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California Approves Statewide Rent Control

nytimes.com

321–330 of 1001 posts

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#321

I'm shocked at the ideological fervor here and the fact that virtually no one seems to have looked at the details of the actual bill. This is nothing like the rent control ordinance in SF that has caused $3000 units to get stuck at $500 rents. That will never happen under this law. The allowable increases are so much higher than "normal" rent control laws that any given unit will catch up to market rates in a matter…

So ... you are arguing rent control is good? Or that this isn't rent control? Or that some rent control is good, but more is really bad?

The point was that this CA statewide bill is quite different from places like SF.

New state law: 5% + inflation

SF: 60% of inflation. This has has never been over 2.9% a year since the law changed in 1992 from a fixed 4% [0].

I think one could sanely argue that allowing increases of up to 5% plus inflation is a suitable restriction, while limiting increases to significantly below inflation is not.

[0] https://sfrb.org/sites/default/files/Document/Form/571%20All...

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#322
There is no functioning market to begin with. Housing prices and rent are through the roof in California, yet supply is not rising to meet demand, largely because existing owners oppose new construction.

Turnabout is fair play. If owners organize politically to control supply, tenants can organize politically to control prices.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#323

When you mess with supply and demand there are always unintended consequences. I'm currently a beneficiary of rent control and am lucky to be paying below-market rate for my apartment. It would be nice to move to another neighborhood, but it would be dumb for me to give up the savings. My neighbor pays 1/10th of what I pay for the same size apartment. Neither of us are leaving anytime soon. This is why there's no liq…

Why should we subsidize your landlord, paying on a Prop 13 valuation 1/10th the market rate? None of them are suffering.

I don't like rent control but I hate prop 13. Interesting is that Howard Jarvis rallied renter support claiming that landlords would be nice and pass the tax savings on to tenants. Of course this didn't happen and there were immediately movements for rent control around the state.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#324
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s here to ensure people can still find affordable places to live. Rent control does the opposite. It radically reduces choices and increase on price on people looking for a place to live. Rent control chooses a small handful of existing renters to be winners. And it makes everyone else a loser. Except it's also shitty renters, because it traps them in place. Sure it gives them a home somewhere. But it denies the…

That’s FUD. It works great in other countries and if strict can give equal chances to tenants no matter your background.

Housing is a strictly zero sum game. When you have more people who want houses in an area than there are houses you will have winners and losers.

Rent control chooses certain people to be winners and other people to be losers. It does exactly nothing to increase the number of winners. Furthermore it creates disincentives to the creation of new housing, which means fewer winners in the future. Even worse, for the winners it does select it puts them at a long term disadvantage by trapping them into a non-optimal location.

The only solution to “not enough housing” is “more housing”. Rent control is actively harmful to this goal.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#325
post #44
post #31

Perhaps an alternative real solution to the housing crises is the abolishment of professional landlords themselves. Why should we support a system where people can own many properties, each feeding them 1/2 of someone else's paycheck? Public-owned housing is the future. It works in Europe and it can work here. Treating housing as an investment vehicle is fundamentally incompatible with the ideal of housing being affo…

> Public-owned housing is the future. It works in Europe and it can work here. Public housing has failed time and time again in the US, so citation needed.

Public housing isn't perfect in Europe - it leads to stagnant cities and the inability to redevelop areas as they change.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#326

> California lawmakers approved a statewide rent cap on Wednesday covering millions of tenants, the biggest step yet in a surge of initiatives to address an affordable-housing crunch nationwide. As though California is at all symptomatic of the problem of providing affordable housing in the rest of the nation. They might as well say it's the biggest step taken in an affordable-housing crunch globally. A whole article…

> A whole article about California's housing problem without a single mention of Prop 13, though?

It's insane how many of these there are. I even know someone who recently bought a townhouse who didn't even know what prop 13 was.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#327
post #21

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…

Have there been leasing periods in your past where rent increases exceeded 7 percent? Is that common? Also, I assume there is some market pressure to consider, if your increases outpace supply and demand, then tenants would simply move, right?

In the US, it is very common the past decade or so.

I'm in bumblefudge-nowhere-Midwest USA, and even we've averaged 10% yearly rent increases, for more than 5+ years now. Every top-20 metro area I've looked at, has had it worse than us on rental price increases.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#328

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

Should it not be the other way around, turn housing into more of a commodity? We have no shortage of most commodities, for example foods, because typically the higher the demand for the commodities, the more is made. Those markets benefit from things like economy of scale. Housing seems to be the opposite right now, there's very high demand and yet development is not able to keep pace due to artificial restrictions l…

Housing is limited by sustainability in ways most commodities are externalized.

Here are all the reasons you can't buy a commoditized "cheaply made" house in Nowhere Minnesota:

A. There is finite land in the world. Burying it in sprawl housing is an American tradition that has wrought disastrous environmental, health, time consuming, wasteful, and systemic consequences across the nation. B. Housing does not exist in a vacuum, not in a way close to what true commodities - things you buy off a shelf for a purpose but otherwise are non-interactive - operate. Housing requires infrastructure in myriad forms from electrical to transit. These structural requirements are systematized and cannot be commoditized meaningfully and thus housing itself is limited by them. C. Housing is limited by your means to sustain it. This means you need a job, and work is going in the opposite direction of commoditization because any repetitious work is being automated. The availability of meaningful employment is shrinking and thus the viable domains of legitimate housing likewise shrink, which is why the flood to California is a thing, why there is so much demand for density, and why a half century of gentrified urban planning has ruined the states housing market. D. Housing is already commoditized. You can buy a manufactured house made at scale for an inflation adjusted cost half of what manually built houses were costing a century ago with more square footage, modern amenities, and the ability to have it installed on a lot over a weekend. If you price out the physical goods cost of manufacturing some of the highest density vertical condo buildings in the world the per-square footage of livable space costs are often below stick built houses. The limiting factor is land - so back to A through C, thats the limiter.

The construction of buildings should be done in a free market that invites competition of builders but with the regulation to recognize those purchasing said structures are rarely educated on quality or safe construction. The distribution of land needs to be radically rethought because the established paradigm of treating it like a segregated consumer good is bankrupting the working class as the aristocracy pours money into property as their Scrooge McDuck money pit of choice.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#329
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vacancy rates are empty units that are available as a percent of all units available for rent. It doesn’t typically include units that aren’t available for rent. 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-…

> I’ve seen an estimate of 20,000 for SF proper.

Even if that was added to the vacancy rate, that would still leave SF with around the national average (~7%) vacancy rate, and that's without counting the off-the-market housing anywhere else in the average (and not double counting actual on-the-market vacancies everywhere else, either.) Anyway you cut it, SF has a low vacancy rate/rate of empty homes.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#330
post #43

It seems more and more clear that California, or at least those in power in California, don't want to fix the housing problem. Because if you're a land owner, the only problem is people trying to spoil the good times. All this VC money pouring into the pockets of tech employees, and a larger and larger fraction going straight into landlords' pockets. What's not to love? If actually you want lower home prices, build m…

> California, or at least those in power in California, don't want to fix the housing problem.

It’s a national problem. If you improve the supply only in CA, more folks will move there and recreate the problem.

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