231–240 of 1001 posts
This does nothing to fix the problem. They need to build more housing. A lot more housing.
But, no, we can't do that. That makes too much sense or something.
For people looking for solutions, here is a link to a supposedly suppressed Housing Development Toolkit put out by the White House in 2016:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images...
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Abused? When I moved here I heard horror stories of rent increasing suddenly. I did what any sane person would do. I looked only for rent controlled places before moving in.
Certainly it gets abused. People keep their apartments even though they're not living in them, because otherwise the rent would go up. I know someone who did that for 20 years with an apartment on Russian Hill. She would sublet the place for a year or two and then come back.
That's generally illegal, unless the subtenant is paying no more than the tenant is in rent. Every tenant who does this in San Francisco can be, and ought to be, immediately evicted. There is zero economic/social justification for abuse of rent control.
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You don't need to confiscate anything. We have an abundance of housing stock (nationwide, many more existing homes than families to fill them). If you make it impossible to be a private landlord then these properties will decrease in value until most citizens can afford to buy a house. Public housing will only be necessary for a small percentage of outliers. New housing will be built to be sold at a modest profit and…
Using the law to destroy the value of someone’s asset until they abandon it is confiscation, just indirectly.
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I know people doing that in Berkeley already.
Berkeley and Oakland are two places that have outrageous transfer taxes when you buy/sell your house. Its 15x what it is in most other cities in California. Basically more impediment to owning a home.
The real solution is to decommodify housing. >The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth. -Adam Smith
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Same. I’m in a rent control place and I would never ever make the mistake of moving in a place that can arbitrarily increase its rent. I fee bad for people who didn’t have a choice and will probably have to move out at some point because of that :/
Do you feel trapped at all? My understanding is that rent control only affects increases. So if the area you live in becomes less desirable, you're likely to face a choice of "starting over" and paying market rate, or sticking with your current living arrangement due to not wanting to lose that rate.
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It also results in a lot of empty units. I was talking with a real estate agent in SF and he said it’s not unusual for landlords looking to sell their rent controlled building to just let units sit empty. Why? Because it can increase the value of the building by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Losing out on $24k worth of rent each year is easy if you know it comes with an extra $300k in your pocket when you sell.
Vacancy rates in San Francisco are very low compared to the rest of the state and the country. Rent control in SF is problematic not because it leads to vacancies but because the allowable increase is far too low, way below inflation.
The estimate is there are 100,000 empty homes in the SF area.[1]
I’ve seen an estimate of 20,000 for SF proper.
This [2] report to SF Planning states the number of empty units has doubled over time.
[1]https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/An-estimated-100-0... [2]http://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/uploads/CR_Final_2.3.19.pdf
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Certainly it gets abused. People keep their apartments even though they're not living in them, because otherwise the rent would go up. I know someone who did that for 20 years with an apartment on Russian Hill. She would sublet the place for a year or two and then come back.
I know several people that do that: luck into a sweet rent control deal even though you were wealthy enough to afford market rates anyway, never, ever give up the lease even after you've essentially moved away anyway and then sublet the unit out at market rates yourself. I don't know the same people that get mad at a corporation for allegedly "cheating the system" in some way don't find this sort of thing offensive,…
If this is in San Francisco, report them to the landlord or the city so they can be evicted. Tenants who abuse the system worsen the housing market for everyone.
I am a landlord in Oregon, but not California. The curious, although ultimately predictable, outcome of the new rent control measure in Oregon is that while I have historically had an arrangement with my property management to be restrained in annual rent increases, they are now advising a default annual increase of the maximum allowed (7 percent before inflation). This is because larger adjustments cannot be made if…
It also results in a lot of empty units. I was talking with a real estate agent in SF and he said it’s not unusual for landlords looking to sell their rent controlled building to just let units sit empty. Why? Because it can increase the value of the building by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Losing out on $24k worth of rent each year is easy if you know it comes with an extra $300k in your pocket when you sell.