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How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

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Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#141

Post by demallien »

r7000 wrote: post #90
fallentimes wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ticket scalping also involves equally fun acts & regulations. Luckily the laws are changing (for the better) which is one reason why it was a good idea to invest in us :-D.

Ticketing has been a weird market. There is a strong expectation among consumers that there is a 'fixed price' (face value) and that anything else is 'unfair'. Demand is constrained completely by a venue's capacity leading to all the obvious problems for over-subscribed events.

This is an important point that the author of the article seems to have not noticed. His whole argument is based on the idea that rent control leads to a decrease in supply, with a resulting hike in price due to unmet demand. But I wonder just how many apartments can really be built in Manhattan? Or in intra-muros Paris, or in the City in London...

Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#142

Post by DabAsteroid »

r7000 wrote: post #90
fallentimes wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ticket scalping also involves equally fun acts & regulations. Luckily the laws are changing (for the better) which is one reason why it was a good idea to invest in us :-D.

Ticketing has been a weird market. There is a strong expectation among consumers that there is a 'fixed price' (face value) and that anything else is 'unfair'. Demand is constrained completely by a venue's capacity leading to all the obvious problems for over-subscribed events.

Demand is constrained completely by a venue's capacity

This is an example of the "We Have No Competition" fallacy. It is a fallacy because substitutes for the demand are possible. In the present case, substitutes could take the form of events on other nights at the same venue, other existing venues, new venues, venue expansion, virtual venue axpansion via remote-viewing technologies, recording for later viewing, etc.

Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#143

Post by sokoloff »

calambrac wrote: post #34
yummyfajitas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It has nothing to do with NYC being an island and SF being a peninsula." It's not just that. NYC is not built up the way it should be, and most of the buildup of recent years is condos. For many years, there was a ridiculous incongruity in NYC: sky high rents and abandoned buildings. Why renovate when you can't charge rents commensurately? These days it's mostly a Harlem/Inwood phenomenon. By the way, why is "allowi…

Rent stabilization in NYC isn't mandatory for new construction, so new buildup being condos is not a response to rent control (unless it's a response to the threat of future rent control). Also, you'll need to explain how "sky high rents + abandoned buildings" corresponds to "Why renovate when you can't charge rents commensurately?" - if landlords can't charge rents commensurately, where are the sky high rents coming…

"The argument that rent control prevents owners from maintaining their buildings is pure bullshit. There's not a rent-control law in existence that doesn't allow annual increases sufficient for maintenance. Buildings aren't maintained because the owner sees the opportunity for dramatically increased profits if the current tenant leaves and lets the building fall to shit in an effort to drive them out."

Read that paragraph slowly and see if you can find the causal relationship between rent control and buildings not being maintained. It's easier to find than Waldo...

While true that it doesn't prevent them by force of law from maintaining the buildings, the natural profit-seeking motivations will cause a sharp increase in deferred or eliminated maintenance and improvements, as the landlord wins either way: either they save 1-2% in current expenses or they get to reset the rent to market rents if the tenant gets too sick of their shithole. Seems pretty far from "pure bullshit" to me...

Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#144

Post by sokoloff »

indiejade wrote: post #76

I have a friend who says: "Hell will be full of landlords." She is a master's degree holding architect who rents.

As the son of a former small-time landord (teachers by day, landlords of 1 single family and 1 duplex house), I can assure you that those landlords will have PLENTY of tenants to rent to down there!

Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#145

Post by jbjohns »

pelle wrote: post #136
sfk wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The market optimizes everything for the better if it is allowed. Such as financial products? I think we have enough evidence right now that people are not mature enough for a totally free market.

You are talking about one of the most highly regulated markets in the US. It's been at least 100 years since the financial markets where free in the US.

You do realize that this whole thing came crashing down because of the very lightly (if any) regulated CDO's right?

Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#146

Post by jbjohns »

mmmurf wrote: post #72
logjam wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my. Two minutes of web search: http://www.accuracy.org/article.php?articleId=51 http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/11/12/matthew-yglesias/poli... http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2006/05/cato-hypocrisy.html http://www.socsec.org/publications.asp?pubid=325 http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200207/thinktank.asp http://www.acsh.org/publications/pubID.498/pub_detail.asp http://www.no-smoke.org/pdf/catoinstitute.pdf http://w…

Do you think people should be allowed to smoke? Should they be allowed to eat Doritos? Should they be allowed to skydive?

Do I think people should be able to have a burning stick in their mouth that increases their risk of getting cancer (which will drive my insurance costs up as well, potentially) and even more so to people who are unfortunate enough to be stuck in an enclosed area with them (e.g. waiter/waitress in a non-smoke-free resturant/club)? No, not at all. If governments didn't make so much money off the cigarette taxes, I'm sure they would be illegal by now.

Eat Doritos? Until they're shown to be poisonous or something, sure.

Skydive? Sure, just not over houses or heavily populated areas.

Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#147

Post by byrneseyeview »

jbjohns wrote: post #145
pelle wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are talking about one of the most highly regulated markets in the US. It's been at least 100 years since the financial markets where free in the US.

You do realize that this whole thing came crashing down because of the very lightly (if any) regulated CDO's right?

You don't think the mortgage market had anything to do with it? As far as I know, the problem is not that CDOs trade at a discount to their underlying value; it's that the underlying value has dropped.

Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#148

Post by jbjohns »

byrneseyeview wrote: post #147
jbjohns wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that this whole thing came crashing down because of the very lightly (if any) regulated CDO's right?

You don't think the mortgage market had anything to do with it? As far as I know, the problem is not that CDOs trade at a discount to their underlying value; it's that the underlying value has dropped.

It's a bit more complicated than that: http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfoli...

Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#149

Post by byrneseyeview »

jbjohns wrote: post #148
byrneseyeview wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think the mortgage market had anything to do with it? As far as I know, the problem is not that CDOs trade at a discount to their underlying value; it's that the underlying value has dropped.

It's a bit more complicated than that: http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfoli...

I am pretty sure that was implicit in my comment. I have read the Lewis piece, which is a great way to get an overview from the perspective of the half-dozen folks willing to give Lewis an interview. I'm not saying that this was entirely due to government intervention -- just that the giant tax incentives, aggressive government market manipulation, and $100B+ portfolios long mortgages and short puts created by government agencies.

Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#150

Post by calambrac »

dk wrote: post #131
calambrac wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't addressed the essence of your point because I don't know what it is. Rent control only really exists in large cities that have experienced wild market fluctuations (in the form of surging rent prices) that displaced renters. If there weren't surging rents displacing people, why would there be rent control? In that case, I would yield them... but in that case, they wouldn't have existed in the first place. S…

Wild fluctuations != rising prices.

Rising prices are a subset of wild fluctuations. The other part is falling prices. Rent control isn't really necessary for the latter, is it now?
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