11 ms·

How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

calambrac 18y ago
"Although rent controls are widely believed to lower rents, data I have collected from eighteen North American cities show that the advertised rents of available apartments in rent-regulated cities are dramatically higher than they are in cities without rent control." Uh... no shit? Why would a city with low rents have any impetus to impose rent control? "There can be no doubt that rent control creates housing shortages. For almost 20 years, national vacancy rates have been at or above 7 percent--a figure generally considered normal. Cities such as Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix, where development is welcomed, have often had vacancy rates above 15 percent." Yes, but these are also sprawling shitholes. And: ridiculously high vacancy rates are a good thing now? "Young people who migrate to New York or San Francisco usually must settle for paying $600 a month to share a two-bedroom apartment with several other people or commuting from a nearby city. Crowding is a manifestation of rent control." It has nothing to do with NYC being an island and SF being a peninsula. And we'll ignore that if you consider an area the size of Houston around both of these cities, you start seeing affordable housing again - commuting 5 miles from another city is a bad thing, but commuting 20 miles from the same city is awesome. "The goal in getting rid of rent control should be to allow the curve of housing prices to return to the elegant symmetry of the free market." Ah, so it's an aesthetic concern. This is just a ridiculous article. There are 3 cities cited as suffering from the supposed ill-effects of rent control, New York, San Francisco, and San Jose (and Boston has "overtones of the rent-control effect at the upper end", whatever that means). The data that illustrates the supposed terrible effects of rent control is the price of apartments on the market on one weekend, completely ignoring the entire point of rent control, which is to allow people to stay in their homes (which the article perversely tries to twist into people becoming "prisoners of their own apartment" - because people in great locations in NYC and SF would otherwise really want to move if only their apartments weren't so damn cheap). There's never any attempt to prove that rent control actually drives out affordable housing, there's only the "no shit, that's the point" observation that newcomers to an in-demand city with rent control pay more. I moved to San Francisco last February, and I'm moving to New York in a month, so I'm not exactly a fan of rent control - I know my price is much higher than my neighbor's because of it. At the same time, though, I recognize that it's really shitty that I could take my programmer's salary and use it like a club against the people who were already living in the city. Why do I want to move to these places? Don't the people who were living there before me get some credit for making it desirable enough that I want to move there? Maybe I should be okay with subsidizing them.
- loumf 18y ago
  Great points. I love how people think that because they heard of someone abusing rent control, that that's the norm. There is no system that isn't gamed in some way -- sure it's unfair, but is the net effect better? Since CATO can obviously afford to do a proper study of the effects of rent control -- I can only assume that they know it won't support their idealogical position.
- yummyfajitas 18y ago
  "It has nothing to do with NYC being an island and SF being a peninsula." It's not just that. NYC is not built up the way it should be, and most of the buildup of recent years is condos. For many years, there was a ridiculous incongruity in NYC: sky high rents and abandoned buildings. Why renovate when you can't charge rents commensurately? These days it's mostly a Harlem/Inwood phenomenon. By the way, why is "allowing" people to stay in "their" homes (fine print: homes which are not really theirs) a good thing? Are unskilled workers somehow more deserving of a house in Manhattan than skilled workers? Do retirees deserve to live close to young workers jobs more than the young workers do? A guy with a family has a very good reason to pay more for a house close to his job.
  - calambrac 18y ago
    Rent stabilization in NYC isn't mandatory for new construction, so new buildup being condos is not a response to rent control (unless it's a response to the threat of future rent control). Also, you'll need to explain how "sky high rents + abandoned buildings" corresponds to "Why renovate when you can't charge rents commensurately?" - if landlords can't charge rents commensurately, where are the sky high rents coming from? The argument that rent control prevents owners from maintaining their buildings is pure bullshit. There's not a rent-control law in existence that doesn't allow annual increases sufficient for maintenance. Buildings aren't maintained because the owner sees the opportunity for dramatically increased profits if the current tenant leaves and lets the building fall to shit in an effort to drive them out. As for why allowing people to stay in their homes is a good thing (and forgive me for being sentimental, but these are their homes, even if other people own the buildings - they do live there): there a few things that bother me about the free market religion: 1. The belief that all things with value have been priced appropriately. 2. The belief that ownership is the only form of risk that should be rewarded by society. Neighborhoods don't just magically become expensive to live in. I won't claim that the only reason is because good, noble people moved in when things were cheap and turned things around, but it's ridiculous to suggest that the people living in a place have nothing to do with that place becoming a desirable place for wealthier people to live. As for whether unskilled workers are somehow more deserving of a house in Manhattan than skilled workers: no, but then again, they don't deserve to be run away from their jobs and families simply because some rich asshole can price them out, either. You're making an emotional appeal for a guy with a family to have a right to be close to his job - that cuts both ways, you know.
logjam 18y ago
I'm not real clear on why a 1997 article from a routinely discredited right-wing think-tank on this issue is Hacker News....but since we seem to be playing "cite old biased articles", here's the sordid history of how unregulated landlord greed drives out affordable housing: http://www.tenant.net/Community/history/hist-toc.html http://www.tenant.net/Community/history/hist-toc.html
- jmtulloss 18y ago
  Routinely discredited? Right-wing? Cato is clearly libertarian. I suppose that tends to the right, but it's not "right wing" in the traditional sense.
- fallentimes 18y ago
  socially liberal & fiscally conservative != right wing
  - jhancock 18y ago
    you are correct sir, if you have two variables, you get a whole plane of possibilities, not just a line ;) I guess its too late to teach basic math to the masses though.
    - davidw 18y ago
      When the squares actually visit LineLand though, who do they hold their noses and vote for? My guess is that they generally vote Republican (like, for instance, Milton Friedman), or did at one time. Perhaps that's changing?
      - Prrometheus 18y ago
        Cato actually has done some studies on the libertarian vote. It went overwhelmingly for George Bush in 2000, but swung about 20 points democratic in 2004. I'm not sure that they've updated the study for 2008, but my gut (and surveys of self-identified well-known libertarians) tell me Obama won the vote. If you like market economics, don't care if your neighbor is gay, and don't feel like occupying countries on the other side of the world, there is really nobody pandering to you. You tend to move around. Edit: Here's the paper comparing the 2000 and 2004 elections that I mentioned http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6715 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6715 Kerry did 18% better than Gore among libertarian voters, despite not having a libertarian bone in his body. Bush won the demographic in both elections, but lost 13% between 2000 and 2004, for a 31 point net swing.
perdurabo 18y ago
Please read http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
mdasen 18y ago
As someone in Boston, I can tell you that rent control was terrible here. The rent controlled units went to people with high incomes and political power (including mayors and those sitting on the Supreme Judicial Court). Most rent controlled units were simply taken off the market in one way or another. If you're getting well below market rent, you tend to look for other ways to use the property and some just allowed relatives or friends to use it rather than bothering with renting, but a lot converted them into condos. The effect was the same - people had to move. Even the Boston Phoenix (the leftist alternative paper akin to New York's Village Voice) came out against it. The fact is that when you put price controls in place, who gets something is determined by factors other than what you're willing to pay for it. In housing, that means: 1. Will you bribe people? Will you bribe the landlord renting the apartment with, say, an extra $200 per month? Will you bribe the current resident of the apartment with $2,000 to vacate and give it to you all the time claiming to the landlord that they haven't left? 2. Are you willing to live in a slum? Landlords don't improve properties when they can't charge more for those improvements. Unsanitary conditions? Screw you! They can rent it to plenty of other people willing to live in that squalor. Properties just deteriorate until they are uninhabitable (or barely habitable) and it removes more properties from the market. With tenancy at will, landlords are able to evict anyone without reason with 30 days notice. Should you complain, you're out and unlikely to find another place. 3. Will you even be able to find a place? No one is willing to move because they won't be able to find another place. People hang on for dear life. Price caps create shortages. The remaining people get to fight like shoppers at a Best Buy at Christmas for one of those Nintendo Wiis. The first thing to go is anyone renting a room in their house because, for the limited rent they could get, they could use it better for themselves as a guest room or something. Next is anything that can be converted to condos. Remaining rental places are kept abysmally and many eventually become uninhabitable. Any little brightness in this situation is hoarded by a lucky few who tend to be those with political or economic power (doctors, lawyers, mayors, and judges) and you can't even pry those places from their cold dead hands. Economics finds an interesting balance a lot of the time. If you force landlords to rent for pennies, they don't maintain their property until it's in a state that wouldn't command more than pennies in rent. If you are forcing tenants to not pay more than $x in rent per month, they'll give under the table for anyplace that's nice. The easiest way to drive down housing prices is to increase the amount of housing. Landlords don't want vacancies and lower their prices to fill. The problem is that, in some cities, there are more people who want to live in them than there are housing units available. So, prices rise until some of those people decide they'd rather spend less and live in a less desirable area. Other than price, what else should determine who gets in and who doesn't?
pg 18y ago
Markets interpret social engineering as damage and route around it.
- Goladus 18y ago
  I agree, assuming it is a reasonably efficient market where everyone has access to the relevant information.
- davidw 18y ago
  Many government policies could be seen as "social engineering", be they farm subsidies, tariffs on imports, spending on things like highways, subsidized communication networks like the postal system, education for people other than those born wealthy, meals for poor kids so that they have something in their stomachs at school and can actually try and think, and so on. And, yes, some of them get 'routed around'. Other policies, whether you agree with them or not, affect the market more than the other way around. For an extreme example, see Cuba, where social engineering routed the market, with results that are disastrous in many ways. Other social engineering experiments, such as universal education up to a certain age in most western countries, seem to have been a net positive for society, even if they are imperfect. Also, I think that some "social engineering", such as keeping people from starving to death, and ensuring they don't freeze to death for want of a warm place to sleep, at a minimum, should not be routed around.
  - pg 18y ago
    I meant social engineering in the form of manipulating markets.
    - davidw 18y ago
      Import tariffs and subsidies are direct market manipulation, and the market doesn't really route around them. Rather, they tend to wreck markets, which is one reason many developing countries continue to press the US and Europe to end farm subsidies - it's wrecking their export markets and hurting their farmers. Governments, when they want to, are perfectly capable of interfering with markets and even destroying them. I am not a libertarian and do not believe that all intervention is harmful, but disagree with your thesis that markets are able to route around governments. Yes, in some cases, but I think that governments have the upper hand: they have guns and police and stuff, like the libertarians love to say. I think the "law of unintended consequences" is perhaps more solid ground with regards to governments and market manipulation.
qqq 18y ago
Rent control is one of the many well-intentioned Government projects that doesn't achieve its goals. Government needs to focus more on 'social technology' (Karl Popper's term) -- on how to achieve the goals it aims for -- and less on arguing what the goal should be and then assuming that making it happen will be the easy part. To those who disagree, I would appreciate to hear why.
GrandMasterBirt 18y ago
Rent control does more in New York. It means that if you are in a rent controlled apt they will increase your rent to the maximum allowed! Always! And they reject people if they don't earn enough money to actually have their rent go up by the maximum amount (rent cannot exceed 20% of your annual income).. And poof In fact I've been hearing that in non-rent-controlled apartments in NY the inflation rate for rent is smaller than for rent controlled apartments.
asciilifeform 18y ago
It isn't hard to think of many solid, rational reasons to oppose rent control. That is, until the wealthy bid up the cost of living in your neighborhood.
jason 18y ago
I have a vagrant living in my NYC apt building that pays $75 a month in rent and eats out of the garbage. He has no electricity or running water. When he opens the door to his apt in the summer the rest of the building gags. There are two other units that pay $75 dollars; a nice old couple and a loony chain smoker with bad BO.
- calambrac 18y ago
  At a 7.5% annual increase from 1971, they would have originally been paying just over $5/month (that's about $25.34 in today's dollars). I'm not an expert in NYC rent prices in the early 70's, but that seems absurdly low. Maybe it's that cheap for some other reason?
  - jason 18y ago
    The rent amount is gossip from the super. The other stuff is first hand, and probably adds a little "control" to my rent as well, but believe me not that much.
mhartl 18y ago
While I'm sympathetic to the goals of empirical studies of this type, I doubt their utility: if they find that rent control increases rents, the evidence is right; if they find that rent control does not increase rents, the evidence is wrong. The reasons for this apparent rejection of empiricism are simple: (1) Empiricism, so successful in the exact sciences, relies on clean evidence and controlled experiments, but evidence in economics is necessarily messy, and controlled experiments rare. (2) Given extremely reasonable and general assumptions (buyers tend to buy more of something if its price goes down, producers tend to produce more of something if its price goes up), the connection between rent control and rents is a theorem, not a conjecture. (See any introductory economics text for a proof.) Doing an empirical study to test the statement "Rent controls increase rents" is kind of like measuring the length of ladders leaning against buildings to test the Pythagorean Theorem. You're likely to find that Pythagoras was right, but if you don't it's probably a flaw in your measurements rather than a mistake in the proof.
DaniFong 18y ago
The article seems to ignore one thing: rent control helps people stay together, and in doing so helps communities stay together. The examples they give of communities with rent control and higher rents are places I'd want to live in. They have real community fabric. This counts for something, though I'm not sure how much.
indiejade 18y ago
I have a friend who says: "Hell will be full of landlords." She is a master's degree holding architect who rents.
- sokoloff 18y ago
  As the son of a former small-time landord (teachers by day, landlords of 1 single family and 1 duplex house), I can assure you that those landlords will have PLENTY of tenants to rent to down there!

"Although rent controls are widely believed to lower rents, data I have collected from eighteen North American cities show that the advertised rents of available apartments in rent-regulated cities are dramatically higher than they are in cities without rent control." Uh... no shit? Why would a city with low rents have any impetus to impose rent control? "There can be no doubt that rent control creates housing shortages. For almost 20 years, national vacancy rates have been at or above 7 percent--a figure generally considered normal. Cities such as Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix, where development is welcomed, have often had vacancy rates above 15 percent." Yes, but these are also sprawling shitholes. And: ridiculously high vacancy rates are a good thing now? "Young people who migrate to New York or San Francisco usually must settle for paying $600 a month to share a two-bedroom apartment with several other people or commuting from a nearby city. Crowding is a manifestation of rent control." It has nothing to do with NYC being an island and SF being a peninsula. And we'll ignore that if you consider an area the size of Houston around both of these cities, you start seeing affordable housing again - commuting 5 miles from another city is a bad thing, but commuting 20 miles from the same city is awesome. "The goal in getting rid of rent control should be to allow the curve of housing prices to return to the elegant symmetry of the free market." Ah, so it's an aesthetic concern. This is just a ridiculous article. There are 3 cities cited as suffering from the supposed ill-effects of rent control, New York, San Francisco, and San Jose (and Boston has "overtones of the rent-control effect at the upper end", whatever that means). The data that illustrates the supposed terrible effects of rent control is the price of apartments on the market on one weekend, completely ignoring the entire point of rent control, which is to allow people to stay in their homes (which the article perversely tries to twist into people becoming "prisoners of their own apartment" - because people in great locations in NYC and SF would otherwise really want to move if only their apartments weren't so damn cheap). There's never any attempt to prove that rent control actually drives out affordable housing, there's only the "no shit, that's the point" observation that newcomers to an in-demand city with rent control pay more. I moved to San Francisco last February, and I'm moving to New York in a month, so I'm not exactly a fan of rent control - I know my price is much higher than my neighbor's because of it. At the same time, though, I recognize that it's really shitty that I could take my programmer's salary and use it like a club against the people who were already living in the city. Why do I want to move to these places? Don't the people who were living there before me get some credit for making it desirable enough that I want to move there? Maybe I should be okay with subsidizing them.

loumf 18y ago
Great points. I love how people think that because they heard of someone abusing rent control, that that's the norm. There is no system that isn't gamed in some way -- sure it's unfair, but is the net effect better? Since CATO can obviously afford to do a proper study of the effects of rent control -- I can only assume that they know it won't support their idealogical position.
yummyfajitas 18y ago
"It has nothing to do with NYC being an island and SF being a peninsula." It's not just that. NYC is not built up the way it should be, and most of the buildup of recent years is condos. For many years, there was a ridiculous incongruity in NYC: sky high rents and abandoned buildings. Why renovate when you can't charge rents commensurately? These days it's mostly a Harlem/Inwood phenomenon. By the way, why is "allowing" people to stay in "their" homes (fine print: homes which are not really theirs) a good thing? Are unskilled workers somehow more deserving of a house in Manhattan than skilled workers? Do retirees deserve to live close to young workers jobs more than the young workers do? A guy with a family has a very good reason to pay more for a house close to his job.
- calambrac 18y ago
  Rent stabilization in NYC isn't mandatory for new construction, so new buildup being condos is not a response to rent control (unless it's a response to the threat of future rent control). Also, you'll need to explain how "sky high rents + abandoned buildings" corresponds to "Why renovate when you can't charge rents commensurately?" - if landlords can't charge rents commensurately, where are the sky high rents coming from? The argument that rent control prevents owners from maintaining their buildings is pure bullshit. There's not a rent-control law in existence that doesn't allow annual increases sufficient for maintenance. Buildings aren't maintained because the owner sees the opportunity for dramatically increased profits if the current tenant leaves and lets the building fall to shit in an effort to drive them out. As for why allowing people to stay in their homes is a good thing (and forgive me for being sentimental, but these are their homes, even if other people own the buildings - they do live there): there a few things that bother me about the free market religion: 1. The belief that all things with value have been priced appropriately. 2. The belief that ownership is the only form of risk that should be rewarded by society. Neighborhoods don't just magically become expensive to live in. I won't claim that the only reason is because good, noble people moved in when things were cheap and turned things around, but it's ridiculous to suggest that the people living in a place have nothing to do with that place becoming a desirable place for wealthier people to live. As for whether unskilled workers are somehow more deserving of a house in Manhattan than skilled workers: no, but then again, they don't deserve to be run away from their jobs and families simply because some rich asshole can price them out, either. You're making an emotional appeal for a guy with a family to have a right to be close to his job - that cuts both ways, you know.

logjam 18y ago

I'm not real clear on why a 1997 article from a routinely discredited right-wing think-tank on this issue is Hacker News....but since we seem to be playing "cite old biased articles", here's the sordid history of how unregulated landlord greed drives out affordable housing: http://www.tenant.net/Community/history/hist-toc.html http://www.tenant.net/Community/history/hist-toc.html

jmtulloss 18y ago
Routinely discredited? Right-wing? Cato is clearly libertarian. I suppose that tends to the right, but it's not "right wing" in the traditional sense.
fallentimes 18y ago
socially liberal & fiscally conservative != right wing
- jhancock 18y ago
  you are correct sir, if you have two variables, you get a whole plane of possibilities, not just a line ;) I guess its too late to teach basic math to the masses though.
  - davidw 18y ago
    When the squares actually visit LineLand though, who do they hold their noses and vote for? My guess is that they generally vote Republican (like, for instance, Milton Friedman), or did at one time. Perhaps that's changing?
    - Prrometheus 18y ago
      Cato actually has done some studies on the libertarian vote. It went overwhelmingly for George Bush in 2000, but swung about 20 points democratic in 2004. I'm not sure that they've updated the study for 2008, but my gut (and surveys of self-identified well-known libertarians) tell me Obama won the vote. If you like market economics, don't care if your neighbor is gay, and don't feel like occupying countries on the other side of the world, there is really nobody pandering to you. You tend to move around. Edit: Here's the paper comparing the 2000 and 2004 elections that I mentioned http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6715 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6715 Kerry did 18% better than Gore among libertarian voters, despite not having a libertarian bone in his body. Bush won the demographic in both elections, but lost 13% between 2000 and 2004, for a 31 point net swing.

perdurabo 18y ago

Please read http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mdasen 18y ago

As someone in Boston, I can tell you that rent control was terrible here. The rent controlled units went to people with high incomes and political power (including mayors and those sitting on the Supreme Judicial Court). Most rent controlled units were simply taken off the market in one way or another. If you're getting well below market rent, you tend to look for other ways to use the property and some just allowed relatives or friends to use it rather than bothering with renting, but a lot converted them into condos. The effect was the same - people had to move. Even the Boston Phoenix (the leftist alternative paper akin to New York's Village Voice) came out against it. The fact is that when you put price controls in place, who gets something is determined by factors other than what you're willing to pay for it. In housing, that means: 1. Will you bribe people? Will you bribe the landlord renting the apartment with, say, an extra $200 per month? Will you bribe the current resident of the apartment with $2,000 to vacate and give it to you all the time claiming to the landlord that they haven't left? 2. Are you willing to live in a slum? Landlords don't improve properties when they can't charge more for those improvements. Unsanitary conditions? Screw you! They can rent it to plenty of other people willing to live in that squalor. Properties just deteriorate until they are uninhabitable (or barely habitable) and it removes more properties from the market. With tenancy at will, landlords are able to evict anyone without reason with 30 days notice. Should you complain, you're out and unlikely to find another place. 3. Will you even be able to find a place? No one is willing to move because they won't be able to find another place. People hang on for dear life. Price caps create shortages. The remaining people get to fight like shoppers at a Best Buy at Christmas for one of those Nintendo Wiis. The first thing to go is anyone renting a room in their house because, for the limited rent they could get, they could use it better for themselves as a guest room or something. Next is anything that can be converted to condos. Remaining rental places are kept abysmally and many eventually become uninhabitable. Any little brightness in this situation is hoarded by a lucky few who tend to be those with political or economic power (doctors, lawyers, mayors, and judges) and you can't even pry those places from their cold dead hands. Economics finds an interesting balance a lot of the time. If you force landlords to rent for pennies, they don't maintain their property until it's in a state that wouldn't command more than pennies in rent. If you are forcing tenants to not pay more than $x in rent per month, they'll give under the table for anyplace that's nice. The easiest way to drive down housing prices is to increase the amount of housing. Landlords don't want vacancies and lower their prices to fill. The problem is that, in some cities, there are more people who want to live in them than there are housing units available. So, prices rise until some of those people decide they'd rather spend less and live in a less desirable area. Other than price, what else should determine who gets in and who doesn't?

pg 18y ago

Markets interpret social engineering as damage and route around it.

Goladus 18y ago
I agree, assuming it is a reasonably efficient market where everyone has access to the relevant information.
davidw 18y ago
Many government policies could be seen as "social engineering", be they farm subsidies, tariffs on imports, spending on things like highways, subsidized communication networks like the postal system, education for people other than those born wealthy, meals for poor kids so that they have something in their stomachs at school and can actually try and think, and so on. And, yes, some of them get 'routed around'. Other policies, whether you agree with them or not, affect the market more than the other way around. For an extreme example, see Cuba, where social engineering routed the market, with results that are disastrous in many ways. Other social engineering experiments, such as universal education up to a certain age in most western countries, seem to have been a net positive for society, even if they are imperfect. Also, I think that some "social engineering", such as keeping people from starving to death, and ensuring they don't freeze to death for want of a warm place to sleep, at a minimum, should not be routed around.
- pg 18y ago
  I meant social engineering in the form of manipulating markets.
  - davidw 18y ago
    Import tariffs and subsidies are direct market manipulation, and the market doesn't really route around them. Rather, they tend to wreck markets, which is one reason many developing countries continue to press the US and Europe to end farm subsidies - it's wrecking their export markets and hurting their farmers. Governments, when they want to, are perfectly capable of interfering with markets and even destroying them. I am not a libertarian and do not believe that all intervention is harmful, but disagree with your thesis that markets are able to route around governments. Yes, in some cases, but I think that governments have the upper hand: they have guns and police and stuff, like the libertarians love to say. I think the "law of unintended consequences" is perhaps more solid ground with regards to governments and market manipulation.

qqq 18y ago

Rent control is one of the many well-intentioned Government projects that doesn't achieve its goals. Government needs to focus more on 'social technology' (Karl Popper's term) -- on how to achieve the goals it aims for -- and less on arguing what the goal should be and then assuming that making it happen will be the easy part. To those who disagree, I would appreciate to hear why.

GrandMasterBirt 18y ago

Rent control does more in New York. It means that if you are in a rent controlled apt they will increase your rent to the maximum allowed! Always! And they reject people if they don't earn enough money to actually have their rent go up by the maximum amount (rent cannot exceed 20% of your annual income).. And poof In fact I've been hearing that in non-rent-controlled apartments in NY the inflation rate for rent is smaller than for rent controlled apartments.

asciilifeform 18y ago

It isn't hard to think of many solid, rational reasons to oppose rent control. That is, until the wealthy bid up the cost of living in your neighborhood.

jason 18y ago

I have a vagrant living in my NYC apt building that pays $75 a month in rent and eats out of the garbage. He has no electricity or running water. When he opens the door to his apt in the summer the rest of the building gags. There are two other units that pay $75 dollars; a nice old couple and a loony chain smoker with bad BO.

calambrac 18y ago
At a 7.5% annual increase from 1971, they would have originally been paying just over $5/month (that's about $25.34 in today's dollars). I'm not an expert in NYC rent prices in the early 70's, but that seems absurdly low. Maybe it's that cheap for some other reason?
- jason 18y ago
  The rent amount is gossip from the super. The other stuff is first hand, and probably adds a little "control" to my rent as well, but believe me not that much.

mhartl 18y ago

While I'm sympathetic to the goals of empirical studies of this type, I doubt their utility: if they find that rent control increases rents, the evidence is right; if they find that rent control does not increase rents, the evidence is wrong. The reasons for this apparent rejection of empiricism are simple: (1) Empiricism, so successful in the exact sciences, relies on clean evidence and controlled experiments, but evidence in economics is necessarily messy, and controlled experiments rare. (2) Given extremely reasonable and general assumptions (buyers tend to buy more of something if its price goes down, producers tend to produce more of something if its price goes up), the connection between rent control and rents is a theorem, not a conjecture. (See any introductory economics text for a proof.) Doing an empirical study to test the statement "Rent controls increase rents" is kind of like measuring the length of ladders leaning against buildings to test the Pythagorean Theorem. You're likely to find that Pythagoras was right, but if you don't it's probably a flaw in your measurements rather than a mistake in the proof.

DaniFong 18y ago

The article seems to ignore one thing: rent control helps people stay together, and in doing so helps communities stay together. The examples they give of communities with rent control and higher rents are places I'd want to live in. They have real community fabric. This counts for something, though I'm not sure how much.

indiejade 18y ago

I have a friend who says: "Hell will be full of landlords." She is a master's degree holding architect who rents.

sokoloff 18y ago
As the son of a former small-time landord (teachers by day, landlords of 1 single family and 1 duplex house), I can assure you that those landlords will have PLENTY of tenants to rent to down there!