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How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

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Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#21

Post by pg »

davidw wrote: post #13
pg wrote: post #10

Markets interpret social engineering as damage and route around it.

Many government policies could be seen as "social engineering", be they farm subsidies, tariffs on imports, spending on things like highways, subsidized communication networks like the postal system, education for people other than those born wealthy, meals for poor kids so that they have something in their stomachs at school and can actually try and think, and so on. And, yes, some of them get 'routed around'. Other…

I meant social engineering in the form of manipulating markets.

Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#22

Post by davidw »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #19
davidw wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that economics turns into politics, and that attracts a wide range of people who are not hackers, and don't really care about it. And of course, yes, it's a system, but it's a big, hairy complex one that is also impossible to do repeatable experiments with in many situations. Even lots of good economics blogs, by real, serious, respectable economists are full of stuff like "my view is that... " or "I f…

I think that if it doesn't involve political parties or politicians, it might work. I mean, it's going to be hard to have a board about startups without talking about market theories, techniques of persuasion, economic trends, role of government in the creation of wealth, distribution of wealth, rational versus irrational buyers, etc. All of these are both economics and politics. We have to be able to talk theory, or…

I'd say if it's directly related to startups, it's probably ok. This article isn't about startups at all. Neither are most other economics articles. Some are, and the ones that are are pretty evident.

Also, "technical fluff"? I enjoy articles like this one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=413047

And it doesn't seem like "fluff".

Furthermore, it really wouldn't hurt if there were actually fewer articles.

Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#23

Post by davidw »

pg wrote: post #21
davidw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many government policies could be seen as "social engineering", be they farm subsidies, tariffs on imports, spending on things like highways, subsidized communication networks like the postal system, education for people other than those born wealthy, meals for poor kids so that they have something in their stomachs at school and can actually try and think, and so on. And, yes, some of them get 'routed around'. Other…

I meant social engineering in the form of manipulating markets.

Import tariffs and subsidies are direct market manipulation, and the market doesn't really route around them. Rather, they tend to wreck markets, which is one reason many developing countries continue to press the US and Europe to end farm subsidies - it's wrecking their export markets and hurting their farmers.

Governments, when they want to, are perfectly capable of interfering with markets and even destroying them. I am not a libertarian and do not believe that all intervention is harmful, but disagree with your thesis that markets are able to route around governments. Yes, in some cases, but I think that governments have the upper hand: they have guns and police and stuff, like the libertarians love to say.

I think the "law of unintended consequences" is perhaps more solid ground with regards to governments and market manipulation.

Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#24

Post by jhancock »

fallentimes wrote: post #5
logjam wrote: post #3

I'm not real clear on why a 1997 article from a routinely discredited right-wing think-tank on this issue is Hacker News....but since we seem to be playing "cite old biased articles", here's the sordid history of how unregulated landlord greed drives out affordable housing: http://www.tenant.net/Community/history/hist-toc.html

socially liberal & fiscally conservative != right wing

you are correct sir, if you have two variables, you get a whole plane of possibilities, not just a line ;) I guess its too late to teach basic math to the masses though.

Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#25

Post by logjam »

mmmurf wrote: post #6
logjam wrote: post #3

I'm not real clear on why a 1997 article from a routinely discredited right-wing think-tank on this issue is Hacker News....but since we seem to be playing "cite old biased articles", here's the sordid history of how unregulated landlord greed drives out affordable housing: http://www.tenant.net/Community/history/hist-toc.html

Examples of how Cato has been discredited?

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://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1409

http://www.iwpr.org/pdf/CATORIB.PDF

http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=21

http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/...

http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/01/im_friends_with....

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/dec2005/nf200512...

http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/vdh56a00

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-fonte050902.as...

http://www.skepdic.com/refuge/junkscience.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Milloy

http://web.archive.org/web/20011122034255/http://www.tnea.or...

http://www.pkarchive.org/global/swedenomics.html

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Asian_Economy/EG12Dk01.html

Trying to pretend that Cato in practice is anything but a shill for big business (including, in particular, the fucking tobacco industry) and the greedy is moronic.

Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#26

Post by timr »

loumf wrote: post #17
mdasen wrote: post #7

As someone in Boston, I can tell you that rent control was terrible here. The rent controlled units went to people with high incomes and political power (including mayors and those sitting on the Supreme Judicial Court). Most rent controlled units were simply taken off the market in one way or another. If you're getting well below market rent, you tend to look for other ways to use the property and some just allowed…

Aside from anecdotes, do you have access to any data that substantiates the claim that "The rent controlled units went to people with high incomes and political power" -- can you put a figure on it (50%, 60%, higher?). My grandparents lived in rent controlled apartments in NYC that they could not have afforded to stay in -- moved there in the 30's in neighborhoods that filled with gang violence -- but gentrified arou…

Indeed. I live in a rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco, and it is not squalid, the landlord is not crooked, and neither I, nor the other tenants, are politically powerful.

I heard a lot of horror stories about rent control before I moved here, but so far the stories haven't approximated the reality. Perhaps the problem lies the details of the rent control policies in question, and not with the concept of rent control itself.

Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#27

Post by davidw »

jhancock wrote: post #24
fallentimes wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

socially liberal & fiscally conservative != right wing

you are correct sir, if you have two variables, you get a whole plane of possibilities, not just a line ;) I guess its too late to teach basic math to the masses though.

When the squares actually visit LineLand though, who do they hold their noses and vote for? My guess is that they generally vote Republican (like, for instance, Milton Friedman), or did at one time. Perhaps that's changing?

Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#28

Post by yummyfajitas »

calambrac wrote: post #12

"Although rent controls are widely believed to lower rents, data I have collected from eighteen North American cities show that the advertised rents of available apartments in rent-regulated cities are dramatically higher than they are in cities without rent control." Uh... no shit? Why would a city with low rents have any impetus to impose rent control? "There can be no doubt that rent control creates housing shorta…

"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 "allowing" people to stay in "their" homes (fine print: homes which are not really theirs) a good thing? Are unskilled workers somehow more deserving of a house in Manhattan than skilled workers? Do retirees deserve to live close to young workers jobs more than the young workers do?

A guy with a family has a very good reason to pay more for a house close to his job.

Re: How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing

#29

Post by GrandMasterBirt »

Rent control does more in New York. It means that if you are in a rent controlled apt they will increase your rent to the maximum allowed! Always! And they reject people if they don't earn enough money to actually have their rent go up by the maximum amount (rent cannot exceed 20% of your annual income).. And poof In fact I've been hearing that in non-rent-controlled apartments in NY the inflation rate for rent is smaller than for rent controlled apartments.
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