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Landlords Are Pushing the Supreme Court to End Rent Control
- mmastrac 3y agoThis is a great way to get pitchforks.
- asu_thomas 3y agoRecent decades suggest that, with a bit of strategy, backlash from curtailing economic protections for working people can easily be minimized to spiraling debt, homelessness, addiction, and suicide, in that order. No biggie.
- hotstickyballs 3y agoIt also protects housing supply from increasing
- mperham 3y agoOk, now invalidate Euclidean zoning.
- bombcar 3y agoI’m all aglow for hyperbolic zoning.
- endisneigh 3y agoRent control is dumb policy anyways. Now how can we get rid of nimby rule? Local governments have way too much influence on development, for better or worse. Perhaps sufficiently large development proposals must be entertained by the entire city or town rather than being unilaterally decided by a board - that seems like a sufficient compromise (at the expense of speed, but development is slow anyway given the appeals). Of course that’s not a perfect solution either since there are towns in which home ownership rate is almost 100% and thus they would be most incentivized to not allow any development even if they all voted at the expense of the neighbors shouldering the development burden.
- sudosysgen 3y agoWhy don't we get rid of NIMBYism and make sure that actually solves the issue without banning sensible implementations of rent control?
- endisneigh 3y agoRent control is a bad policy no matter how you slice it. In general most price controls are counterproductive
- Supermancho 3y agoFor many people, price gouging is conceptually palatable when it doesn't apply to them. A revision would make more sense, but treating it like a black and white issue is disingenuous.
- beej71 3y agoAnd yet people vote in politicians who back it. More basic issues clearly need to be addressed before politicians can repeal rent control and still get reelected.
- sudosysgen 3y agoThat's really not true. Rent control has been shown multiple times to actually work in reducing prices, and when quantitative welfare analysis in whether the drop in mobility is worth the drop in prices are done, it's often found to be worth it. There are of course ways to do rent control that are better or worse, some of which may indeed be generally counterproductive, and everyone agrees that it can't solve the problem by itself. Economics is not even close to being sufficiently precise for you to be able to reason through any appreciable problem from first principles.
- wskinner 3y agoRent control works for some people (e.g. those already living in rent controlled apartments). It also tends to suppress long term supply and improvement of existing supply, and that hurts other people in less visible ways (e.g. people who would have moved into new housing which was never built due to supply suppression, or residents of rent-controlled buildings which gradually fall into disrepair). In general, we should be skeptical of any policy where those helped are obvious and those harmed are non-obvious or distributed through time and space.
- throwawa14223 3y agoFinally, something that should actually help fix the housing crisis.
- vkou 3y agoNot as long as you can't build.
- tomohelix 3y agoThis is the natural consequence of Citizen United (such a dishonest name). When those with money is allowed to leverage their wealth to disproportionately affect legal proceedings and lawmaking, it is just a step towards dystopia.
- bombcar 3y agoWe’re rapidly allowing ourselves to slump to a moneycracy - one dollar = one vote.
- asu_thomas 3y agoIt's called capitalism for a reason. What are you suggesting as an alternative?
- tw04 3y agoCapitalism is a monetary policy, not a form of government. In the US, it is becoming a form of government to the detriment of democracy. When people cannot voice their opinion through voting, it tends to end badly. Here’s hoping the rich folks figure that out before it’s too late to solve with democracy.
- asu_thomas 3y ago> Capitalism is a monetary policy, not a form of government. Capitalism is a mode of social relations that monetary policy is downstream from. Remember capitalism was established as dominant by way of revolution. Capitalism and democracy fundamentally contradict one another from the outset, but democracy was capitalism's path to victory. The contradiction still remains.
- orwin 3y agoCapitalism is a production policy. It just meant that the one who choose what get built and where are the one with the monetary capital.
- 3y ago
- yesbutum 3y ago[dead]
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y agoWatch us get the worst of all world policy, keep restrictive zoning so the housing supply remains low but eliminate rent control so the demand translates directly to higher landlord profits.
- stephbu 3y agoLandlords -> lobbyists of large real estate investment corporations. One of the biggest social crimes is enabling housing ownership companies to become large investment vehicles.
- karaterobot 3y agoGood. People think rent control helps poor and middle class people find a good place to live, and punishes those evil, evil landlords. What it does in practice is discourage building new housing, and encourages evil, evil landlords to convert existing housing into condos they can sell. It drives people out of the city.
- 650REDHAIR 3y agoRent control is the only thing that keeps dozens of my friends in San Francisco. Ages 22-75.
- bombcar 3y agoNobody denies that some people benefit - the question is does society as a whole benefit?
- beej71 3y agoEnough to get the votes, apparently!
- kjksf 3y agoGood for them but how is it just and fair? Why your friends get cheap rents and not my friends who would also like to have cheap apartments in SF? How is it fair that everyone who doesn't have rent controlled apartment is paying more for their apt than they otherwise would, as dictated by supply-demand 101. How is it fair that a private entity (a landlord) subsidies another private entity (renter) under threat of government violence? In any other business context (e.g. selling cars) such rules would be beyond the pale. Can you imagine the government telling Ford that if a buyer meets some criteria Ford has to sell them F-150 at 40% discount? It sounds absurd but this is what rent control is.
- BizarroLand 3y agoYeah, I can, because the flip side of this is that they're already marking up the ford 250%, so when they take the 40% of the new total off they're just getting their normal margins and not their vastly inflated ones that they get to pawn off on others in the name of "ford price control", and everyone else pays those higher prices thinking, "Well, if that guy can afford it, I must be able to also..."
- dmckeon 3y agoUnpopular opinion: rent controls should be used only in times of drastic changes in housing supply or demand, and have short time limits equal to what it would take to resolve a housing crisis. Sudden change in demand or natural disaster destroys 20% of housing stock: 3-5 years of rent control. Otherwise we are just using politics to torque the market, "taking" capital from owners/landlords, and generating non-market incentives for renters. (see: master tenants, secret sub-leases, etc.)
- bombcar 3y agoRent controls should be part of development deals. Imposing them post-development distorts the market and causes weird side effects (people refusing to move even when they “should”, illegal subletting, etc).
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- jacknews 3y agoRent control probably should be banned. But by the same token, proceeds from rent should be taxed at the full land value of property, so that the only profit from rent is from improvements. The tax proceeds should then be used to subsidize rent, if necessary.
- xnx 3y agoDo the arguments against rent control also apply to affordable housing unit construction mandates? Seems like they would.
- endisneigh 3y agoYes. In general for something to be optimal supply must meet demand. Usually if demand is high supply will eventually follow. Demand for construction (creating supply) is there, but for reasons we don’t need to get into, it’s not allowed. So affordable housing is throwing the relative poor a bone, but the thing is those mandates change profit margins if the non-affordable housing cannot effectively eat the cost, changing the demand for construction.
- friend_and_foe 3y agoMan they're really hammering away at this "billionaire benefactor" line, as if the public debate on this topic is over and national consensus has been reached, as if this whole narrative wasn't contrived in the last 6 months. The article doesn't go into detail about the claims of the plaintiffs (called "lobbyists" as if the court can he lobbied), I wonder why. I really want to know what their constitutional argument is, because I don't see rent control by states and cities being unconstitutional. Unfortunately this article is devoid of substance and is just a propaganda piece to normalize the "billionaire benefactor" narrative.
- d__a__n__g 3y ago[flagged]
- beej71 3y agoNot gonna lie... Pro-renter policies in my state definitely dissuade me from renting. It's scary to think you might not be able to get your house back from a dishonest renter without going to hell and back.