251–260 of 1001 posts
This rent control is a result of populism - plain and simple. Rent control works for those already renting - and that is about it! Everyone else suffers: those moving to the area, the landlords and those wanting to build more.
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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.
1.5% is definitely high, but I have a difficult time believing that it's a larger impediment to owning than the generally high price of property due to lack of supply.
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Gives me money? What? So arbitrary rent is a much better way to keep rent down? Come on...
Arbitrary rent? No, the market rate. And yes, if you’re living in a rent controlled place and paying $1000 per month when the same place is going for $3000, it’s virtually a cash transfer from the landlord to you every month. That’s why you hear about massive ($100k+) buyouts in SF.
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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.
Which is why vacant property tax makes sense for popular areas
What if someone’s on vacation or has mail being delivered there etc. or comes in once in a while or Airbnb’s it’s much harder to impliment I think than it sounds.
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Nothing. The parent comment was arguing that because the law now says that rent couldn't increase by more than 7% they were now being advised to increase rent by that much every year (ostensibly because they are now planning to do this), and my response is that it's absurd to claim that anything in the law will change things so that you could make that sort of increase now if you couldn't already make that increase b…
The thing that would be different is the game theoretic situation where every landlord feels compelled to do that so the market rate increases by 7% per annum.
However, there's an issue with how you're calculating the market rate: You're assuming that tenants can/will bear that cost indefinitely, so the market rate can be "whatever the landlords want to make it". That won't always be true, not just from landlord defectors who might try to undercut the oligopoly on price, but because the tenants can move elsewhere and effectively remove demand.
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What in your second paragraph doesn’t apply without rent control? In other words, what makes 7% the magic number? Your entire argument seems based on market forces (if you raise too much, your tenant leaves and if there’s no wealthy people to replace them, you're stuck). How is this not the case without rent control? Do wealthy tenants somehow appear without rent control?
Nothing. The parent comment was arguing that because the law now says that rent couldn't increase by more than 7% they were now being advised to increase rent by that much every year (ostensibly because they are now planning to do this), and my response is that it's absurd to claim that anything in the law will change things so that you could make that sort of increase now if you couldn't already make that increase b…
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What in your second paragraph doesn’t apply without rent control? In other words, what makes 7% the magic number? Your entire argument seems based on market forces (if you raise too much, your tenant leaves and if there’s no wealthy people to replace them, you're stuck). How is this not the case without rent control? Do wealthy tenants somehow appear without rent control?
Nothing. The parent comment was arguing that because the law now says that rent couldn't increase by more than 7% they were now being advised to increase rent by that much every year (ostensibly because they are now planning to do this), and my response is that it's absurd to claim that anything in the law will change things so that you could make that sort of increase now if you couldn't already make that increase b…
I feel like an amount of the general public just wants Big Daddy government to come in and authoritatively force everyone into an unnatural framework, which is pure ignorance.
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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.
yea, vacancy rates in SF are 2 - 3%, way way below the national median, and way below the california median as well