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> Rent is up nearly 20% since 2020, with the largest increases concentrated on lower- and middle-tier apartments rented by lower-income consumers. About half of

> Rent is up nearly 20% since 2020, with the largest increases concentrated on lower- and middle-tier apartments rented by lower-income consumers. About half of renters now pay more than 30% of their income in rent and utilities, and rising shelter costs were responsible for over two-thirds of January inflation. We need better rent stabilization laws. Not the ones we have in many big cities that result in perpetually skewed markets and $200/mo rents. But a more comprehensive approach including requiring multi-year lease options, 12-month or greater rent increase notice requirements, and rent increase caps that prevent catastrophic rent hikes but still allow units to align with market rates over longer timeframes. Unfortunately, people prefer to strawman the entire concept by pretending that the only "rent control" laws that can exist are like those in NY or SF.

58028641 3y ago
Doesn't rent control just reward people lucky enough to rent before prices increased? Wouldn't increasing supply be a better way to reduce prices?
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Ya, most rent control just rewards those that are there when it happens, if it applies to new renters, supply eventually seizes up. I’m not sure what model parent thinks will work. Maybe rent control light where price increases are limited but the limit is highish? I can see that working out, limiting increases to 1.5-2X inflation might keep the market fluid and provide some stability to renters without locking new tenants out.
  - malermeister 3y ago
    The secret is for the government to make up for the decrease in private supply. Vienna showed how it's done - see this article for example: https://citymonitor.ai/environment/housing/red-vienna-how-austrias-capital-earned-its-place-in-housing-history https://citymonitor.ai/environment/housing/red-vienna-how-au... There's a reason it's been #1 most livable city in the world on several rankings for years in a row now.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      You need to have some residency control for that to work. Otherwise, everyone would just flock to the most popular cities for their discounted apartment. This also works in Singapore, but only for qualified residents.
      - malermeister 3y ago
        What residency control does Vienna have?
  - thisgoesnowhere 3y ago
    Would you apply the same logic to how the market for real estate unfairly rewards previous entrants? My parents have seen a 4x increase in the value of their house in 20 years, is that unfair?
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      Yes! Buying your own home is the ultimate form of rent control, even though property taxes increase over time (and its even worse in CA with prop 13). Very unfair. If we wanted to make the market fair, we would disallow home owners all together. This effectively happens for most people in some places in Europe. Also, I heard of some places in Europe where if you own your own home, you have to pay some extra tax vs. what you would have paid in rent. I think Switzerland? They also had some form of rent price control, although this just made it really hard to rent an apartment even if you were willing to pay more. These are fairly complex systems that all give advantages to existing residents (so moving to Europe for two years to do a post doc is much harder than it would be if you did that in the USA).
      - thisgoesnowhere 3y ago
        Finally someone who has thought through the problem and come out with the right solution. Great stuff
- standardUser 3y ago
  "Rent control" can do any numbers of thing - it really depends on the specific policies.
- ruuda 3y ago
  Increasing supply decreases prices globally, but increases them locally: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/change-my-mind-density-increases https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/change-my-mind-density-incr...
  - bombcar 3y ago
    So we coordinate- every single city increases supply at the exact same time, causing all local prices to go up whilst the average goes down.
- vkou 3y ago
  Yes in the same way that social welfare rewards people lucky enough to be born in your country.
Ekaros 3y ago
12 months or more to increase rent seems counter-productive. As it would mean that what makes most sense for landlord is to just increase by maximum each and every time as they cannot forecast changes over such long period. Still, capping increases to something like inflation+2%, and making leases continuous with long termination periods would be entirely sensible fixes.
- standardUser 3y ago
  I think families should have as much time as possible to handle the significant costs and disruptions associated with moving homes.
- lelandbatey 3y ago
  If inflation+2% is an acceptable rent change, I don't understand how needing 12 months or more to increase rent is a problem. The only thing a shorter time period allows is a landlord to say "well, over this past 3 months we saw inflation change by +-0% but 0+2 is still 2%, so we're increase rent 2% in the next 3 months period". And that doesn't seem like a good possibility.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    12 months seems rather extreme range to me. So what would happen is that you rent a place, day after you move in you get notice that yes we are going to increase rent by maximum in a year. After all this is the most logical and effective time to do it. Now cost might not increase as much in year from that date, but landlord does not know. Come next year, they again also don't know, so again max allowed at time. But instead, if you can notice rent increase let's say 1 month before year is full, they might look at what are current cost and think oh, I could do with lower increase.
    - standardUser 3y ago
      One option is to require multi-year lease options. Most commercial leases work that way. That creates a lot of stability and predictability for the family, just as it does for businesses.
Workaccount2 3y ago
The only fix for high housing costs is to build more housing or make your area shitty (so people want to leave). The latter isn't popular so that leaves only one option. You cannot legislate away costs for an in demand product. It can't be done. Put strict rent increase laws in place and all you do is make it so people sit in their apartment for years to lock in that low rent.
- standardUser 3y ago
  Did you read my comment? It is literally about how "strict rent increase laws" are not the solution.
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    While true, if supply and demand are allowed to meet through new construction you won't need rent stabilization laws.
    - CPLX 3y ago
      Nope. Supply and demand will never be smooth and linear, housing markets will always be intrinsically inelastic. Ever tried moving? Since that’s true you can use policy to decide who gets to keep the inevitable consumer surplus.
    - kredd 3y ago
      I understand the general economics behind it, but I don’t think you can free market the problem away when the market is very obviously not free. Just off the top of my head - incentives for over complicating the zoning laws in big cities, extreme push from the locals to stop the new constructions, owners not wanting their investments to go down. I live in a rental building in Vancouver, and without rent control it would be awful for everyone, as the demand has been insane in the past decade. Sure, for people like us who can pay 2x the rent wouldn’t exactly be a problem, but I have friends, and a lot of elderly in my neighbourhood who would have to move out right away. I can’t imagine a possible way for supply to catch up with the actual demand just because how the municipal governments function. And well, construction business isn’t known to be efficient here in North America.
NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
Everything is up 20% since 2020; but lower-income wages are up more, FWIW.
- pizzafeelsright 3y ago
  My experience would say goods are up about 50% I keep having to bump my wife's allowance while not getting bacon because it isn't in her budget.
patrickmay 3y ago
Rent control has been repeatedly demonstrated to increase prices and lower the quality of the units under control. The solution to high housing prices is reducing zoning restrictions, not increasing government intervention.
- robocat 3y ago
  > The solution You can always look at countries/cities where your "solution" has been tried and see if rents shifted. Certainly in my city there are many more houses (infill and suburbs) and rents are not dropping - however we also have high immigration so demand is rising. Then again, popular cities have huge demand. Increasing supply seems unlikely to fix the underlying issue.
  - patrickmay 3y ago
    Rent control fails consistently. Here are a couple of links, any economist who follows the data agrees: https://www.urban.org/research/publication/place-blame-where-it-belongs https://www.urban.org/research/publication/place-blame-where... https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/research-report/nmhc-report-rent-regulation-policy-in-the-united-states/ https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/research-report/nmhc-r... > Increasing supply seems unlikely to fix the underlying issue. The underlying issue is that the law of supply and demand applies to housing just as to any other market. Increasing the supply is the only way to lower prices.
- mjevans 3y ago
  The solution is More Houses. Build more houses. Keep building. It would help long term if houses were required to be built well. It would also help if there were incentives to build more housing when the market was notably dysfunctional; as it has been for the past 40+ years.
akira2501 3y ago
So, instead of an algorithm that purely benefits landlords, you just want the opposite algorithm that purely benefits tenets? In either case we're throwing the whole pricing part of the market away while still pretending we're engaged in capitalism. Unless you dedicate huge amount of resources to the problem you will likely harm more people than you help. You could compete with the market through publicly owned housing that people of low income can apply for. You could upset the market by vastly overhauling zoning laws to make them more open and less bureaucratic. You could increase access to the market by introducing property tax brackets that are based on total property ownership in a county. You could increase access to housing options by drastically improving high speed transport to new areas that are currently underdeveloped. If people are being priced out of the market it's because not enough options exist, which in NYC and SFO is a real physical issue, but in most other places it seems like an entirely artificial issue.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jonas21 3y ago
Many landlords are happy to offer longer-term leases. I signed a two-year lease once, and I think they would have offered a longer one if I'd asked. I'd guess there's not a lot of demand for these as renters also want the flexibility to move.
Aurornis 3y ago
> But a more comprehensive approach including requiring multi-year lease options, 12-month or greater rent increase notice requirements, and rent increase caps that prevent catastrophic rent hikes but still allow units to align with market rates over longer timeframes. If you require landlords to give 12 months notice of rent increase and cap the year-over-year increase, the outcome is entirely predictable: Every 12 months, tenants will receive a notice of pending rent increase, and that rent increase will be the maximum allowed by law. This game has already been tried before. Once you start tying people's hands, the optimal strategy is to become as aggressive with rent increases as the law will allow. The only time you back off is if you have a vacancy you can't fill, but that's unlikely because once a city starts controlling rents heavily (even with your proposed laws) it discourages more construction. There's basically no difference between strict rent control and a rent control that limits rent increases to X% per year with 12-month notice period. They're the same thing because once you cap something, people feel compelled to chase the cap for fear of getting left behind.
- Marsymars 3y ago
  > Every 12 months, tenants will receive a notice of pending rent increase, and that rent increase will be the maximum allowed by law. I'd suggest having no maximum increase, and having the landlord be liable for moving costs if the tenant chooses to move and the landlord is not able to re-rent the unit within a short time period at the increased rent price.
devbent 3y ago
As a land lord, every year the cost of my owning my rental property goes up by about $300 / month due to HOA increases and property tax increases. That is roughly a 10% increase, way above inflation. Any sort of rent control would have the rent less than the cost of ownership in 2 or 3 years.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Renting a HOA’d unit has to be its own hell.
- Marsymars 3y ago
  It trivially can't do that forever though, or the entirety of the world's economy will consist of fees to your HOA.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Marsymars 3y ago
I'm staunchly against "rent control" in the form of capped pricing, and feel like I've been shouting into the wind for years describing rent stabilization measures like you're describing. It seems like something that nobody is discussing or has any interest in. There are costs to both moving and to a lack of home stability that are ultimately born by society at large, but that are effectively negative externalities to the actions of landlords.

58028641 3y ago

Doesn't rent control just reward people lucky enough to rent before prices increased? Wouldn't increasing supply be a better way to reduce prices?

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Ya, most rent control just rewards those that are there when it happens, if it applies to new renters, supply eventually seizes up. I’m not sure what model parent thinks will work. Maybe rent control light where price increases are limited but the limit is highish? I can see that working out, limiting increases to 1.5-2X inflation might keep the market fluid and provide some stability to renters without locking new tenants out.
- malermeister 3y ago
  The secret is for the government to make up for the decrease in private supply. Vienna showed how it's done - see this article for example: https://citymonitor.ai/environment/housing/red-vienna-how-austrias-capital-earned-its-place-in-housing-history https://citymonitor.ai/environment/housing/red-vienna-how-au... There's a reason it's been #1 most livable city in the world on several rankings for years in a row now.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    You need to have some residency control for that to work. Otherwise, everyone would just flock to the most popular cities for their discounted apartment. This also works in Singapore, but only for qualified residents.
    - malermeister 3y ago
      What residency control does Vienna have?
- thisgoesnowhere 3y ago
  Would you apply the same logic to how the market for real estate unfairly rewards previous entrants? My parents have seen a 4x increase in the value of their house in 20 years, is that unfair?
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Yes! Buying your own home is the ultimate form of rent control, even though property taxes increase over time (and its even worse in CA with prop 13). Very unfair. If we wanted to make the market fair, we would disallow home owners all together. This effectively happens for most people in some places in Europe. Also, I heard of some places in Europe where if you own your own home, you have to pay some extra tax vs. what you would have paid in rent. I think Switzerland? They also had some form of rent price control, although this just made it really hard to rent an apartment even if you were willing to pay more. These are fairly complex systems that all give advantages to existing residents (so moving to Europe for two years to do a post doc is much harder than it would be if you did that in the USA).
    - thisgoesnowhere 3y ago
      Finally someone who has thought through the problem and come out with the right solution. Great stuff
standardUser 3y ago
"Rent control" can do any numbers of thing - it really depends on the specific policies.
ruuda 3y ago
Increasing supply decreases prices globally, but increases them locally: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/change-my-mind-density-increases https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/change-my-mind-density-incr...
- bombcar 3y ago
  So we coordinate- every single city increases supply at the exact same time, causing all local prices to go up whilst the average goes down.
vkou 3y ago
Yes in the same way that social welfare rewards people lucky enough to be born in your country.

Ekaros 3y ago

12 months or more to increase rent seems counter-productive. As it would mean that what makes most sense for landlord is to just increase by maximum each and every time as they cannot forecast changes over such long period. Still, capping increases to something like inflation+2%, and making leases continuous with long termination periods would be entirely sensible fixes.

standardUser 3y ago
I think families should have as much time as possible to handle the significant costs and disruptions associated with moving homes.
lelandbatey 3y ago
If inflation+2% is an acceptable rent change, I don't understand how needing 12 months or more to increase rent is a problem. The only thing a shorter time period allows is a landlord to say "well, over this past 3 months we saw inflation change by +-0% but 0+2 is still 2%, so we're increase rent 2% in the next 3 months period". And that doesn't seem like a good possibility.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  12 months seems rather extreme range to me. So what would happen is that you rent a place, day after you move in you get notice that yes we are going to increase rent by maximum in a year. After all this is the most logical and effective time to do it. Now cost might not increase as much in year from that date, but landlord does not know. Come next year, they again also don't know, so again max allowed at time. But instead, if you can notice rent increase let's say 1 month before year is full, they might look at what are current cost and think oh, I could do with lower increase.
  - standardUser 3y ago
    One option is to require multi-year lease options. Most commercial leases work that way. That creates a lot of stability and predictability for the family, just as it does for businesses.

Workaccount2 3y ago

The only fix for high housing costs is to build more housing or make your area shitty (so people want to leave). The latter isn't popular so that leaves only one option. You cannot legislate away costs for an in demand product. It can't be done. Put strict rent increase laws in place and all you do is make it so people sit in their apartment for years to lock in that low rent.

standardUser 3y ago
Did you read my comment? It is literally about how "strict rent increase laws" are not the solution.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  While true, if supply and demand are allowed to meet through new construction you won't need rent stabilization laws.
  - CPLX 3y ago
    Nope. Supply and demand will never be smooth and linear, housing markets will always be intrinsically inelastic. Ever tried moving? Since that’s true you can use policy to decide who gets to keep the inevitable consumer surplus.
  - kredd 3y ago
    I understand the general economics behind it, but I don’t think you can free market the problem away when the market is very obviously not free. Just off the top of my head - incentives for over complicating the zoning laws in big cities, extreme push from the locals to stop the new constructions, owners not wanting their investments to go down. I live in a rental building in Vancouver, and without rent control it would be awful for everyone, as the demand has been insane in the past decade. Sure, for people like us who can pay 2x the rent wouldn’t exactly be a problem, but I have friends, and a lot of elderly in my neighbourhood who would have to move out right away. I can’t imagine a possible way for supply to catch up with the actual demand just because how the municipal governments function. And well, construction business isn’t known to be efficient here in North America.

NovemberWhiskey 3y ago

Everything is up 20% since 2020; but lower-income wages are up more, FWIW.

pizzafeelsright 3y ago
My experience would say goods are up about 50% I keep having to bump my wife's allowance while not getting bacon because it isn't in her budget.

patrickmay 3y ago

Rent control has been repeatedly demonstrated to increase prices and lower the quality of the units under control. The solution to high housing prices is reducing zoning restrictions, not increasing government intervention.

robocat 3y ago
> The solution You can always look at countries/cities where your "solution" has been tried and see if rents shifted. Certainly in my city there are many more houses (infill and suburbs) and rents are not dropping - however we also have high immigration so demand is rising. Then again, popular cities have huge demand. Increasing supply seems unlikely to fix the underlying issue.
- patrickmay 3y ago
  Rent control fails consistently. Here are a couple of links, any economist who follows the data agrees: https://www.urban.org/research/publication/place-blame-where-it-belongs https://www.urban.org/research/publication/place-blame-where... https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/research-report/nmhc-report-rent-regulation-policy-in-the-united-states/ https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/research-report/nmhc-r... > Increasing supply seems unlikely to fix the underlying issue. The underlying issue is that the law of supply and demand applies to housing just as to any other market. Increasing the supply is the only way to lower prices.
mjevans 3y ago
The solution is More Houses. Build more houses. Keep building. It would help long term if houses were required to be built well. It would also help if there were incentives to build more housing when the market was notably dysfunctional; as it has been for the past 40+ years.

akira2501 3y ago

So, instead of an algorithm that purely benefits landlords, you just want the opposite algorithm that purely benefits tenets? In either case we're throwing the whole pricing part of the market away while still pretending we're engaged in capitalism. Unless you dedicate huge amount of resources to the problem you will likely harm more people than you help. You could compete with the market through publicly owned housing that people of low income can apply for. You could upset the market by vastly overhauling zoning laws to make them more open and less bureaucratic. You could increase access to the market by introducing property tax brackets that are based on total property ownership in a county. You could increase access to housing options by drastically improving high speed transport to new areas that are currently underdeveloped. If people are being priced out of the market it's because not enough options exist, which in NYC and SFO is a real physical issue, but in most other places it seems like an entirely artificial issue.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jonas21 3y ago

Many landlords are happy to offer longer-term leases. I signed a two-year lease once, and I think they would have offered a longer one if I'd asked. I'd guess there's not a lot of demand for these as renters also want the flexibility to move.

Aurornis 3y ago

> But a more comprehensive approach including requiring multi-year lease options, 12-month or greater rent increase notice requirements, and rent increase caps that prevent catastrophic rent hikes but still allow units to align with market rates over longer timeframes. If you require landlords to give 12 months notice of rent increase and cap the year-over-year increase, the outcome is entirely predictable: Every 12 months, tenants will receive a notice of pending rent increase, and that rent increase will be the maximum allowed by law. This game has already been tried before. Once you start tying people's hands, the optimal strategy is to become as aggressive with rent increases as the law will allow. The only time you back off is if you have a vacancy you can't fill, but that's unlikely because once a city starts controlling rents heavily (even with your proposed laws) it discourages more construction. There's basically no difference between strict rent control and a rent control that limits rent increases to X% per year with 12-month notice period. They're the same thing because once you cap something, people feel compelled to chase the cap for fear of getting left behind.

Marsymars 3y ago
> Every 12 months, tenants will receive a notice of pending rent increase, and that rent increase will be the maximum allowed by law. I'd suggest having no maximum increase, and having the landlord be liable for moving costs if the tenant chooses to move and the landlord is not able to re-rent the unit within a short time period at the increased rent price.

devbent 3y ago

As a land lord, every year the cost of my owning my rental property goes up by about $300 / month due to HOA increases and property tax increases. That is roughly a 10% increase, way above inflation. Any sort of rent control would have the rent less than the cost of ownership in 2 or 3 years.

bombcar 3y ago
Renting a HOA’d unit has to be its own hell.
Marsymars 3y ago
It trivially can't do that forever though, or the entirety of the world's economy will consist of fees to your HOA.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Marsymars 3y ago

I'm staunchly against "rent control" in the form of capped pricing, and feel like I've been shouting into the wind for years describing rent stabilization measures like you're describing. It seems like something that nobody is discussing or has any interest in. There are costs to both moving and to a lack of home stability that are ultimately born by society at large, but that are effectively negative externalities to the actions of landlords.