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“Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

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Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#601

Post by wpietri »

marak830 wrote: post #599
toomuchtodo wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They should realize that not everyone can live in a good area of the city. A city, by its structure, has a center and periphery. The good zones are good by relation to the other zones, otherwise, space is just space. So, valuable property will always be limited in quantity. And who lives in the good parts of a city should not be determined solely by the depth of their pockets.

Why? Isnt this the free market at work? Allowing the people who work the hardest for it (of course this always the case, but you get my point), to choose their place of residence.

Markets are mechanisms we use to accomplish goals. They are not ends in themselves. They are certainly not universal moral guides. If you think in this case a market is the best mechanism to achieve a particular social goal, you'll have to make the case.

If we were to give houses to the people who worked hardest, every single immigrant construction worker I have met would get the houses, and comfortable office-dwellers like me would be out of luck.

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#602

Post by foobarqux »

Kalium wrote: post #454
foobarqux wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing prices and displacing people from their homes has an obvious effect on the local labor market, which is an externality.

Given that they are displaced by other people, presumably with higher incomes and skill levels, I'm not sure how obvious an effect that is.

A city's inhabitants aren't fungible even in SF and in any case replacing employees costs a company a lot of money.

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#603

Post by clarky07 »

wpietri wrote: post #243
clarky07 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 - first, so what? second, nobody needs to live "there". They can move to a different rental. 2 - moving isn't "that" expensive. It's a pain in the ass, but you can do it in a weekend with a few hundred dollar moving truck. You might be able to raise rates a few percent, but you can't just move them significantly above market.

> It's a pain in the ass, but you can do it in a weekend with a few hundred dollar moving truck. Let me guess: no kids, haven't lived in your place very long, don't know your neighbors, don't have family nearby, don't live in a city with substantial pressure on housing, and you make over the median income. > You might be able to raise rates a few percent, but you can't just move them significantly above market. That…

Let's see. I moved last summer, from a place I lived in for seven years. Check. I'm married, kid on the way, I knew my neighbors, and I have family nearby. You were so close. (I do make over the median income, so you did get that one.)

If your landlord raises their rates to double the market value, move. If you don't, that just means you're doing it wrong.

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#604

Post by wpietri »

clarky07 wrote: post #603
wpietri wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a pain in the ass, but you can do it in a weekend with a few hundred dollar moving truck. Let me guess: no kids, haven't lived in your place very long, don't know your neighbors, don't have family nearby, don't live in a city with substantial pressure on housing, and you make over the median income. > You might be able to raise rates a few percent, but you can't just move them significantly above market. That…

Let's see. I moved last summer, from a place I lived in for seven years. Check. I'm married, kid on the way, I knew my neighbors, and I have family nearby. You were so close. (I do make over the median income, so you did get that one.) If your landlord raises their rates to double the market value, move. If you don't, that just means you're doing it wrong.

So you're telling me that in one weekend with one truck, you packed everything for a family, moved it, unpacked it, and had total expenses of a few hundred bucks? Congrats on being a minimalist. When I see most people do it, though, they take a couple of months of spare time to prep and months more to get everything situated and recover.

Yes, sure, if the rent is doubled, one should probably move despite the hassle. But the point is that landlords can take advantage of the asymmetry in cost/difficulty of changing places to hike rents. Nobody would move because the landlord was charging them $1/yr above what they could pay elsewhere. Most would move if it were double. The landlord's advantage is somewhere in between.

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#605

Post by toomuchtodo »

marak830 wrote: post #599
toomuchtodo wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They should realize that not everyone can live in a good area of the city. A city, by its structure, has a center and periphery. The good zones are good by relation to the other zones, otherwise, space is just space. So, valuable property will always be limited in quantity. And who lives in the good parts of a city should not be determined solely by the depth of their pockets.

Why? Isnt this the free market at work? Allowing the people who work the hardest for it (of course this always the case, but you get my point), to choose their place of residence.

/u/wpietri answered this better than I.

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#606

Post by q2 »

bbarn wrote: post #441

The reason this article is trending at the top of HN is the reason this person is going through this. The idea that great start-ups must exist on an 47 sq mile piece of land with utterly mediocre weather (the literal definition of mediocre, that is - one many of us love, myself included) in perfect coexistence with a quaint aging population below the poverty line, drug addicts, and the last generation that sought to…

>>> Why so many globally reaching, internet based, in every home in the world companies think that they absolutely must be positioned in the mecca of startupdom

Why people join twitter or facebook or any other virtual social network? I think both have similar answers.

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#607

Post by fhf »

There seems to be a lot of discussion in this topic around the idea that "IF San Francisco did away with rent control, THEN the market would correct the problem."

Given that SF hasn't had rent control since 1980 (it only applies to buildings constructed before that), and the market has thus had 25 years to correct, which of the following is true:

1. There is no housing problem 2. Removing rent control didn't make a difference.

I'm actually curious to know the opinion of people blaming rent control...

(edit: typo)

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#608

Post by simoncion »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #594
simoncion wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rental housing (like garbage collection) is only efficient when there is more than enough housing (or memory) available to meet demand (of tenants, or of the garbage collection machinery). In obscenely undersupplied cities like SF, rents become absurdly high very, very fast. Case in point. In 1998 (At about the height of the Dot Com bubble) a one-bedroom apartment in my building rented out for ~$500/month. In 2010 (W…

> In obscenely undersupplied cities like SF, rents become absurdly high very, very fast. That's what an efficient market is supposed to do. The high price then encourages the construction of more housing. There isn't enough supply because of rent control and other regulations that discourage or outright prohibit the construction of new or higher density housing. The market is doing exactly what an efficient market is…

Rent control isn't the source of the undersupply in SF.

Restrictions on new construction (both legal and social) are the source of the undersupply in the city.

Do you live in SF? If you did, you would know that in the few new residential buildings that have been constructed, rents are somewhere between $3000 and $4000 per bedroom. What developer could possibly refuse that income? Do you think that rent control is driving rents in newly construction apartments that high? Likewise, do you think that -with rental rates like that- developers are failing to build new stock because of existing rent controlled stock in SF?

As an aside, if you didn't know how rent control works in SF, here's a quick intro. Buildings built before 1979 and rented as residential housing are covered by rent control. No other buildings -unless (as is happening in Trinity Place on Market Street) the landlord enters into a special agreement with his tenants- are covered by rent control. This means that new construction is NOT covered by rent control.

Because new construction is not covered by the rent control ordinances, in a market with extreme undersupply, like SF's, there is no economic reason for a developer not to build new housing stock.

Have you been enlightened? :)

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#609

Post by marak830 »

wpietri wrote: post #601
marak830 wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Isnt this the free market at work? Allowing the people who work the hardest for it (of course this always the case, but you get my point), to choose their place of residence.

Markets are mechanisms we use to accomplish goals. They are not ends in themselves. They are certainly not universal moral guides. If you think in this case a market is the best mechanism to achieve a particular social goal, you'll have to make the case. If we were to give houses to the people who worked hardest, every single immigrant construction worker I have met would get the houses, and comfortable office-dwelle…

I certainly cant argue with that, but wouldnt the people buying them be the hard workers in industries that reward them for that work (the reward values are a whole different issue imo).

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#610

Post by BurningFrog »

aceperry wrote: post #466
tptacek wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better way for him to have put it would have been: "Just like the Indiana state legislature can't by statute declare pi to be 3.14, San Francisco cannot repeal the law of supply and demand". Rent control or not, the law of supply and demand still applies; it just expresses itself in more dysfunctional and unproductive ways. That's the problem with rent control. Reasonable people can disagree about whether the publi…

"Rent control or not, the law of supply and demand still applies... or about whether rent control works. It doesn't work." Without rent control, I'm pretty sure that a LOT more people would be pushed out of San Francisco. It seems to me that places like San Francisco, New York, and a few other places are not typical of what other areas experience. I know it's fashionable amongst the libertarian set to blame problems…

> Without rent control, I'm pretty sure that a LOT more people would be pushed out of San Francisco.

Are you saying you think fewer people would live in SF without rent control?

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