Rent control fundamentally cannot work, which is why it never works. Malicious noncompliance is a red herring.
In practise, I've yet to see anything working that doesn't make rentals either scarce or prohibitively expensive.
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Rent control fundamentally cannot work, which is why it never works. Malicious noncompliance is a red herring.
In practise, I've yet to see anything working that doesn't make rentals either scarce or prohibitively expensive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe this is the hack for managing city growth
Why do you want successful cities to stop growing? Especially ones that have zero desire to stop attracting employers. Offices take up very little space so if you let developers build commercial real estate you will always have a mismatch between housing and jobs if you stop building residential real estate. This will displace lower income people in the end and lead to gentrification rather than a stop to growth.
It's hard to increase transportation infrastructure in a built-up area. And when you do, everybody says it didn't work because traffic is still bad or trains are still overfull. But they never notice that population increased during construction. If you could stop growth, then your transportation needs stabilize.
Doesn't really feel fair to me though, because it's so hard to move into the closed city.
Personally, I'm a fan of limiting rent increases to a max of something like 5-10% per year. Not so much that it's a total hardship to deal with a max increase; not so little that landlords have to do max increases every year or get way off market; also not so little that a landlord can't catch up later if they purposefully lag on increases to keep a preferred tenant.
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It can and does work in many places. Whole cities like Stockholm mostly consist of rent-controlled apartments which have same rents paid since WWII era, which now amount to almost nothing. It creates awful social distortions and indirect costs, but it certainly does work.
I'm sure it works for the residents of Stockholm, but not so much for all sorts of people who would move to Stockholm but can't wait in line 10 years for an apartment.
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These kinds of things are side-effects of "tenant's rights" laws. Some may consider it the end-goal, to be fair - as eventually you'd drive landlords completely out of business. The problem is that this is antithetical to higher density, because you need landlords of some form if you have anything denser than a duplex. You can have condos perhaps, but not everyone can afford to get into one, or even wants to. And if…
> you need landlords of some form if you have anything denser than a duplex Why? What value do they provide, other than having a bunch of money upfront? I’d argue there are many, many ways to fund building construction other than for-profit ownership
Providing capital is useful! You can't just ignore that.
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This doesn't answer how you got the apartment, which is invariably either luck, knowing someone, or having rich parents (in which case you can buy one of those income-controlled units that make zero sense for anyone except a nepo-baby -- e.g. need to earn I also had a time in a rent-stabilized apartment in NYC (East Village, probably not far from yours) and the answer of how I got it: luck. It happened to be availabl…
read the last paragraph ...
New report dropped recently that vacancy rates there are like 2% or less. That is far, far below healthy levels. NYC needs more housing, as does much of the US in places where the jobs are.
New report dropped recently that vacancy rates there are like 2% or less. That is far, far below healthy levels. NYC needs more housing, as does much of the US in places where the jobs are.
1.4%. And yes, it is clearly unhealthy and indicates a lack of supply. https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/007-24/new-york-city-s-vac...
A huge fee in order to start paying rent to an 'owner'? This whole deal has very much jumped the shark.
What does one have to do to secure a $1100 a month apartment in NYC? I'm sure everyone else wants it. Get drawn from a rental lottery at random? Offer your first born child? Supplement your rent with sexual favors to the landlord?
It was an older apartment with newly renovated kitchen and bathroom, albeit small. The brokers fee was something like $3000(thought this was ridiculous).
At the time I also found a similarly priced apartment but at last minute for some reason it was pulled the broker said.
I don't think any amount of searching can find such deals now.