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Oregon passed sweeping housing crisis laws

latimes.com

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Re: Oregon passed sweeping housing crisis laws

#71

Post by BurningFrog »

pchristensen wrote: post #45

Here’s an anti rent control argument I haven’t heard (this applies to stricter rent control regimes like NYC, SF - not sure about this new OR law). Getting a spot in a rent-controlled apartment is a valuable, non-transferable asset. If you buy a house and it gains $100,000 in equity, you can sell it and buy a bigger house, sell it and cash out while getting a smaller house, borrow against it. With a rent-control asse…

Your observation also highlights how rent control is institutionalized privilege.

Those who already have a home are given an ownership right to that status, while those without a home are being permanently excluded.

Re: Oregon passed sweeping housing crisis laws

#72

Post by verall »

bko wrote: post #52
wpietri wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, rent control will have the opposite effect of what Oregon thinks, and only make housing scarcity worse. It depends on the kind of rent control. Housing has important asymmetries it's reasonable to address through legislation. One is asymmetry in scale: you have one unit; landlords have many more. This gives them stronger negotiating power. Another is cost of change. It's much more expensive for me in…

> It depends on the kind of rent control. Housing has important asymmetries it's reasonable to address through legislation. One is asymmetry in scale: you have one unit; landlords have many more. Not necessarily true. Sure , the landlord knows more about the apartment but you know more about yourself as a tenant. Landlord takes a huge risk in terms of allowing someone rent, especially given protections afforded to th…

> Landlords also have an interest in the community as they own equity in that community that would appreciate if the neighborhood gets nicer.

Yes, but obviously people care most about the communities that they actually live in. "Absentee lords mainly want to extract cash" probably means that, as you say, a landlords interest in their community is related to their investment and the opportunity for the value to rise. People that actually live there have other interests, as the landlord does with the location they actually live. Someone renting out a room in their house or half of a duplex isn't absentee, and would have many non-profit interests in the local community. A landlord that lived a few hours away probably would not.

Re: Oregon passed sweeping housing crisis laws

#73

Post by jeffdavis »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #51
pchristensen wrote: post #45

Here’s an anti rent control argument I haven’t heard (this applies to stricter rent control regimes like NYC, SF - not sure about this new OR law). Getting a spot in a rent-controlled apartment is a valuable, non-transferable asset. If you buy a house and it gains $100,000 in equity, you can sell it and buy a bigger house, sell it and cash out while getting a smaller house, borrow against it. With a rent-control asse…

Great idea, I second that! Could there be a special marketplace for rent controlled places? Could allow people to swap with each other and/or use public servant status as a credit, to help teachers, firefighters, etc get living in very pricy districts.

If you want to help public servants, pay them more, don't give them special privileges.

Special privileges are anathema to equality under the law. When applied to government employees, it can start to get very bad quickly.

Re: Oregon passed sweeping housing crisis laws

#74

Post by TulliusCicero »

Misdicorl wrote: post #55
nickserv wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the density that makes urban areas unsafe, it's all the cars. A downtown pedestrian street is perfectly safe for kids to hang out and play. Neighbors, older kids and shopkeepers keep an eye out without being in helicopter mode. In the few cities I've been to that have banned vehicular traffic in downtown areas, you do see bunches of kids running around, as done for millennia.

Yes, vehicle traffic would be by far my #1 worry in high density areas.

With respect, you have it exactly backwards. It's the US, with its predominately low density, car-dominant building style that has vastly more traffic fatalities than higher-density Germany or Japan.

It's true that low-density SFH areas often seem more peaceful, but in practice cars there usually travel much faster than they do in higher-density neighborhoods, and it's speed that kills.

Re: Oregon passed sweeping housing crisis laws

#75

Post by gamblor956 »

boomlinde wrote: post #58
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Older buildings have all kinds of maintenance issues. Even if predictable, they're still an added expense, especially for major systems. Without allowing rental unit owners to pass those costs along to the renters, either the units will be taken off the rental market or they will be allowed to disintegrate over time until they're no longer habitable.

Combine it with laws that protect a decent standard for apartments and make it much harder to kick tenants out without a good reason. I.e. enforce basic tenants' protection instead of worrying about what incentives landlords have. It shouldn't matter whether the landlord wants to take a unit off the market if the tenants aren't willing or can't move. Then it lies on the landlord to create an incentive for tenants to…

You've literally just described LAs renters protections and tenants rights organisations in a nutshell...

Re: Oregon passed sweeping housing crisis laws

#76

Post by TulliusCicero »

kryogen1c wrote: post #12
s_Hogg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the desirability of homes in single family neighbourhoods inconsistent with the fact that they tend towards creating haves and have-nots in the market for housing?

The definition of a market is haves and have-nots. Saying that building expensive things is segragation is thinly veiled strict socialism. What's the alternative, everyone is forced to live in the same housing? You can't force cheap apartments in nice neighborhoods, those neighborhoods will become not nice. Thats how rent control works

> The definition of a market is haves and have-nots.

Sure, but we're talking about government force, not the market.

It's one thing if the market creates SFH-only neighborhoods, but why should the government be enforcing that as law?

Re: Oregon passed sweeping housing crisis laws

#77

Post by pbourke »

spoonie wrote: post #48
kryogen1c wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of a market is haves and have-nots. Saying that building expensive things is segragation is thinly veiled strict socialism. What's the alternative, everyone is forced to live in the same housing? You can't force cheap apartments in nice neighborhoods, those neighborhoods will become not nice. Thats how rent control works

I should be able to build whatever I want on my private property. Whether it’s a house or an apartment building.

And I assume that you’d be fine with your neighbour doing the same, irrespective of the impact on the value and enjoyment of your property?

Re: Oregon passed sweeping housing crisis laws

#78

Post by Misdicorl »

bastawhiz wrote: post #62
Misdicorl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can this really be tied to "white flight"? I think you make a compelling point, but white flight also happens to suburbs- which I guess is also part of your point. I don't know the reasons and history of suburb development. It seems to me that it should have a lot to do with the commoditization of fast travel costs, and its simply that rich white people were first able to take advantage. If socioeconomic status weren…

There's a difference between "moving to a single family home" and "preventing my neighborhood from becoming high density". I don't care how many people live in SFUs so long as it's not illegal to build higher density buildings.

But I think there are rational, non-racist reasons to want to prevent your neighborhood from becoming high density.

Re: Oregon passed sweeping housing crisis laws

#79

Post by verall »

BurningFrog wrote: post #61
wpietri wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, rent control will have the opposite effect of what Oregon thinks, and only make housing scarcity worse. It depends on the kind of rent control. Housing has important asymmetries it's reasonable to address through legislation. One is asymmetry in scale: you have one unit; landlords have many more. This gives them stronger negotiating power. Another is cost of change. It's much more expensive for me in…

> One is asymmetry in scale: you have one unit; landlords have many more. This gives them stronger negotiating power. This is one of those theoretical arguments that sounds good but have no empirical foundation at all. If it was true the gigantic Walmart could completely dick me around when buying socks and toilet paper. In reality prices are very competitive. It also completely ignores that fact that most landlords…

What?

Landlords do dick around with prices on small business owners, and Walmart has the scale to not get dicked around with. This is just another thing that helps them to be exceptionally competitive in pricing their goods.

The GP was talking about real estate and it doesn't have much to do with how competitive socks and toilet paper are.

Re: Oregon passed sweeping housing crisis laws

#80

Post by leetcrew »

s_Hogg wrote: post #14
kryogen1c wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of a market is haves and have-nots. Saying that building expensive things is segragation is thinly veiled strict socialism. What's the alternative, everyone is forced to live in the same housing? You can't force cheap apartments in nice neighborhoods, those neighborhoods will become not nice. Thats how rent control works

I accept that, but policy seems to enforce single family home neighbourhoods in many places. This exacerbates the problem of haves and have-nots in the housing market. I'm not in the "ban SFH neighbourhoods" camp, but I think we shouldn't have as much of a problem with them becoming denser. Particularly not when the people already living there tend to have the chance to be well-compensated by selling to developers if…

> Particularly not when the people already living there tend to have the chance to be well-compensated by selling to developers if they want.

the developers have a significant amount of leverage in this situation. if they can build one large apartment building in a low-density sfh neighborhood, they can take a significant chunk of value off all the neighboring homes. if they can secure land to build several large buildings, they can seriously devalue these homes. when they start looking to buy property for the nth building, the homeowner isn't going to get anything close to the original value.

as a society, we should never have allowed this situation to happen in the first place, but now that we have, it's not going to be easy to solve. until you get to pretty high percentiles of wealth, homes tend to be a large fraction of a family's net worth. to suddenly remove the zoning would be a pretty big hit for these people; a lot of them could get upside-down on their mortgages.

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