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I wish they had a reasonable argument that benefitted everyone. They want the owners of properties not to be able to set the rent. But my family had an apartmen

by lnanek2 11y ago

I wish they had a reasonable argument that benefitted everyone. They want the owners of properties not to be able to set the rent. But my family had an apartment building in NJ that unfortunately, due to laws, we couldn't raise the rent more than a set amount per year. Soon there was just no way to even pay for maintenance when the roof leaked and things like that and it had to be shutdown. So giving these people what they want, the ability to force owners not to raise rent, just does not benefit anyone in the end. She runs a chile shop, how would she feel if protestors were sitting in front of city hall demanding she can only charge ten cents per bowl of chile? Sure the protestors love the idea of nearly free food, but that is just going to kill the business, not give them nearly free food forever.

ChuckMcM 11y ago
And that is the problem in a nutshell. Price fixing a single thing (in this case rents) means the market moves without those prices changing and that results in huge imbalances. Now if the NJ government funded a fixed rate building maintenance team you're family could use the price appropriate maintenance team to keep the building in repair, of course they could not pay them market wages (that is why maintenance costs more) so the people working for the maintenance group would have to go to the state run stores where they could get their fixed priced foodstuffs. Of course the manufacturers selling to that store would need fixed price ingredients which you would get from state run farms selling their crops at a set price. It is a silly ad nauseum sort of response but the kernel is accurate, you cannot successfully control one aspect of prices without somebody getting disadvantaged. Since you want more housing, the answer is to let people build more market rate housing, not to control rents.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  Since you want more housing... Trouble is what people really want is for nothing at all to change. Prices stay flat, no new housing is built, nobody gets evicted, no new people come to town. Sadly, since they want to have their cake and to eat it too, nobody seems to be approaching it from the POV of: We are up against an inexorable force of change; how do we channel that change in a way that is most acceptable? Instead they demand the impossible and lose all control of where that inexorable force is going to take them.
  - williamcotton 11y ago
    I know us programers have a proclivity towards binary thinking, but these people aren't arguing for a world without any change, just a way to decrease the volatility of a housing market that fluctuates beyond human scale. Humans are big, blundering slow moving beasts at the top of the food chain. It takes us years to settle in to new homes and communities and find our footings. Having rents double over just a few years is just too much for most people to handle. Call it "rent stabilization", not "rent control" and it makes more sense. The goal is to slow the rates of change and make sure things are happening at human scale. Real estate, contract law and marketplaces are all human constructions and we shouldn't let them get the best of us.
- fragsworth 11y ago
  Rent control is also something corrupt local politicians can do to increase the value of their own properties in the neighboring districts outside of where the rent is controlled, because the prices in those districts will go up even higher than they would have otherwise.
- dllthomas 11y ago
  In principle, you an end the regress at any point with subsidies. Ramifications are manifold, I've no idea if it's a good idea, and it's not what's being proposed, but it seems a potential way out of what you've described.
  - dllthomas 11y ago
    s/an/can/
- makeitsuckless 11y ago
  Price fixing can be indexed. Happens all the time in many countries with many things, like housing and benefits. Like the thread about trailer parks and poverty elsewhere on HN right now, these are solved problems. If you don't like the solution because it offends your ideologies, fine, but stop pretending certain solutions can't or won't work. They can and they do.
erispoe 11y ago
Housing can hardly be the poster child of free-market: there's a lot of information asymmetry, barriers to entry, it takes a lot of time, even in the best conditions, to get a project built... It's highly cyclical: supply can take years to even start to address demand, whereas projects can be killed very quickly when the economy goes down. This is why housing needs regulations if we want it to function properly. We need the right set of incentives to make sure we have housing for everyone. I fail to see, however, how actively restricting building, i.e. supply, is going to alleviate tensions in the market. Anti-development people use an argument that is very similar to "build it and they will come", only in reverse: if you don't build it, they won't come. Believing that they will be able to deplete demand by restricting supply.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  >I fail to see, however, how actively restricting building, i.e. supply, is going to alleviate tensions in the market. Anti-development people use an argument that is very similar to "build it and they will come", only in reverse: if you don't build it, they won't come. Believing that they will be able to deplete demand by restricting supply. Well, it keeps turning out that 80% of new housing construction targets the ultra-high-end luxury market. You would think this would push down the prices of lower-end housing through supply/demand, but then the luxury apartments get turned into ghost apartments for investment purposes, leaving even the high-income without a place to actually live, with the result that sometimes increased housing construction actually increases prices. And that's terrible.

by lnanek2 11y ago

ChuckMcM 11y ago

And that is the problem in a nutshell. Price fixing a single thing (in this case rents) means the market moves without those prices changing and that results in huge imbalances. Now if the NJ government funded a fixed rate building maintenance team you're family could use the price appropriate maintenance team to keep the building in repair, of course they could not pay them market wages (that is why maintenance costs more) so the people working for the maintenance group would have to go to the state run stores where they could get their fixed priced foodstuffs. Of course the manufacturers selling to that store would need fixed price ingredients which you would get from state run farms selling their crops at a set price. It is a silly ad nauseum sort of response but the kernel is accurate, you cannot successfully control one aspect of prices without somebody getting disadvantaged. Since you want more housing, the answer is to let people build more market rate housing, not to control rents.

sliverstorm 11y ago
Since you want more housing... Trouble is what people really want is for nothing at all to change. Prices stay flat, no new housing is built, nobody gets evicted, no new people come to town. Sadly, since they want to have their cake and to eat it too, nobody seems to be approaching it from the POV of: We are up against an inexorable force of change; how do we channel that change in a way that is most acceptable? Instead they demand the impossible and lose all control of where that inexorable force is going to take them.
- williamcotton 11y ago
  I know us programers have a proclivity towards binary thinking, but these people aren't arguing for a world without any change, just a way to decrease the volatility of a housing market that fluctuates beyond human scale. Humans are big, blundering slow moving beasts at the top of the food chain. It takes us years to settle in to new homes and communities and find our footings. Having rents double over just a few years is just too much for most people to handle. Call it "rent stabilization", not "rent control" and it makes more sense. The goal is to slow the rates of change and make sure things are happening at human scale. Real estate, contract law and marketplaces are all human constructions and we shouldn't let them get the best of us.
fragsworth 11y ago
Rent control is also something corrupt local politicians can do to increase the value of their own properties in the neighboring districts outside of where the rent is controlled, because the prices in those districts will go up even higher than they would have otherwise.
dllthomas 11y ago
In principle, you an end the regress at any point with subsidies. Ramifications are manifold, I've no idea if it's a good idea, and it's not what's being proposed, but it seems a potential way out of what you've described.
- dllthomas 11y ago
  s/an/can/
makeitsuckless 11y ago
Price fixing can be indexed. Happens all the time in many countries with many things, like housing and benefits. Like the thread about trailer parks and poverty elsewhere on HN right now, these are solved problems. If you don't like the solution because it offends your ideologies, fine, but stop pretending certain solutions can't or won't work. They can and they do.

erispoe 11y ago

Housing can hardly be the poster child of free-market: there's a lot of information asymmetry, barriers to entry, it takes a lot of time, even in the best conditions, to get a project built... It's highly cyclical: supply can take years to even start to address demand, whereas projects can be killed very quickly when the economy goes down. This is why housing needs regulations if we want it to function properly. We need the right set of incentives to make sure we have housing for everyone. I fail to see, however, how actively restricting building, i.e. supply, is going to alleviate tensions in the market. Anti-development people use an argument that is very similar to "build it and they will come", only in reverse: if you don't build it, they won't come. Believing that they will be able to deplete demand by restricting supply.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>I fail to see, however, how actively restricting building, i.e. supply, is going to alleviate tensions in the market. Anti-development people use an argument that is very similar to "build it and they will come", only in reverse: if you don't build it, they won't come. Believing that they will be able to deplete demand by restricting supply. Well, it keeps turning out that 80% of new housing construction targets the ultra-high-end luxury market. You would think this would push down the prices of lower-end housing through supply/demand, but then the luxury apartments get turned into ghost apartments for investment purposes, leaving even the high-income without a place to actually live, with the result that sometimes increased housing construction actually increases prices. And that's terrible.