6 ms·

Rent control has been tried in so many different American cities and by and large is considered a failure in any city it is implemented. I would love to see a c

Rent control has been tried in so many different American cities and by and large is considered a failure in any city it is implemented. I would love to see a city try a radically different tactic. Minneapolis requires a certain amount of low and middle income housing in any suburb. NYC is giving large tax credits for middle class housing and is considering a pied-à-terre tax. Simply expanding rent control seems to just be pushing the problem off farther into the future.

neokya 11y ago
Looks like encouraging new construction is part of the package as pointed by a Reddit user here https://www.reddit.com/r/berlin/comments/3871ik/berlin_becomes_first_german_city_to_make_rent_cap/ https://www.reddit.com/r/berlin/comments/3871ik/berlin_becom... That new constructions are excluded from rent control. Thing is I can't really find this in German media. Only British media seems to write gist of this new regulation, which seems quite odd.
- pgeorgi 11y ago
  http://www.faz.net/aktuell/finanzen/meine-finanzen/mieten-und-wohnen/die-mietpreisbremse-feiert-ihr-debuet-heute-in-berlin-13618860.html http://www.faz.net/aktuell/finanzen/meine-finanzen/mieten-un... mentions it.
timr 11y ago
"Rent control has been tried in so many different American cities and by and large is considered a failure in any city it is implemented" [citation needed] I think what you meant to say is that rent control is widely considered a failure by certain rich people who want to maximize their profit-seeking behavior without regard to societal cost, and economists of particular ideologies, who generally are unable prove their claims about real-world rent-control systems. Most other people like it, which is why it sticks around. The people who complain about rent control in San Francisco, for example, have yet to provide evidence that it's doing anything but lowering prices here. There's a lot of heat in this debate, but very little light.
- mpyne 11y ago
  > There's a lot of heat in this debate, but very little light. An ironic statement given the 3 paragraphs that preceded it...
- tptacek 11y ago
  Well, rich people and economists. Here, let's ask Paul Krugman: The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ''a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'' Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go -- and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable. Bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out -- what yesterday's article oddly described as ''free-market horror stories'' -- and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies? Predictable. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-affair.html http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-... But, of course: Paul Krugman. Rich dude maximizing profit-seeking behavior.
  - timr 11y ago
    That's, as usual, a critique of something completely unrelated to real-world rent-control. Ignoring the fact that your counter-evidence is a survey, "a ceiling on rents" doesn't accurately describe any of the existing rent control schemes, which do allow rents to rise, and attempt to control only the rate of growth. So this is a straw man. Most economists, when asked about rent control, default back to the one thing they know: price caps are bad. That's obvious. They don't agree to nearly the same extent when you ask them about the policies that actually exist. The more ideological economists then try to assert that all price manipulation is bad...usually without evidence of any sort. Krugman's thinking is so sloppy here that it's a joke. He "didn't know anything" about SF housing until the day before he wrote the article, and it shows -- how can he plausibly claim that he knows that the rental bubble of the late 90s was due to rent control, when the region was the historic center of one of the largest economic bubbles of the 20th century? He couldn't know, and didn't know. The tech bubble popped, the money went away, and the rental crisis ended. This one will end the same way. The high-order bit here is the tidal wave of new money, not the rent-controlled tenants that are drowning in the flood.

neokya 11y ago

Looks like encouraging new construction is part of the package as pointed by a Reddit user here https://www.reddit.com/r/berlin/comments/3871ik/berlin_becomes_first_german_city_to_make_rent_cap/ https://www.reddit.com/r/berlin/comments/3871ik/berlin_becom... That new constructions are excluded from rent control. Thing is I can't really find this in German media. Only British media seems to write gist of this new regulation, which seems quite odd.

pgeorgi 11y ago
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/finanzen/meine-finanzen/mieten-und-wohnen/die-mietpreisbremse-feiert-ihr-debuet-heute-in-berlin-13618860.html http://www.faz.net/aktuell/finanzen/meine-finanzen/mieten-un... mentions it.

timr 11y ago

"Rent control has been tried in so many different American cities and by and large is considered a failure in any city it is implemented" [citation needed] I think what you meant to say is that rent control is widely considered a failure by certain rich people who want to maximize their profit-seeking behavior without regard to societal cost, and economists of particular ideologies, who generally are unable prove their claims about real-world rent-control systems. Most other people like it, which is why it sticks around. The people who complain about rent control in San Francisco, for example, have yet to provide evidence that it's doing anything but lowering prices here. There's a lot of heat in this debate, but very little light.

mpyne 11y ago
> There's a lot of heat in this debate, but very little light. An ironic statement given the 3 paragraphs that preceded it...
tptacek 11y ago
Well, rich people and economists. Here, let's ask Paul Krugman: The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ''a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'' Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go -- and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable. Bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out -- what yesterday's article oddly described as ''free-market horror stories'' -- and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies? Predictable. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-affair.html http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-... But, of course: Paul Krugman. Rich dude maximizing profit-seeking behavior.
- timr 11y ago
  That's, as usual, a critique of something completely unrelated to real-world rent-control. Ignoring the fact that your counter-evidence is a survey, "a ceiling on rents" doesn't accurately describe any of the existing rent control schemes, which do allow rents to rise, and attempt to control only the rate of growth. So this is a straw man. Most economists, when asked about rent control, default back to the one thing they know: price caps are bad. That's obvious. They don't agree to nearly the same extent when you ask them about the policies that actually exist. The more ideological economists then try to assert that all price manipulation is bad...usually without evidence of any sort. Krugman's thinking is so sloppy here that it's a joke. He "didn't know anything" about SF housing until the day before he wrote the article, and it shows -- how can he plausibly claim that he knows that the rental bubble of the late 90s was due to rent control, when the region was the historic center of one of the largest economic bubbles of the 20th century? He couldn't know, and didn't know. The tech bubble popped, the money went away, and the rental crisis ended. This one will end the same way. The high-order bit here is the tidal wave of new money, not the rent-controlled tenants that are drowning in the flood.