“Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900” • Hacker News Board

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

#621

Post by kelnos » Tue, Mar 17, 2015, 9:19 AM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #573

kelnos wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that person's ability to move to SF hinges on someone else getting kicked out of their home and city, then no, I don't care about that person. But I'd rather be able to care about both people. I'd rather SF's planning process wasn't so idiotic that it's impossible to build at the rate we need to in order to house everyone who wants to live here, at whatever economic level. I'd rather that rent control hadn't helpe…

So, your answer is to assert privilege - they were there first, so they deserve it more, go fuck off. What's been noted repeatedly across history is that rent control tends strongly to encourage a culture of NIMBYIsm. Rent control has contributed heavily to creating the current situation and its persistence increases the political resistance to building more housing. Have you not noticed the routine grumbling about e…

But right now? Rent control has created a witch's brew for political stasis. That's what you wanted, right? To enable privilege for people who are deserving by virtue of living in sufficiently old housing?

Not at all. But that's what we have now. It's easy to say "we shouldn't have done it this way", but simply removing tenant protections isn't going to solve the problem: it's just going to put all the power in the hands of landlords and builders... and of course they're going to abuse that power.

Existing rent control[1] isn't causing a lack of building. A city-enforced lack of building is causing a lack of building. Both the city planning committee and the NIMBY crowd just don't want things to change. On that, I completely agree with you.

Couple that with moralizing about how profit margins need to be razor-thin to be morally acceptable, and the scenarios you imagine are ones in which no developer is willing to work.

It's give and take. I'm not advocating for razor-thin profit margins, and I'm getting a little weary of you suggesting that my position is that the only alternative to the crazy rent increases are no rent increases at all. There has to be a happy medium somewhere, where landlords can increase their profit without driving people out.

[1] For the record, I am not in favor of expanding rent control, but I do believe we're at least temporarily stuck with the rent control we have now. Killing the existing rent control without first drastically increasing the housing supply (coupled with finding a way to allow landlords to raise rents without requiring that their tenants move away) would absolutely destroy lower-income renters.

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

#622

Post by vsl » Tue, Mar 17, 2015, 3:42 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #17

jackowayed wrote: post #3

If you read the caption, the real issue here is a horrible abuse of the rent control law. When the renter signed their lease, the unit was covered by rent control, putting very tight restrictions on rent increases and evictions. However, the landlord then essentially destroyed the other unit in the building so that they could reclassify the building as a single-family home instead of a multi-unit building. Single-fam…

OTOH, how much can you restrict the property owner? What if the other unit needed to be knocked down for a reason other than to get rid of rent control? Would it be OK for the law to tell the owner to fix it some other way? What if both units were destroyed in a natural disaster and a new structure had to be built from nothing? Is that still rent-controlled? Also, is rent control even a good idea? In the short term,…

> Also, is rent control even a good idea?

Let me put it this way: the rents dropped sharply when rent regulation finally ended in my country. After 15 years of doomsayer horror stories from the left how unregulated rents would make the poor homeless, it turned out, within a year, that the exact opposite was happening.

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

#623

Post by zobzu » Tue, Mar 17, 2015, 7:29 PM UTC

charlesdm wrote: post #544

zobzu wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it actually sounds fair, doesn't it?

Sarcasm? How does that sound fair for the owner. Not being able to rent out your apartment for 5(!) years is ridiculous.

then dont stop renting it... sounds like the buyer should have guaranteed cash cows.. well, bad luck, guaranteed cash cows are NOT fair.

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

#624

Post by tarblog » Tue, Mar 17, 2015, 7:36 PM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #593

jusben1369 wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem here is assuming terms like stable and volatile equate to better and worse. A lack of rent controls will definitely result in price changes occurring based on supply and demand and therefore much more frequently than with controls. So in that respect they're more "volatile" At the same time that market is much healthier because the prices are transparent and all economic agents can act rationally…

The claim was that markets without stabilization eventually stabilize. However, from what I've read, the markets studied continue to be more stochastic for the long term. I really think you should look into the research. There's a lot of tested hypothesis and survey analysis in them. We tend to not treat economics like a science - as if our general education is enough to have an informed opinion. We certainly don't d…

I've never heard it claimed that getting rid of rent control was a way to stabilize the housing market until this thread. I have heard that rent control creates severe housing shortages, insane competition for existing apartments (like having a renter's resume in SF), and lower quality housing for everyone. To me, it seems you've defeated a strawman.

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

#625

Post by gcb0 » Tue, Mar 17, 2015, 7:57 PM UTC

balls187 wrote: post #162

gcb0 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i take it you are under 25 and never have to move a family into a rental house? when you do that, i'd love to see your opinion then about living in a place where every month you need to set aside a weekend to find a plan-b place just in case your rent jump to a price you can't afford next month.

> when you do that, i'd love to see your opinion then about living in a place where every month you need to set aside a weekend to find a plan-b place just in case your rent jump to a price you can't afford next month. Do they not offer long term leases? It seems figuring out a more long term solution would be prudent.

that don't exist anywhere, and is exactly what rent-control tries to solve.

rent is either 1 or 2yr contracts and then month-by-month. everywhere in the world. you can try to renegotiate a new 1yr or 2yr each time with a discount (or lower increase) but that is the same as negotiating all over again.

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

#626

Post by kristopolous » Tue, Mar 17, 2015, 8:02 PM UTC

tarblog wrote: post #624

kristopolous wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim was that markets without stabilization eventually stabilize. However, from what I've read, the markets studied continue to be more stochastic for the long term. I really think you should look into the research. There's a lot of tested hypothesis and survey analysis in them. We tend to not treat economics like a science - as if our general education is enough to have an informed opinion. We certainly don't d…

I've never heard it claimed that getting rid of rent control was a way to stabilize the housing market until this thread. I have heard that rent control creates severe housing shortages, insane competition for existing apartments (like having a renter's resume in SF), and lower quality housing for everyone. To me, it seems you've defeated a strawman.

Sorry, I'm not making this out to be competition. We all come to this discussion with different backgrounds. I'm fascinated by economics. So when I see claims that really aren't backed by the literature I feel obliged to bring it up.

As far as your other claims ... those are harder to measure really.

Rent amounts is a pretty easy number but things like lower quality (how much lower, what kind, where, is it predominant) and higher competition (amongst whom, using what process, which strategies aren't in play any more) ... well those are much harder questions. The microeconomic topic here is called Welfare economics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_economics and in economic theory is the social welfare function: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_welfare_function

I'm not saying those broad ideas don't hold ... but defining things like quality and competition can be a much trickier business than price.

And unfortunately, if you are going to approach it as a science, you can't really go off anything other than definition, observation, and measurement.

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

#627

Post by glesica » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 4:08 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #386

maxlybbert wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Externality" means something more than "thing I don't like."

That's a bit of a snarky way to put it, but this is correct; the parent comment is abusing the term "externality". The consequences of rental contracts for tenants in a free housing market are not an externality; the tenant is a party to the transaction.

In this case, the tenant isn't a party to the transaction, the tenant can't afford to be a party to the transaction at $8,000+ per month, that's my whole point.

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

#628

Post by esrauch » Mon, Mar 23, 2015, 4:16 AM UTC

maxharris wrote: post #463

esrauch wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the person you were replying to was referring to land when he said property (which is a normal term to use, if someone asked me "are you interested in looking at a property?" it would pretty unambiguously mean land / physical building). Not that it means his stance was correct, but your argument isn't addressing his point.

Property is more than just land. People have titles cars, boats, copyright over books they've written, stocks, bonds, savings accounts, furniture, clothing, timeshares, patents on things they've invented, etc. At any rate, in all three of my examples, money changed hands for work creating property. That money could be used to buy property, physical or otherwise.

I don't think you understood my point. The word "property" just has two separate definitions in common English, one is the one you are using and the other is verbatim "land" (which happens to be a subset of the first definition).

At least in my dialect of English "a property" would always always refer to land (e.g. "steal a property" is nonsense).