-run housing arrangement like this, but I think it discards the practical for the ideal... With less restrictive zoning, more properties and building projects become financially feasible with the banks, builders, and contractors we already have. It costs the government zero money and happens automatically with the stroke of a pen. It's much more difficult to re-engineer our entire mode of government, taxation, and housing provision than simply removing a few legal restrictions.
- phmqk76 3y ago
  We don’t need government run housing arrangements. What we need are market regulations, like rent control, that work. Having the government as an available lender, to ensure capital access for developers, isn’t control, it’s working the levers of capitalism to encourage an outcome. Look at Texas - zoning-free, no rent control, and it’s quickly becoming a housing dystopia. Prices are rising rapidly, and as you build out so quickly, your taxes rise as a clip more than twice most places, to build new schools and hire teachers and build roads, etc. and guess what? Private equity firms are snapping up homes at a huge clip, 25% nationally and much higher in Texas, and then rent them out according to algorithms that maximize their profits (in collusion with other landlords using the same software). Why build a Rube Goldberg machine to impact housing prices though the elimination of zoning, when you can affect it directly through rent control and directly incentivizing new construction of cheap units?
tptacek 3y ago
I think you missed my subtext, which is that rent control followed New York City into its current housing crisis. But, I will add "complete public financing for virtually all new housing" to the list of interesting ideas people have for solving housing scarcity, along with "plant based diets" and "moving everyone to federal grazing land in rural Oregon".
- phmqk76 3y ago
  You’re misunderstanding my point, and your history is off. Rent control did not follow NYC to its housing crisis, NYC went through an extremely dark period of underinvestment and crime from the 1970s to the early 1990s, independent of housing. And in fact, during that time, we went from 2 million rent controlled units to 22,000 today. And I never proposed “complete public financing for virtually all new housing,” that is a bad faith way of debating me, to put words in my mouth. I said the government should be an available lender to ensure to incentivize the building of new units, and to encourage private investment. Which exists right now with governmental companies like NYC HPD. If you had any domain expertise at all, you’d know that, instead of making strawman arguments.

OrwellianChild 3y ago

I sympathize with the desire for a utopian government-run housing arrangement like this, but I think it discards the practical for the ideal... With less restrictive zoning, more properties and building projects become financially feasible with the banks, builders, and contractors we already have. It costs the government zero money and happens automatically with the stroke of a pen. It's much more difficult to re-engineer our entire mode of government, taxation, and housing provision than simply removing a few legal restrictions.

phmqk76 3y ago
We don’t need government run housing arrangements. What we need are market regulations, like rent control, that work. Having the government as an available lender, to ensure capital access for developers, isn’t control, it’s working the levers of capitalism to encourage an outcome. Look at Texas - zoning-free, no rent control, and it’s quickly becoming a housing dystopia. Prices are rising rapidly, and as you build out so quickly, your taxes rise as a clip more than twice most places, to build new schools and hire teachers and build roads, etc. and guess what? Private equity firms are snapping up homes at a huge clip, 25% nationally and much higher in Texas, and then rent them out according to algorithms that maximize their profits (in collusion with other landlords using the same software). Why build a Rube Goldberg machine to impact housing prices though the elimination of zoning, when you can affect it directly through rent control and directly incentivizing new construction of cheap units?

tptacek 3y ago

I think you missed my subtext, which is that rent control followed New York City into its current housing crisis. But, I will add "complete public financing for virtually all new housing" to the list of interesting ideas people have for solving housing scarcity, along with "plant based diets" and "moving everyone to federal grazing land in rural Oregon".

phmqk76 3y ago
You’re misunderstanding my point, and your history is off. Rent control did not follow NYC to its housing crisis, NYC went through an extremely dark period of underinvestment and crime from the 1970s to the early 1990s, independent of housing. And in fact, during that time, we went from 2 million rent controlled units to 22,000 today. And I never proposed “complete public financing for virtually all new housing,” that is a bad faith way of debating me, to put words in my mouth. I said the government should be an available lender to ensure to incentivize the building of new units, and to encourage private investment. Which exists right now with governmental companies like NYC HPD. If you had any domain expertise at all, you’d know that, instead of making strawman arguments.