151–160 of 724 posts
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>So you are replacing landlords with people who actually live there. ...who are now saddled with decades of mortgage payments, and have a high percentage of their net worth being tied up in a not very well diversified asset class.
But you are buying an asset instead of just paying rent.
Sure, the impact today seems relatively equitable: a windfall for people that rent today coupled with a small drop in supply.
But fast forward 10 or 20 years and the situation looks far worse: everyone who got a windfall today is still living in the same apartment, whereas anyone trying to enter the rental market is utterly SOL. The people that are really getting screwed are 10 years old today: when they try to move out of Mom and Dad's they will enter a market with vastly reduced supply since nobody has any incentive to move.
This is why if you're 19 you can't afford to live in Manhattan: you're either old (and lucky) or rich.
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Rationing bread would increase the number of people who have some bread. Regulating the price to a point well below the free market supply/demand driven price causes a decrease in the amount of bread supplied to the market (and probably increase hoarding/decrease the breadth of distribution). Think back to toilet paper shortages last spring. Rationing was arguably the best move (and was what local markets around me d…
Rental properties are inherently rationed by the fact that there is no reason to rent more than one flat in the same city.
Yes why build an apartment in Berlin if they will just inevitably move the date for rent controlled buildings forward eventually.
I don't know... maybe because you need an apartment for yourself, and you now can afford to actually buy the lot because you do not have to compete with investors expecting a dividend of 20% on their investment?
Why not get rid of greedy farmers so people can grow potatoes in their backyard? Why this longing to re-implement the failed policies of East Germany? Is it nostalgia for police states and shortages?
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Once the evil rich pigs have lots of bread, more than even they can eat, do they then not start using it to purchase labor from the starving poor?
No, they use it to buy lands, resources, mercenaries to get more land and to keep the status quo. I suppose if you are a mercenary you will be fine (as long as your head is not split in 2)
Sorry folks, the correct answer is: it’s a real estate bubble. And deregulation is not going to help with that.
We all lived through 2008, didn’t we? We’ve seen this before. It shouldn’t be a big mystery. Speculation drives real estate prices, real estate prices drive rents. Government intervention is necessary to break the cycle.
The goal of rent control - or more accurately rent stabilization - should be to smooth out fluctuations in rent over time, not to create a class of housing stuck below market in perpetuity. Most of what people object to about rent control isn't the attempt to stop families form suffering wild rent increases that can destabilize entire neighborhoods/workforces, but rather to smooth out those increases to give families…
Berlin specifically wanted something more.
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I agree, although the toilet paper situation was a bit different IMO because the shortage wasn't in the supply chain -- it was absolutely clear that inventories would restock sooner or later. In that situation, higher prices wouldn't have incentivized more production. Still, supermarkets could have temporarily raised prices 10x and still sold their inventory. Why didn't more of them do it? Presumably, they made the r…
I think this is part of the nuance: we've gotten ourselves into such a bind with housing in so many places that it feels like we need the short term, crisis relief that rent control provides. For some people, it absolutely means not being kicked out into the streets. Go tell that mom and her kids about 'the market'. Yet at the same time, markets, supply and demand are real, and we need to bring them back into balance…
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Unclear on how claimed price controls would ensure equitable distribution of bread. Why is the price of bread being capped making it so that more people get bread? If I’m rich and the price of bread is artificially low, maybe I’ll just buy up even more bread and now fewer people get bread.
Because you can define the cap so e.g. it only applies for one apartment per person, so you can't use it to get multiple ones cheap.
What if my nephew from another town moves in to live, it becomes tight… are they eligible too?
There are plenty of places in the world where real estate was/is rationed or distributed, and they all end up having very similar social distortions.
The solution, is that now landlords can only increase rent 7% (plus inflation) per year. This year, its something like 9%.
Apparently, someone forgot to figure out what >7% per year for 5 years is..... Its 40%, before the inflation numbers are added in.