4 ms·

Rent control will lead to more slums and more boats like this. American cities have tried rent control, and it simply leads to a shortage of rooms for rent. Aft

Rent control will lead to more slums and more boats like this. American cities have tried rent control, and it simply leads to a shortage of rooms for rent. After all - why would you build apartments or rent out existing rooms if you're not going to make money off of it? If you're looking for a leftist answer that would alleviate some of this, I would suggest running with the platform of subsidized rent. In the US, it's called Section 8, after the section of the 1937 Housing Act that created it. Basically, if you earn less than a certain amount of money, the government will pay for a certain amount of your rent (ranging from a small portion to almost all of it). In turn, landlords are guaranteed tenants and funding as long as they adhere to certain building requirements and responsibilities. Section 8 ends up getting a whole bunch of criticism, as it drives housing prices up further and dicks over the middle class, (if you don't qualify for assistance, you're going to have problems) but if you want to make it a priority to have working-class / poor people live in London, that's probably the way to go. You have to pay for it with increased taxes, though.

pjc50 12y ago
We already have this, it's called housing benefit. A cap was recently introduced on the payments to deal with extreme cases (single mother with many children living in Zone 1 getting > national average income). It doesn't actually impose any extra responsibilities on landlords. What we used to have was a national programme of building social housing. This had some high-profile social failures (qv US "housing projects") and the government embarked on a programme of selling it off at a great discount to the current occupiers while demolishing some of the worst tower blocks. What we now have is a massive failure of planning policy. The symbol of this is the derelict for 30 years Battersea power station. It's a huge, useless, architectural treasure that's occupying a lot of land in Zone 1 because nobody can agree what to do with it.
- jblok 12y ago
  Its quite far into the building process now actually. The whole Power Station/Nine Elms area is getting a huge number of (quite expensive) apartments and 2 extra Northern Line stations.
dreamweapon 12y ago
American cities have tried rent control, and it simply leads to a shortage of rooms for rent. In NYC's case, it also leads to 1.5-2 million people being able to live in the city who otherwise (at market rates) simply would not be able to, period. To flatly assert that it "simply leads" to a shortage in stock (with no other significant effects) -- or that unregulated housing markets don't also have crippling shortages -- is just... weird. After all - why would you build apartments or rent out existing rooms if you're not going to make money off of it? This is, of course, completely illogical: just because some apartments are rent-stabilized, that doesn't mean that all of them are, or even a majority of them are. And of course owners will still rent their stabilized apartments -- they may forego some of the niceties of higher-end maintenance, but they'll still rent them. And in any case, the reality is that while developers in NYC are occasionally forced to build a small portion "affordable" units[1], it doesn't ding their profit margins very much, and they're falling over each other to create new stock, just the same. (Hint: city planners have long been aware that there's an incentive tradeoff that comes with requiring a certain proportion affordable units to be built; that's why they keep this proportion very low, so as to not impact the developer's incentives, very much). [1] Most of which generally aren't actually affordable to actual low-income residents (due to on some quirks about how "mean income" is defined), but that's another matter.
- CyberDildonics 12y ago
  There is scarcity either way. It can be a race to who can take over an apartment when so many people are in line, or it can be high rents that some people can't afford. People aren't entitled to live anywhere they want regardless of what they can afford. Some areas like San Francisco, London, and Manhattan are scarce and expensive (through demand, building limitations etc)
s73v3r 12y ago
What are you talking about? Even with rent control, you're still going to make money. You're just not going to make Scrooge McDuck levels of money.

pjc50 12y ago

We already have this, it's called housing benefit. A cap was recently introduced on the payments to deal with extreme cases (single mother with many children living in Zone 1 getting > national average income). It doesn't actually impose any extra responsibilities on landlords. What we used to have was a national programme of building social housing. This had some high-profile social failures (qv US "housing projects") and the government embarked on a programme of selling it off at a great discount to the current occupiers while demolishing some of the worst tower blocks. What we now have is a massive failure of planning policy. The symbol of this is the derelict for 30 years Battersea power station. It's a huge, useless, architectural treasure that's occupying a lot of land in Zone 1 because nobody can agree what to do with it.

jblok 12y ago
Its quite far into the building process now actually. The whole Power Station/Nine Elms area is getting a huge number of (quite expensive) apartments and 2 extra Northern Line stations.

dreamweapon 12y ago

American cities have tried rent control, and it simply leads to a shortage of rooms for rent. In NYC's case, it also leads to 1.5-2 million people being able to live in the city who otherwise (at market rates) simply would not be able to, period. To flatly assert that it "simply leads" to a shortage in stock (with no other significant effects) -- or that unregulated housing markets don't also have crippling shortages -- is just... weird. After all - why would you build apartments or rent out existing rooms if you're not going to make money off of it? This is, of course, completely illogical: just because some apartments are rent-stabilized, that doesn't mean that all of them are, or even a majority of them are. And of course owners will still rent their stabilized apartments -- they may forego some of the niceties of higher-end maintenance, but they'll still rent them. And in any case, the reality is that while developers in NYC are occasionally forced to build a small portion "affordable" units[1], it doesn't ding their profit margins very much, and they're falling over each other to create new stock, just the same. (Hint: city planners have long been aware that there's an incentive tradeoff that comes with requiring a certain proportion affordable units to be built; that's why they keep this proportion very low, so as to not impact the developer's incentives, very much). [1] Most of which generally aren't actually affordable to actual low-income residents (due to on some quirks about how "mean income" is defined), but that's another matter.

CyberDildonics 12y ago
There is scarcity either way. It can be a race to who can take over an apartment when so many people are in line, or it can be high rents that some people can't afford. People aren't entitled to live anywhere they want regardless of what they can afford. Some areas like San Francisco, London, and Manhattan are scarce and expensive (through demand, building limitations etc)

s73v3r 12y ago

What are you talking about? Even with rent control, you're still going to make money. You're just not going to make Scrooge McDuck levels of money.