361–370 of 724 posts
Every time we try to "improve" on the market "failures", we screw up. Because there is an universal law it seems: you f.ck with the free market, the free market f.cks with you.
> If the judges nix the legislation, lots of tenants in the formerly regulated sector could get hit by huge and even retroactive increases in their rents. Am I reading this correctly? So, these tenants might find themselves in thousands (maybe dozen of thousands) of euros of debt to their landlord. And I assume they'll be required to pay it up overnight? In this case, the politicians really screwed these "poor" peopl…
Yes. It even said so in the letter you get when the price was lowered. My rent was fairly 'overpriced' for the area so if it gets overturned I'll owe around 500e per month for every month that the law was in effect. Needless to say, most who lost their jobs and even many who didn't won't have the 5k or whatever it is in their case to give up suddenly. I guess if many of us find ourselves in debt here and can't rent b…
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Your technical analysis is correct as usual, but I agree with sologoub's comment[0], "That’s not success, that’s picking winners and losers." [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26316547
Markets pick winners and losers all the time. It's just that winners in market housing situations are always the people with the most money. It's difficult to make an argument that it's a more virtuous way to select winners, compared to 'the winners are the people who were here first'. Both are fundamentally unfair. Life, in general, isn't fair. Rent control doesn't exist to maximize overall virtue. It exists to mini…
That's because it's a strawman that you've constructed. Real debates involve consideration of the needs of people who can't find housing in heavily-regulated areas. Existing tenants aren't the only people worth considering. They just happen to be the people with the votes and the political power, so it's no surprise that local government focuses on their needs at the expense of everyone else.
In Oregon, they passed a statewide rent control. They pointed out repeatedly at how rent had gone up 30% over five years. 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.
It didn’t help much. Landlords could circumvent it in many ways: by offering contracts to new renters that automatically increase each year, which then isn’t bound to the limits. For existing tenants they could do bullshit renovations that trigger a modernization clause, also killing the limit. Or put an Ikea couch in the apartment, then renting it as furnished, again circumventing some of the rent limits. Sure you could sue, but in many cases people were just happy to finally find something and ate up the higher prices.
Although I’m positively affected by the latest rent control laws in Berlin, I’m also not totally sure what to make of it. But I wanted to let you know that this is by far not the first law that was passed to try to curb price increase.
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Yes. It even said so in the letter you get when the price was lowered. My rent was fairly 'overpriced' for the area so if it gets overturned I'll owe around 500e per month for every month that the law was in effect. Needless to say, most who lost their jobs and even many who didn't won't have the 5k or whatever it is in their case to give up suddenly. I guess if many of us find ourselves in debt here and can't rent b…
Is it me, or it is just irresponsible to push this through before it gets legally cleared. You basically endangered the finances of most renters in the city.
An issue that many commenters here are missing is that the problem with rent control will manifest more sharply in the future. 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 en…
I think you're missing a larger point: why should people be forced to move? There's no natural law that says people should be ceaselessly pushed around by market forces.
The result was that (my relatives in Italy told me) it suddenly became impossible to find masks anywhere.
Most producers decided to keep stock unsold hoping that the regulations would change in the future, and some smaller producer actually stopped production altogether or went out of business because it was no longer viable (source, in Italian) https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/mascherine-primi-espulsi-mer...
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Kicking people out of their homes doesn't solve the supply problem, because it doesn't create new housing. It just shuffles around who lives in existing houses. If you have a housing problem, and you want to solve it, you need to do two things. 1. Not kick people out of housing that they have. (Because it is incredibly disruptive to people's lives.) 2. Build new housing, until demand is met. Rent control accomplishes…
You can't do #2 without doing #1 - most in-demand land is already occupied and unused land is typically not worth developing (or doing so would cause environmental harm). In an all-owner-occupant suburb, this isn't so much of a problem: you're literally paying people lots of money to accept the disruption of having to move. However, in almost every other kind of housing arrangement, ownership over the building is sep…