Huh, funny how this always happens...
Something about those who refuse to study history are doomed to repeat it.
Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets
431–440 of 724 posts
Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rent control only exists for one reason: to keep tenants in their apartments. It's not a tool that is solving a shortage of housing but lots of politicians will insist that new housing isn't needed. You just need to manipulate the useful fiction that is the market and fake everything. At least that's what the politicians think. Even if it means that the market is no longer useful.
Rent control, when coupled with other means of ensuring housing is built for those that can afford it, is a reasonable way of ensuring housing for those that can't afford it at the market price. That is, globally applying a cap on rents would be a bad idea, since there would be no incentive to build new housing. However, when coupled with restrictions such as requiring only some fraction of new housing construction t…
> Imo we should just solve this issue once and for all by supplying government housing to anyone at a low price, but there seems to be little political will for that.
Where would that end? If you always build more to accommodate any poor or homeless people, they'll come from other cities to enjoy the cheap housing.
Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there was no rent control, why didn't he just raise the price up to market value when your lease came up for renewal? I live in a city without rent control, and your experience is entirely foreign to me. Heck, my current landlord has offered to pay for things that I don't think are even really his responsibility. He's just happy to have good tenants paying market rate. Switching tenants will probably cost a few th…
Because of something called vacancy control. You can't raise rents on people in a unit. You could raise the rent of an empty unit to market rate (in Berkeley, in the 90's after rent control was changed). EDIT: changed word "defeated" to "changed"
To add more context, only a few cities (Berkeley, Santa Monica) had strong rent control with vacancy control in the 1980s and 1990s. Other cities, such as San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles, had rent control but have always allowed the rent to reset to market rate when the unit is vacant.
The California Law called Costa-Hawkins phased out vacancy control in all cities from 1995 to 1999. After 1999, landlords have the right to set the initial rent, overriding local vacancy controls. (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...)
In Nov 2018, California voters rejected Proposition 10 41%-59%, which would have repealed Costa-Hawkins and allowed vacancy controls again (https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_10,_Local_Ren...). Berkeley, Richmond, and Santa Monica would immediately have imposed vacancy controls under their existing laws.
In Nov 2020, California voters again rejected Proposition 21 40%-60%, which would have allowed vacancy controls that limit rent increases to 15% per vacancy (https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_21,_Local_Ren...).
Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
| for those who are not actually displaced, yes. Yes, exactly. | But the ones that are displaced are often essentially banished Without it they would have been displaced even earlier. Speculative bubbles exist outside of rent control, especially in the US where rent control is never all that strong or comprehensive.
I take a very SFBA perspective here, but... > Without it they would have been displaced even earlier This is mostly hypothetical. In functioning housing markets that don't manipulate prices or limit new construction through policy, speculative bubbles make little sense -- why would housing become more expensive if it's easy to build lots of it? The argument that removing just rent control would make folks worse off -…
| I take a very SFBA perspective here
I don't know how useful an SFBA perspective is, given that area is dealing with factors that very, very few other places in America are: Namely, an historic single industry boom and a lack of expansion area. The only real comparable place in America is Manhattan.
Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets
#435There is no reason why housing cannot be much much cheaper than it is now -- so cheap that it is nearly free. Larry Page, in an interview in 2014 discussed how. "Rather than exceeding $1m, there’s no reason why the median home in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, shouldn’t cost $50,000" [1] and attributed this entirely to a policy problem. The answer is continuously increasing supply in a manner that outpace…
> shouldn’t cost $50,000
To me that makes no sense. Cheaper than the midwest? The whole world would want to move there.
Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets
#436The situation in Berlin before the policy change was that the city government had made it very hard to build apartments at all. Each time a project it developed, the developer is blackmailed into supporting various unrelated policies, being it parking space related, maximum stories, etc., and sometimes capriciously denied permission to build. This is how my green-leaning, government-trusting architect friends describ…
I moved to Berlin two years ago and the finding a house was incredibly exhausting. As the article mentions, there are two categories, rent capped apartments and non rent capped apartments. For the first category, there are 2000+ applicants per day per apartment, making it impossible to actually have a chance to get the apartment. The odds getting that apartment as a foreigner that do not speak German is non existent,…
> stupid amounts of rent for small apartments (1100 - 1200 cold rent for 50sqm
Wow that's cheap, London you'd pay double or triple that.
Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets
#437An 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…
A counterexample is Vienna, which utilizes a well balanced system of rent-control and social housing to have incredibly low rents and still a stable supply of flats. One tweak they apply is that rent-control does not apply to new developments, so creating new flats is more lucrative than turning old buildings into luxury developments. The city also acts as a competitor, driving prices down by offering cheap flats. Th…
FYI, rents in Vienna are not "incredibly low". From someone who has rented there.
Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets
#438Surely this is good. The long term inhabitants get to stay at a cheap rate, the newcomers have to pay a premium. NYC works in a similar way.
The only difference is new construction, are new buildings controlled as well or free to charge whatever?
Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ellis act Owner movein is for moving yourself or a relative into the unit so you can live in it. Condo conversion is separate from Ellis act and Owner* Move in, it has to do with splitting off units to sell them independently, for example turning a TIC into a condo. Units that have been Ellised* or Owner Occupied* find it much more difficult to do a condo conversion, as there are laws about how long you need to wait…
Ellis Act is different than Owner Move-In (which covers family members too). Ellis Act, named after the law, was created as the govt can’t compel you to rent - you have the right to remove your home from the rental market. ” The Ellis Act (California Government Code Chapter 12.75)[1] is a 1985 California state law that allows landlords to evict residential tenants to "go out of the rental business" in spite of desire…
You are correct! I mixed up the Owner movein and Ellis. Thanks.
https://andysirkin.com/tenancy-in-common-tic/san-francisco-r...
Re: Rent controls have split housing in Berlin into two distinct markets
#440American and European urbanites need to become comfortable with Chinese and Japanese style mega cities or their urban areas will always be unaffordable. Chinese and Japanese cities are affordable for everyone because they build! They build as much as they need to in order to fit everyone into the city. We don't do that here so cities are for rich people.
> Chinese and Japanese cities are affordable
uh Chinese apartments are super expensive and you dont even get to own the land. Japan was super expensive but is now affordable since the bubble popped and the population started shrinking.
Berlin's population is growing quickly so doesn't have much to do with Japan.